Introduction

The soil has never been flat, empty or inert. The solid phase of minerals, gases and organic matter that make up what is known as the ‘pedosphere’ teems with microbial communities in perpetual interaction; with the remains of once-living things in re-composition; with disintegrating rock and crystalline minerals; with slow-growing root-systems and, between them, burrowing macro-organisms. We would not have food without these inter-relating elemental processes, or without the millennia of experimental practices that have developed for understanding and working with them.

The major centres of plant domestication that emerged with modern agriculture depended on these vernacular practices, although local soil knowledge was progressively marginalized as generalizable scientific principles were extracted (Barrera-Bassols and Zinck, 2003). In the contemporary world, peasant agriculture is often considered primitive or ‘under-developed’, even although it has survived precisely via innovation and adaption (van der Ploeg, 2014). The process of marginalization has been accelerated through the rise of economic vocabularies of profit and production through the course of the twentieth century, which have worked to redefine the soil as ‘exploitable and potentially modifiable genetic material’ (Krzywoszynska and Marchesi, 2020: 195). This seems paradoxical, however, because many contemporary agricultural and medical plant-based products were originally sourced from local agricultural knowledge, usually without recompense (Hayden, 2020). It is also deeply concerning, because an ‘extractivist’ approach to agriculture cannot be applied endlessly without exhausting the soil’s vitality (Rist and Dahdouh-Guebas, 2006; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015; Gray and Sheikh, 2018).

This relegation of everyday agricultural expertise has not, however, prevented the elaboration of vibrant agricultural alternatives. In Mexico, while Green Revolution technologies were being tested during the 1960s, experimental ecological practices were also being consolidated, based on an extensive cataloguing of existing traditional and indigenous approaches (Astier et al, 2017). Building on objections to precursors to Green Revolution projects, voiced as early as the 1940s, networks of agronomists, geographers and anthropologists worked to document the merits of traditional and smallscale farming practices, and consolidate more holistic understandings of soil, seeds and farming systems (Yapa, 1993). Since the 1960s, these networks have become associated under the term ‘agroecology’, denoting agricultural approaches that value ecological factors over other metrics.

Entanglements of injustice

She was a mother. The past tense is to some extent accurate. Her 19-year-old son left the house one day quite excited about finding a new job and never came back. The next time she saw him, his dead body was wearing strange clothes. ‘Guerrillero’ the media, the Army and the President called him. The newspapers were wrong, the militaries were wrong, former president Uribe was wrong and she knew it. Twenty years later a controversial Human Rights Watch Report proves her right, as it does to many other Madres de Soacha. Nowadays she marches with other mothers in her situation, even in times of lockdowns. The pandemic has not taken away her pain, memories, and the need for justice.

While marching in the streets of Bogotá, her path comes across other mothers, their partners and children, all of whom embody a different kind of pain. They have walked endless distances to reach this unwelcoming place. They are sometimes mistaken for Desplazados, but their Venezuelan accent gives them away. They were displaced from their homes by dispossession, violence, and hunger. They also march, but not to protest as their right to do it is sometimes considered illegitimate. They march to cross the Colombian-Venezuelan border, and to endure subsequent bureaucratic borders. As other people on the move within the country, they arrive in the cities and inhabit the streets of Bogotá where the stories of this chapter become more visible.

State crimes like the ones perpetrated against Madres de Soacha and their sons, also known as the Falsos Positivos case, are not new. Falsos Positivos is the name given by the media to at least 6400 young men assassinated by the Colombian Army after being dressed up as guerilla militants (JEP, 2021). It is claimed that these assassinations were motivated by an incentive system promoted during the Presidency of Alvaro Uribe between 2002 and 2008, offering soldiers financial rewards for every guerilla casualty. Similarly, displacements due to violence and precarity are not new either. The increasing cases of Venezuelan nationals arriving in Colombia adds to the existing number of people usually addressed as Desplazados, or Internally Displaced People.

