Led by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, with Postdoctoral Researcher, visiting fellows Vandana Singh & Grace Dillon.
Our in-depth case studies and the capstone anthology will foreground soil futures that strongly oppose soil and land desecration and creatively broach the possibility of reframing natural forces and other nonhuman life, including microbial life, as agents of simultaneous cleansing and restitution/healing.
Aim
This work package aims to explore soils as aesthetic artifacts within imagined possible futures. We explore here how soil fictions narrativize or visualize relations of care and recuperation, studying contemporary science fiction and Indigenous futurisms that challenge human exceptionalism and colonial extractivist logics detrimental to the planet.
Questions
How are conceptions of soils shifted or challenged through the imagined worlds of literature, art and culture? What practical utopias of collaborative survival do these soil imaginaries offer?
Methods
The work package employs CoFUTURES methodologies and its core principles of transmediality, transnationality, and transdisciplinarity (https://cofutures.org/). This WP goes beyond literary analysis to study speculative works dealing with soils and soil recuperation, for instance, in video games, graphic works, and films. Using Indigenous futurisms as a guide, we will look at Indigenous works from different regions of the world (North America, Northern Europe, and India/South Asia).
Our transdisciplinary approach involves analysis and design, using the insights from our empirical case studies to develop a hybrid anthology containing fiction, art and speculative non-fiction on alternative soil futures, and commentaries from all project participants.