2018

For the cultivation of crops—in other words, a site of productivity or financial return—Bellacasa asks us to engage with soil as a living, interdependent community and with forms of soil ecology that feature alternative human-soil relations and what she calls a “care time.” In her attention to practices that have been marginalized by “successful” forms of technoscientific innovation, Bellacasa takes resource from not only ecological but also feminist approaches. Our proposition is that we can add to this postcolonial approaches, which, although not explicitly articulated by Bellacasa, resonate with much of what she offers. We claim that it is only by combining these three approaches that we can, as she puts it, catch “glimpses of alternative, liveable relationalities”—relationalities that can “hopefully [contribute] to other possible worlds in the making.”