Ecologies, repair, justice

There is an urgency to face the precipice of ecological devastation, take a leap into the fractures of a broken Earth, and experiment with more sustainable and just ways of living. And yet, in spite of incessant calls to attend to multiple fronts of emergency, major obstacles remain. One of them, as many analyses of the hope-shattering failures of COP26 and previous climate agreements have shown (Kutney, 2014; Rosen, 2015; Spash, 2016; Arora and Mishra, 2021), is the recognition of the inescapable entanglements of ecological care with care for people. No justice, no ecological peace. Attempting a modest contribution to efforts addressing this situation, Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by trying to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair and to remediate both damaged ecologies and persistent inequities in ways that support resurgence against more than human injustice. This book takes up this task from a diversity of theoretical and political fronts, unpacking some of the workings at stake in the conceptual coupling of the ecological with reparation.

The intellectual and political grounds upon which this book has grown are nurtured by a surge of thinking about new multifaceted and generative meanings for ecology. Encompassing traditional scientific meanings, fostering ‘the ecological’ has come to signify an embodied understanding of the highly specific and worldly environmental, socio-political and mental connections that situate different beings, human and non-human (Guattari, 1995) – or, perhaps, in more abstract conceptual undertakings, connections between multiple forms of matter and experience within interdependent environments (Hoerl and Burton, 2017; see also Kingsland, 2005; Herzogenrath, 2009; Morton, 2010; Wall, 2014; Papadopoulos, 2022). Exploring a sense of general ecology has promoted the decentring of the human and confronted human exceptionalism, yet increasingly too the revival of ecological thought has been challenged by perspectives that insist that all more than human affairs exist precariously and are marked by situated histories of social, gendered, racial, colonial and spatial conflicts (Nightingale, 2011; Wright, 2018). In other words, there is no such thing as a neutral ecology for people and nonhumans; ecological interventions pose issues of justice at their core, even when these are difficult to apprehend from where one stands (Plumwood, 2008).

This book showcases narrative research now, embracing the challenge to situate the most enduring practice of storytelling in relation to new times, new technologies and the new kinds of publics that they enable. Stories are always situated within histories that shape what can be told and heard, making stories part of practices of oppression and resistance. So critical narrative research ‘now’ must engage with digital methods and the ease of replication and linkage that these bring. Narratives now have to be contextualised in relation to new doubts about veracity and the institutional and virtual spaces through which emotion can be moved, intensified and instrumentalised. Narratives now must be understood as having escaped the confines of talk, inhabiting architectures, songs, ribbons, nudges and likes. Representing the stories of others involves ‘joining in’ with the telling, including claiming, deflecting, returning and amplifying narrative value.

We also have our own biographical ‘nows’ from which we experience narrative. These days I am becoming intimately connected with the eulogy as a narrative form – the story of self that is told about us by those who have loved and lost us: connecting fragments and points of view from friends, family, colleagues and material traces. At other times in my life I have been sensitised to other kinds of storytelling: the critical moments that power coming-of-age narratives; the connective stories of familiarity and inheritance and that talk into being a new generation; and encounters with forgotten and unstoried material rediscovered in archives that surprise, enchant and even haunt us. And of course, those insurgent sexual stories that were our preoccupation in the late 1980s and 1990s, new ways of talking that made public problems out of private trouble and enacted sex and gender in radically new ways.

And so, I would like to honour the death in 2022 of Ken Plummer, a prince of narrative methods, who connected a sociology of interaction with humanistic understandings of text and documentation. His worked helped me and many others understand how stories are always conservative and conserving: it takes chains and webs of people to imagine, articulate and hear stories.

