Soils have stories to tell about pasts, presents and futures in the making. The environmental crisis affecting soils today has led to a wave of appreciation of their materiality as living worlds and to calls to rethink human-soil relations as an ecological community of care. Yet soils also entail a material memory of troubled associations with un/belonging. Stories about human-soil attachments can evoke deep care for places, but also historical and current exploitation, exclusion, and dispossession from land and community. Encouraging re-imaginations of human-soil relations as ecological belongings, this gathering seeks to bring together the cares of un/belonging and ecological thinking through alterstories that may nurture alternative conceptions of more than human justice.

Confirmed speakers: Åsa Sonjasdotter, Lesley Green, Patricia Noxolo, Nirmal Puwar, Ros Gray, RL Martens, Adele Reed, Greg Muldoon

The one day symposium will be followed by a public talk by Malcom Ferdinand, author of Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, (Polity, 2022) followed by a response by Shela Sheikh

This symposium is organised by Maria Puig de la BellacasaLink opens in a new window and Giulia Championas part of the project Ecological Belongings: transforming soil cultures with science, art and activism funded with an AHRC Leadership Fellowship. It is hosted by CIM (Centre for Interdisciplinary MethodologiesLink opens in a new window, The University of Warwick) and organised in collaboration with the Warwick Environmental Humanities Network and the and the Warwick Environmental Systems Interdisciplinary CentreLink opens in a new window

REGISTRATION IS FREE BUT REQUIRED FOR PARTICIPATION - IN PERSON AND REMOTE: FOLLOW THIS LINKLink opens in a new window TO THE REGISTRATION PAGE

*A few TRAVEL BURSARIES are available for precarious or unfunded researchers willing to attend in person: please email directly maria.puig-de-la-bellacasa@warwick.ac.uk *

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME (in progress): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/research/research-projects/ecological-belongings/symposium-programme/