Building Soil is Building Community: Working with More-than-Human Worlds

In this talk, I share my work teaching and learning with post-plantation soils in the American South. I posit a role for agricultural praxis within academic spaces in building both a renewed care for our remaining soils, and a haptic understanding of key theoretical concepts in the environmental humanities, including interspecies being, natureculture, and (ecological) care. Thinking with Maria Puig della Bellacasa and her “thick impure involvement” in the complex, underground worlds of soil, I claim campus farms and gardens as critical infrastructure for navigating outside of apocalyptic and utopian narratives of climate futures, and for building what the emerging field of soil humanities have called “soil publics.”

Saskia Cornes is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and Program Director of Duke Campus Farm. Her teaching and research work together to rethink our relationship to food, and to the land and people that grow it. A Renaissance scholar by training, Cornes holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she focused on the culture of agriculture in 17th century England.

This is a hybrid event, co-hosted with the University of Toronto. Dr. Cornes will speak from Toronto, followed by an in-person response from Oxford DPhil student Barbara Stiubiener Arbahao from the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography.

Those in Oxford are warmly encouraged to participate together and in person at TORCH. For those interested in attending online, please visit www.eventbrite.ca/e/making-soils-visible-saskia-cornes-tickets-1039084849757?aff=oddtdtcreator for free registration.