Saana Hokkanen

In this autoethnographic essay, I trace and explore different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations (me, my father and my grandparents) who have lived and worked on a family farm in Central Finland. By weaving together critical social scientific and multidisciplinary thinking using personal accounts, this contribution offers an examination of how relationships and knowledge about agricultural soils exist in a variety of ways, many of which cannot be reduced to technoscientific or agro-productivistic understandings. I discuss embodied and silent ways of knowing land, which are thick with time and socially shared, making visible the parallel soil knowledges that exist in a place. This essay also offers an opening for thinking about how diversifying and “storying” knowledges about agricultural lands can build further understanding about more-than-human relations, slower timescales, and the disappearance of local ways of knowing lands. Keywords: autoethnography, agriculture, soils, soil knowledge, Finland

Synthetic pesticides and their widespread use in agricultural production is a key part of the materiality of modernity, and a systemic tool for how industrial agriculture re-organizes multispecies life. This article furthers existing research investigating the ontological politics of environmental governance and the global agrochemical complex, drawing linkages between pesticides and the historical expansion of modernity as a way of world-making within the context of Europe. By utilizing a critical policy analysis as a method, the article examines EU policy documents as ontological and political tools for performing worlds. Founded theoretically on political ontology and ontological politics, the main questions explored are: 1. What kind of a “thing” pesticides are understood and made to be within EU’s regulatory documents and 2. How pesticide safety towards human and other-than-human life is understood and constructed within the regulatory framework, and 3. What are the politics of power that guide these assumptions? Additionally, by cross-pollinating ontological politics with a more-than-human/multispecies framework, the article offers a multidisciplinary contribution in understanding how pesticides work, both conceptually and literally , as ways of relating to and (un)making more-than-human life. As such, the article contributes to further understanding about the politics of power and meaning-making around pesticides.

Research on extractivism has rapidly proliferated, expanding into new empirical and conceptual spaces. We examine the origins, evolution, and conceptual expansion of the concept. Extractivism is useful to analyze resource extraction practices around the world. ‘Global Extractivism’ is a new conceptual tool for assessing global phenomena. We situate extractivism within an ensemble of concepts, and explore its relation to development, the state, and value. Extractivism as an organizing concept addresses many fields of research. Extractivism forms a complex of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differentials underwriting and rationalizing socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life-through subjugation, depletion, and non-reciprocity.