Peasants in late 18th and early 19th century England venerated soils as a kind of living being that needed care in the form of special ceremonies, foods, and attention. English agronomists at the same time spurned these folk customs and worked to use chemistry to understand soils scientifically. Strangely, in carrying out experiments, they treated soils to a similar retinue of punishing procedures long reserved for enslaved or criminalized people. At the end of their preparations, English amateur agronomists studied crushed, distorted and dead materials. Something about the deployment of abstract knowledge led to passivity, inertia and death. There is a similar trend in scholarship in the humanities--the shifting to passive tense, the removal of living beings from sentence structure--as treatments of the subject become more abstract. In this workshop, I will explore my quest for my own inner soil/soul in seeking to understand humans' relationships with earth in the past.
Kate Brown is professor in history of science at MIT. Her research interests illuminate the point where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands. She has written four award-winning books: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004); Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013); Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (University of Chicago Press 2015); Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019). Currently she is exploring the history of what she calls “plant people:” indigenes, peasants and maverick scientists who understood long before others that plants communicate, have sensory capacities, and possess the capacity for memory and intelligence. She teaches environmental history, Cold War history, and creative non-fiction history writing. You can read more about Kate Brown here: https://sts-program.mit.edu/people/sts-faculty/kate-brown/