Project description

Soil is being lost at an accelerating rate through various processes, and its renewal occurs on timescales well beyond human lifetimes. Desertification is one such process, leading to degradation in dry areas and affecting agricultural production, soil resilience, and water quality. This project develops a conceptual framework for ethnographic research on desertification in agricultural regions, focusing on environmental change, farmers’ knowledge and soil politics. Integrating perspectives from political ecology and interdisciplinary research on human-soil relations, I use the concept of soils as “critical zones” (Salazar et al. 2020) to examine how farmers’ experiential understandings of desertification, together with scientific and policy perspectives, shape human-soil relations in a drying agricultural area of Romania. The ethnographic research will investigate farmers’ understanding of their agricultural practices and the strategies they have developed to combat desertification, capturing how their negotiations and adaptations to desertification are influenced by soil knowledge and politics.

Short Bio

I am a social anthropologist with extensive research experience in human-environment relations, anthropology of food and wine, labour studies and migration in Moldova, Romania and Germany. I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale) in 2019, with a dissertation on socio-economic transformations in a wine region of the Republic of Moldova. My current research focuses on the interconnections between knowledge and politics in human-soil relations.