[Workshop] Grounding soils in Southeast Asia

Shuttle bus info (For those who registered for this workshop)
We would like to inform you that the ICAS 13 Organising Committee has prepared a shuttle bus from the Campus B, Universitas Airlangga to the Workshop venue, Kampung Plampitan, Venue 1. (Please note: Only for those who registered for the workshop).

If you want to make use of the shuttle service, please ensure to be at UNAIR shuttle bus pick-up/drop-off point by 13:40. Please note that the bus will leave to the workshop venue on time. An ICAS 13 Badge is required to board the shuttle bus.

*Shuttle bus only brings participants to the workshop location, after the session, participant can explore Surabaya at their leisure. Find more information about Surabaya transportation here.

Activity or Workshop Details:
This session precedes another session that we organise “Strategic roundtable: A Roadmap for Grounding soils in Southeast Asia”. In light of the ongoing and accelerating decline in soil condition at the global level and warming planet as the result of climate change, the interconnection between these global processes and their local manifestations are often unequally experienced. However, knowledges of and attention to soils have been steadily proliferating from various spaces in academia, policy making, art, activism, and private sector at the global level, including in Southeast Asia. The importance of soils in the region is not limited to its vital role in agriculture, but also in mining, supporting tropical forests, in the conservation of peatlands, and living habitat for microorganisms and invertebrates. As such, on the one hand, soils are becoming an object of renewed attention for the force of emotion with which they shape identities, cultures, memories, histories, and imaginations in the region. On the other, with the rise of investor interest in carbon markets, and scientific interest in carbon sequestration as a strategy for climate change mitigation, soils are set to become a new object of both resource management and exploitation.

This situation raises several key questions for a new era of environmental resource management and ecological relation:
1) What new approaches to monitoring, knowledge sharing, and multi-scalar governance can be shaped, building momentum from successful examples of grassroots action and participatory diplomacy?
2) What is the strength of the cultural work that activists and artists do in creating new cultural forces to renew ecological relations between people and their homes?
3) What forms of exploitation may arise as soil becomes a commodity, which are perceived as threats by those connected to the most vulnerable? How does it compare against land as a commodity?

Guided by a dual theoretical frame, we seek to understand how the “forces” of the market and emotion encounter, converge, or confront each other. Renato Rosaldo’s work (1987?) on the cultural force of emotion and the notion of “capitalisation” of land, recently articulated by Hirsch, Woods, Scurrah and Dwyer (2022) provide us with a conceptual grounding, with soil as centrepiece.

We want to discuss the issues above not from a nowhere location. To share and continue ongoing conversations on soils which are geographically and academically from and/in Southeast Asia, in this workshop we aim to cultivate mutual learning and exchange of different ways of relating to and through soils that depend on knowledge from practitioners from the arts, activism, and sciences. We conceive Southeast Asia as our point of departure, space of struggle, and futures that are unravelling. Therefore, we will explore how the stories we bring to the workshop may intermingle and diverge or converge to form trajectories, cracks, gaps, crevices, through which other stories about soil can come in or excluded. Finding common points of concern and future research will be one of many outcomes of these convergences. To this end, we encourage plurality in the use of metaphors, narratives, materiality, measuring apparatus and tools, media, bodily senses, languages, experiences to relate to
soils. Our approach emphasises that soils are multiple.