Introduction

About 20 per cent of the surface of Ireland is covered in bogs, including the blanket bogs along the western coast and the raised bogs in the midlands. Long treated as ‘wastelands’ by colonial and postcolonial policy, it is estimated that there has been a 99 per cent loss of the original area of actively growing raised bogs in Ireland (EPA, 2011). This happens when bogs are drained – without water, the bogs cease to be bogs. The rural midlands, since the 1950s, have been the site of large-scale industrial turf-cutting by the semistate company Bord na Móna (BnM). These cut peatlands, open mines across the island’s boggy central regions, are now post-industrial landscapes or ‘brownfields’, as official policy refers to them. While the remnants of living bog provide habitats to many rare species of plant and animals and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, most drained and cut bogs today act as wastelands of modernity, as after their transformation for industrial activity, these largely barren landscapes continue actively emitting carbon which for centuries has been locked underground.

In 2018, BnM announced plans to phase out industrial extraction of peat by 2030, joining the Irish state’s efforts to de-carbonize. As one of the country’s largest landholders, with a landbank of around 200,000 acres (about 1 per cent of Ireland’s total landmass), these ‘ruined’ environments may be central to the country’s ‘green’ and ‘smart’ futures as sites of de-carbonization and remediation, carbon sequestration and information services. The company must balance its obligation to deliver a ‘just transition’ for the hundreds of industrial workers and communities organized around peat-cutting with contributing to the state’s commitment to transition to 70 per cent renewable energy in the country by 2030.

Current discourses and associations of peat bogs and waste resonate with discourses from the 18th and 19th centuries, when efforts to drain and reclaim these waterlogged ‘wastelands’ by British colonial authorities were justified by moral and economic studies and mapping projects. The colonial division of the world into a patchwork of territories for extraction has frequently stressed treatment of the ‘wild’ or the ‘terra nullius’ in colonial imaginaries, concepts which allowed administrators and capitalists to make landscapes legible, populations manageable, and territories inert for extraction (see Yusoff, 2018).

The old lecture theatre bristles with attention. Students perch on wooden seats looking down towards the speaker at the front of the room. The storyteller was once a student here himself, an Arts/Law undergraduate, many years ago. He remembers sitting in lecture theatres just like this one, names scratched into soft wood surfaces, now Tippexed. He doesn’t look like a ‘typical crim’, does he, he asks rhetorically, no visible scars, tattoos or missing teeth. The ‘respectable’ outer layer, though, belies deep emotional and psychological scars. And anger – such roiling, raging anger – it has nearly consumed him at times. Anger and shame at what happened to him, at what he did, at how he suffered and how others suffered because of him.

He was imprisoned at the age of 21 – just a kid, really – released at 27. In court, his father had pleaded to serve the time in his stead. It was decades ago now. But it is still so real, so palpable, so much part of him, despite everything he’s done to try and put it behind him.

He tells of what it feels like to come very close to taking a man’s life with his own gun, the adrenalin-blurred moments surrounding arrest, the way time pauses and rushes at supersonic speed, stretching and condensing experience into fragments of memory that lodge under the skin like splinters. He tells of how this paradox of time foreshadows the experience of being locked behind iron bars, steel doors, stone walls. Locked in emotional darkness, where the sounds and smells of suffering and torment permeate your dreams and waking hours. Outside, as your father ages, sickens and dies, family lives on.

Like sound, time moves forward in the elastic medium of the outside world. On the inside, in the rigid unyielding medium of the prison, it gets stuck, snagged on razor wire and splinters. The storyteller captures students’ attention with tales of horror, abjection, base human experiences. Their faces open, their eyes wide, they listen. They try to understand. They try to make sense of the way prison time follows you outside, through the gates, slinking behind you like a shadow that won’t be shaken.

Instructions to read

Dear reader:

When reading this text, I invite you to remember two things. First, if you are not familiar with weaving, I would like to show you two components of woven textiles: the warp and the weft. That is the first thing you should bear in mind.

The second is also an invitation to think of this content as a textile in four dimensions:

• 1. In a concrete material dimension, it is textile because it produces a textile piece.

• 2. It is also textile because it follows textile logics during the process of material making. The textile making process is a social practice weaving. Imagine the textile making process as the warp that gathers together and assembles, diverse species – humans and more-than-humans – as part of a textile ecology and other ecologies.

