Making with soil: researching research practices for sustainable research

Curriculum knowledge is tied to a disciplinary organization set to create ever-increasing specialization; producing knowledge that is efficient in solving disciplinary and technical problems but often unsuitable for dealing with complex, socio-environmental issues. New ways of practicing research, and of thinking its role in society appear necessary to overcome the empasse, and to enable the production of knowledge which is relevant, contextual and inclusive of a plurality of legitimate perspectives (Benessia et al., 2012). This paper draws on a recent project, BRIDGES (Building Reflexivity and response-ability Involving Different narratives of knowledGE and Science) focussed on a specific socio-ecological dimension of the current global health crisis - the fertility of soil. Since the early 2010's, the UN has identified soil degradation as one of the most critical planetary concerns, alongside climate change and biodiversity loss; moreover, soil fertility is relevant to several SDGs (1, 2, 11, 12, 15) with SDG 15 Life on Land being an issue that is particularly relevant to the Italian context, where 14 hectares of cultivable soil per day are lost to urbanisation (Munafo, 2019). However, alternative views exist on what constitutes 'fertile soil' (FAO, 2019) and how it can be measured, according to different disciplines, operating at different levels and time-scales. In addition, decision-making processes about the different uses of soil will need to balance economic considerations with questions about the health of people and ecosystems. Hence, the governance of soil is a trans-disciplinary issue involving diverse fields of knowledge and practices, a plurality of languages, methods and scales. In these circumstances, the 'post-normal' turn has garnered momentum in policy studies and in the scientific community itself (Waltner-Toews et al., 2020) as well as in education (Colucci-Gray, 2014) as a participatory model of decision-making advocating for an "extended peer community", with a wider set of stakeholders, each one holding a partial but legitimate perspective. Yet, such approaches are not mainstream. For example, Meijer et al. (2016) reported that while the new <<epistemology of the European identity>> in policy-related science is formally requiring a full integration of all social actors in decision-making, researchers consider these as "peripheral activities" without straight-forward value for them. A "tacit hierarchy between science and society", bearing the idea that "certain kinds of knowledge are better than others" makes on a par relationships difficult. Indeed, such contradiction is linked to dominant narratives that express wider imaginations about the world, what is to be valued and the place and agency of humans versus others more than humans. Held tacit, these narratives define and demarcate the horizons of possible and acceptable action: project and impose classifications, distinguish issues from non-issues, and actors from non-actor. Hence, for a change to occur both "research cultures and research practices have to be reconsidered, "decoupling it from the desire for control over Nature and the future, and re-coupling it to its relational dimension of "how humans ask and respond to each other, taking more seriously the "experimental craft of all kinds of practitioners, not only humans" (Haraway, 2016, p. 68). Drawing on demarcation as a powerful heuristic tool, this paper inquires into the narratives of research arising from the experiences of a group of multidisciplinary researchers involved in arts-based practices of digging in the soil. The study looks at how participants came to understand and redefine the parameters of their research work, focusing on: 1. What cultural and social norms underpin the ways in which researchers talk about and legitimise their ideas of research? 2. To what extent does the artistic dimension enable a reflection on the intrinsic values of human dependency from soil?