Juan Francisco Salazar, Céline Granjou, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, Manuel Tironi (eds.), Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory – Bloomsbury, June 2020

This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in political and artistic practices, in order to address global ecological change.

The chapters in this edited volume challenge scholars to attend more carefully to the ways in which they think about soil, both materially and theoretically. Contributors address a range of topics, including new ways of thinking about the politics of caring for soils; the ecological and symbiotic relations between soils; how the productive capacities and contested governance of soils are deployed as matters of political concern; and indigenous ways of knowing and being with soil.

This is another expensive hardback unfortunately. Some of the same contributors are part of a theme section of Environmental Humanities on ‘Conceiving Soils and Humans in the Anthropocene’, edited by Anna Krzywoszynska and Greta Marchesi.

Those papers seem to be open access, including the introduction “Towards a Relational Materiality of Soils“.