• 3. The text itself is an attempt to weave different voices. The narration is interweaving diverse voices as threads. You will find these voices in different styles. In these brackets [·] you will find my thoughts, my emotions, connections I make as a voice off; you can skip these parts if they get too noisy for your taste. In these brackets < ・ > and in italic you will find the participants’ voices, and in these brackets ﹛·﹜ and in bold you will find fictional voices as part of academic worlds. Along with the text, you will also find crossed-out words. I would rather keep them than erase them; if I took them out, you would not notice their absence, but their crossed-out presence will add material meaning.

• 4. Finally, all that is here is part of a giant fabric whose [I would say]. Its materiality is semiotically textile. As noted by John Law when explaining material semiotics, ‘practices in the social world are woven out of threads to form weaves that are simultaneously semiotic … and material’ (Law, 2007: 7).

<Look, she is Eliana> Salvador told his workmate. He had his hands on my shoulders, holding me carefully from my back, while he gazed at his friend with a look that told us all what we needed to know. A story of a year was said with a look in just a second.

Amid the manifold social and ecological crises of the Anthropocene, diverse understandings of the entanglement of human life with more-than-human species and entities have emerged across and between disciplines, alongside attempts to intervene in these relations. Fields such as Earth system science and sustainability science have envisioned, charted and emphasized the interrelatedness of (socio)ecological processes and phenomena across spatial scales and geopolitical borders, while science and technology studies has explored how these global environmental knowledges are co-produced with global political orders (Miller and Edwards, 2001; Jasanoff, 2004). Posthuman and new materialist theory, often indebted to Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies (Sundberg, 2014; Giraud, 2019), has challenged Anglo-European anthropocentrism and dualisms (of nature/culture, mind/body, social/material), by considering the human to be always, relationally and mutually constituted with often agential or lively nonhumans, whether animals, technologies, energies, landscapes or elements (Haraway, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Povinelli, 2016).

In environmental, life and health sciences, the symbiotic roles of bacteria and other microbes in constituting animal lives and creating or maintaining individual, ecological and planetary health has become a key area of investigation (McFall-Ngai et al, 2013), shaping popular imaginaries of ecologies within and beyond human bodies (Turney, 2015; Yong, 2016), and producing new forms of microbiopolitics (Paxson, 2008). By the early twenty-first century, dominant scientific and popular representations of microbial life had ‘shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promise’ (Paxson and Helmreich, 2014: 165), in which microbes have come to represent both a ‘not yet tamed or fully known nature’ and model ecosystems that might prescribe the ways in which relations between organisms and humans ‘could, should or might be’ (p 168). Meanwhile, in feminist science studies and anthropology, the resurgence of life forms such as fungi in the ‘capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015), and the multispecies, material relationalities in practices such as permaculture (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) have been taken as muchneeded symbols of hope and examples of the possibility of care and renewal.

Microbial capacities for ecological and material transformation are increasingly mobilized within what geographer Jamie Lorimer (2019, 2020) refers to as ‘the probiotic turn’, a shift occurring across a range of science and policy domains in parts of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) world.

Introduction

These are the words of my mother, my amma. I have changed them a little. These words were uttered in Urdu. Some things are lost in translation. I do not believe words can ever show her pain of losing her father.

This snippet is a part of a creative, narrative book project about my family experiences of war and migration. In 1971, the East wing of Pakistan became Bangladesh. Both my maternal and paternal family were forced to migrate to West Pakistan due to bloodshed and brutal conflict. I grew up with heartbreaking accounts of these events. My mother lost her father in the war. Now orphaned, she and her siblings were taken in by extended family who themselves were struggling in a new city and culture. My book attempts to tell these stories of my mother, my father and a few other relatives; stories that are proving to be somewhat untellable.

In this chapter, I reflect on my experiences of telling these untellable stories in the light of scholarship on memory and narrative. By doing so, I want to acknowledge the struggles of working on graphical family memoir. The chapter provides insight into the challenges of developing creative narratives about family stories of trauma, grief and resilience. The process of working on this book has been a journey of discovery for me, and I continue to work my way through my responses, reactions and coping mechanisms.

