Encountering Bioinfrastructure: Ecological Struggles and the Sciences of Soil

Abstract

What humans know about the soil has material implications for the future of life on Earth. This paper looks at how 'soil' is in the process of becoming visible as a living world at the heart of an epoch marked by technoscientific management of the environment. At this time scientific knowledge of the natural world encounters a range of collectives and individuals striving to renew humans' relationships with non human and organic ways of life.

Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.–Colombia War on Drugs

“…My work is influenced by scholarship at the interface of anthropology and feminist science studies that critically bypasses a modern nature/culture divide and a cascade of associated distinctions (such as objects/subjects, bio/geo, and organic/inorganic) to arrive at processual understandings of life that necessarily reconceive our notions of the human, and consequently of politics and ethics (Tsing ; de la Cadena ; Stengers ; Haraway ; Mol ; Barad ; Verran ). However, rather than concentrate on realized things or achieved political events, which has been the focus of much of the twentieth century's and, especially, the international left's political thinking, I build on scholarship that emphasizes everyday transformations in the ways people produce, reproduce, consume, and hence compost their material worlds (Puig de la Bel‐ lacasa ; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos ; Gibson‐Graham ). In particular, I focus on what these processes of decomposition and renewal may tell us about the everyday practices through which not only people but entire ecologies—trees, soils, plants, seeds, insects, chickens, microbes, and farmers— strive to collectively change the conditions of their lives.…”

Communicating Care : The Contradictions of HPV Vaccination Campaigns

“…Puig de la Bellacasa 2011Bellacasa , 2014Rappert 2015). In doing so, I explore what it might mean to hold on to, and care for, the marginal, neglected and absent in my study.…”

“…In general, in the parts of the study where I focus on the marginal and neglected, I aim to tell "alter-narratives" that can trouble predominant articulations. Inspired by Puig de la Bellacasa (2011Bellacasa ( , 2014 I emphasize a care for the neglected, marginal and absent as an ethico-political commitment that can foster alternative visions, and enable other worlds.…”

“…Some of the matters of care I emphasize might seem trivial in comparison to the "bigger issues" involved. Learning from, for example, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011Bellacasa ( , 2014, this is precisely the reason why seemingly trivial matters need attention. This mode of attention, I hope, can help disrupt and unsettle some of the normative and exclusionary ways in which care is being done.…”

From Publics to Practitioners: Invention Power and Open Technoscience

“…Let's talk about work. Let's talk with Leigh Star (Star, 1991, see also Clarke, 2014, Papadopoulos, 2014b, Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014) about all these labours that have been rendered absent and invisible in the experimental achievement and in the humanist tale of making and contesting scientific facts. What kind of labours are necessary in order for knowledge to be produced?…”