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 contradictions are 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: they project and impose classifications; they distinguish issues from non-issues, and actors from non-actors. Hence, for a change to occur both “research cultures and research practices have to be reconsidered, decoupling from the desire for control over Nature and the future, and recovering the 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?

A group of 15 multidisciplinary researchers – all members of the project team – took part in a 3 day residential stay in the rural centre for research in the arts and sciences “Pianpicollo Selvatico” (http://www.pianpicollo.org/pages/about). Arts-based practices engage participants across a range of communicative dimensions: from the abstract, cognitive level of classical scientific demarcation, to the aesthetic, embodied and affective level of contextualised inquiries (Barone and Eisner, 2011). Specifically, the activity was proposed and led by two artists and involved participants in ‘digging’ in the soil across three sites: the meadow; the vegetable path and the woodland. For each dig the task was the same: to adopt a stance of attention and attentiveness (Patrizio, 2020); the archaeological gaze which collects without categorising; sets aside without judging; tells a story by keeping open the possibilities for other stories (Haraway, 2016). The process of digging being a metaphor for the wider practices of research, comparing and contrasting the more focussed and instrumental attitude of the ‘looking for’ with the exploratory and relational dimensions of looking in, order to improve one’s own way of observing and one’s own doing. Adopting artistic methods involving making with materials, we sought to overcome the classical dichotomy of ‘neutral observation’ - as a detached stance from the world - versus ‘participation’ - that presumes being a part of the world. A participatory sensory ethnography approach was adopted; each participant made soil artefacts and took photographs; discussions amongst us were audio and video-recorded, and all data was put in a shared repository. Here we draw upon the approach of Taylor et al (2022), thinking with things in order to think with theory, to recount the different stories of the dig via sharing a selection of objects, each one speaking to the particular experience of working and being with soil. Stories and photographic narrations were diffracted to bring forth the vitality and potentiality at the heart of research – to re-animate research practice, each object having potency, a vital part of the entangled web of space and time (Taylor et al., 2022). The insights from these encounters illuminate the expectations, contradictions and possibilities of changing posture and modulating one’s gaze in order to act within a transdisciplinary space.

“An object’s vibrancy is often fugitive, ephemeral, momentary and yet an object can unleash forceful, affective, and powerful effects. Posthuman object pedagogies invite risk and discomfort, in their challenge to do research against the grain in the cracks, interstices, middles and muddles” (Taylor et al., 2022, p.219). Also in our digging, the stories carried by our objects brought back an intensity of affect, which continued to reverberate in the memories, the voices and our own bodies. For some, digging was inevitably connected to finding something, supposed to be mysterious, difficult to get to, precious. Research in this sense was a quest leading to a result. But other narrations of research were also possible. Turning the gaze towards one’s hands, our stories spoke about the need to get close and into contact; the awareness of entering an entangled set of relations, even if such relations were not all immediately apparent. Each tool afforded different ways of making community with soil, whilst the different soil environments themselves called for different modes of digging. For us all involved in professional research across multiple disciplinary contexts, the central question was the same one: how do we move from data driven approaches to context-sensitive modalities, which allow openness and the possibility of the unknown? How do we cultivate the qualities of research as a practice of attention that sustains and nurture relationships within a diversity of settings and situations? How do we continue supporting ourselves and others to take the time to dig, to make space to dig, and to bring testimonies of each other’s experiences? In the project we learnt the importance of taking time and taking time for oneself, to perceive the value of moving away from a model of expertise to making-with soil and with its stories.

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