Dissertation
“Thinking with soils”: relational and care-full perspectives on carbon farming futures and deep transformations
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25907/00934
Abstract
The story of modern agri-food systems is a complicated one. With agri-food systems identified as a major contributor to ecological crises and highly vulnerable to the negative consequences of these converging crises, their transition and transformation has become the focus of diverse strategies on international, national, and local scales. Agri-food sectors are thus becoming spaces of climate action for more sustainable futures. Carbon farming is an example of this type of action, with diverse ecological and economic goals, including mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon in agricultural soils and improving soil health. In these ways, soils are enrolled in the project of securing (human) futures.
This research orients itself towards the exploration of carbon farming in agriculture as a socio-ecological transformation (K. O’Brien, 2018) and a context of human-soil relations. Previous research shows that much of the current mainstream action to mitigate the climate crisis in the agri-food sector perpetuates the status quo and lacks focus on the subjective and cultural aspects of transformation. New and alternative perspectives are therefore needed that foreground diverse ways of knowing which can support transformation. Ways of knowing shape and are shaped by our relationships to humans and more-thanhumans and thus how we work for and embody socio-ecological transformations matters for the kinds of outcomes that are possible. I thus approach climate change and related ecological crises as relationship problems (Gram-Hanssen et al., 2022; O’Brien, 2021).
Details
- Title
- “Thinking with soils”: relational and care-full perspectives on carbon farming futures and deep transformations
- Authors
- Kirsti Susanna (Sanna) Barrineau - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Contributors
- Marcus Bussey (Principal Supervisor) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Sustainability Research ClusterStina Powell (Co-Supervisor)Naomi Smith (Co-Supervisor) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Awarding institution
- University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
- Degree awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Publisher
- University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
- DOI
- 10.25907/00934
- Grant note
- This work has been supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, through the research program Mistra Environmental Communication.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Law and Society
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991136705802621
- Output Type
- Dissertation
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