Bringing soils to life in the human and social sciences

Abstract

Despite their key importance for ecosystems and societies, soils have long remained a peripheral topic in the human and social sciences. Our paper aims to account for the recent, fast-growing literature in human and social sciences on soils. We first highlight social sciences’ shared concern for unsettling common visions of soil as a surface, a background or a taken for granted stock of resources; then we show that the works at stake differ in terms of: (i) their linkage with soil science disciplines and fields, (ii) the social science theories they mobilise, (iii) their main contributions, and (iv) their approach to soil materialities and agencies. Following these criteria, we present three strands of research on soil-related issues: (1) Literature bearing on the politics of soil knowledge investigates how soil becomes an object of knowledge and management; (2) Soil new materialism addresses practices and ethics of caring for the living soil; (3) Soil decolonial studies unravel soils’ powers and the intertwined agencies of soils and societies. By examining these research agendas, we suggest that social and human thinkers have, in the past two decades, tended to shift from a focus on the socially constructed nature of soils, to a growing emphasis on soils’ own biophysical agency in shaping societies, also in line with soil sciences insights and works. We argue that the increasing uptake of soil in human and social sciences contributes to an increasing concern for achieving better theoretical and empirical accounts of the co-constitution of society and the material world.