Contributors

1. Huiying Ng – Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximillians University
2. Dimas D. Laksmana – Universitas Indonesia

Click here for more details and see the workshop schedule

About the workshop

Because of the ongoing and accelerating global changes that largely affect soil health, their local manifestations are often unequally experienced. Particularly, the conditions for biologically diverse organisms in soils have been in constant decline due to excessive use of chemical fertilisers and  pesticides in and around Southeast Asia. Furthermore, because Asia is culturally, ecologically, and historically diverse, addressing soil health issues depends on knowledge from a wide range of practitioners from the arts and activism to applied sciences.    
As such, on the one hand, soils are becoming an object of renewed attention for the force of emotion with which they shape identities, cultures, memories, histories, and imaginations in the region. On the other hand, with the rise of investor interest in carbon markets, and scientific interest in carbon sequestration as a strategy for climate change mitigation, soils are set to become a new object of both resource management and exploitation.  

Key questions

This situation raises several key questions for a new era of environmental resource management and ecological relation: 

1. What new approaches to monitoring, knowledge sharing, and multi-scalar governance can be shaped, building momentum from successful examples of grassroots action and participatory diplomacy?
2.  What is the strength of the cultural work that activists and artists do in creating new cultural forces to renew ecological relations between people and their homes?
3.  What forms of exploitation may arise as soil becomes a commodity, which are perceived as threats by those connected to the most vulnerable? How does it compare against land as a commodity?

Our invitation to conference participants

In this participatory workshop we aim to cultivate mutual learning and exchange of different ways of relating to and through soils in and around Southeast Asia. Finding common points of concern and future research that connect regional concerns with global research agenda set up by, for example International Union for Soil Science, will be one outcome. We plan to draft the roadmap to work on the research agenda in the Strategic roundtable: A roadmap for grounding soils in Southeast Asia that we also organise at ICAS 13 and we hope you can also participate. 
To bring together the expertise of the group on doing interdisciplinary research on environmental and social change and participatory learning around soil, we are planning the following activities:

1. Participatory mapping on similar "soil grounding" initiatives
2. This map is planned to be digitally documented on the Participatory Food Systems website, currently under construction
3. Evocative writing that interweaves historical, economic, and ethnographic threads to express diversity and richness of experiences of soil
4. Presentation of microscopic images of soil physical structures in diverse terrains as an introduction of the microscopic physical forces that bind soil together and are influenced by biological and anthropogenic factors
5. Sharing on agroecological practices that build up and restore soil and challenges of incorporating local traditional methods to policy-making at national and international level.
6. Hands-on workshop and sharing of practices that blend research and education on soil for urban communities   

Apply to join the workshop   

We invite 10–15 scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners to join our workshop. Please fill in the following registration form no later than 5 July 2024. If you have questions, you can reach out to the workshop organisers at their emails.    
The conference organisers will notify the participants of their acceptance to the workshop by early July 2024. Once your applications are accepted, we will share some preparatory resources to be completed prior to the workshop. This may include some readings on soil from the perspective of anthropology, STS, sociology, environmental humanities, and other related disciplines, and other material. As the workshop will be based on prior preparations the workshop participants undertake beforehand, we ask that you make time to read, pause, and reflect on these resources a few days before the workshop.