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 farming communities, soil resilience, and water quality. This project develops a framework for ethnographic research on desertification, focusing on environmental change, farmers’ knowledge, and soil politics. It follows large-scale, production-oriented farmers transitioning to no-till agriculture under economic and climatic pressure in Romania’s largest agricultural region. While not intended as an ecological shift, this practice helps mitigate pervasive soil degradation processes. By viewing soil as both political and experiential terrain, the project asks what it means when soil care emerges not from conservation ethics, but from the need to keep capitalist farming viable in an increasingly unstable environment.

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.