Telling untellable stories

I want to tell these stories because my mother never could, at least not in a written or a published form, despite being a writer and a poet. The academic discourse around the ‘Fall of Dhaka’ is mostly about the ‘Independence of Bangladesh’. The event is the same, but the stories are told differently. This often happens with stories. Especially the untellable ones. There are a lot of different kinds of untellable stories. In this particular case, more stories are told from the Bangladeshi point of view because the ones that ought to have come out from Pakistan would have to say, ‘Our leaders were wrong’, ‘Our people committed atrocities’.

The aim of the Dis-Positions book series is to bring together recent work in the emerging intersections of such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, geography, design and philosophy, not least as they bear on the broad field of science and technology studies (STS). Conversely, if STS is undergoing major shifts in how it engages with ‘the social’ and the question of ‘societies’, it raises vital matters of concern for these various disciplines and their inter-connections. Dis-Positions thus provides a platform on which varieties of generative mutualities across these areas of scholarship can be presented. In this respect, Dis-Positions is undergirded by a desire to promote novel fields of inquiry, adventurous theoretical and empirical projects and inventive methodological practices. It seeks to encourage authors to address live debates, while drawing on and interrogating developments across academic areas, in the process disturbing and repatterning STS.

In pursuing this ethos, Dis-Positions comprises a consolidated, rigorous and proactive space through which creative and critical new perspectives in STS and beyond can find a voice. Under this rubric fall: discussions of the posthuman, post-colonial, affective and aesthetic; methodological inventions that incorporate speculative, engaged, entangled, and sociomaterial practices; empirical novelty that ranges from emergent technoscientific innovations to reformulations of the ordinary; and conceptually creative and critical developments that capture processual and pluralistic thought, extensions of assemblage and practice theories, and the turns to affect and post-performativity.

We are immensely proud to have the superb edited volume by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Maddalena Tacchetti, Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict, as the inaugural volume of the Dis-Positions book series. Ecological Reparation is concerned with how to rethink social-environmental degradation so that we are better equipped to respond to – remediate and recover – the damaged ecologies that comprise a deteriorating global context. However, the volume is not a typical example of academic practice: rather, it is also immersed in the endeavours of social and environmental justice movements and policy. Indeed, together these latter serve as a necessary backdrop of, and an intended constituency for, Ecological Reparation. It is no easy task to marry these analytic, practical and political objectives but Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa and Tacchetti have done a superb job of pursuing these aims within and across the various chapters that make up Ecological Reparation.

I’m a researcher in STS or Science and Technology Studies. And so, I have the privilege of doing what we anachronistically call ‘field work’ – or, I might say, the chance to encounter people and things in their ordinary settings. I’m interested in witnessing the way in which people are navigating and doing socio-ecological change. In the summer of 2019, I visited 17 different farms, scattered across the UK: from Fife, in Scotland, to Devon in the south-west of England. I had the chance to talk at length to each farmer, or sometimes to a pair of farmers, on each farm, and to take a walk around the farm so that they could show me the work that they were doing. The farms were varied in size and in the diversity of their farm work, but they all had a few things in common. They were all rearing cattle for eventual sale as beef; they were all feeding their animals exclusively on grass pastures; and they were all following, more or less strictly, the guidelines of an organization that supports this practice – the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association (PFLA).

It doesn’t seem a very remarkable practice – to feed your cattle on pastures! But in this chapter, I narrate the actions of these farmers in a particular way (and perhaps, problematically, in a way that they may not recognize). I narrate their practices as ‘mending ecologies’. Mending ecologies is my preferred term, rather than say repairing ecologies, since mending denotes a mundane, lay activity, not necessarily requiring specialist skills. Mending requires observation (of what has broken down) and a focused amount of care (to mend and re-materialize). I suggest that the PFLA farmers are attempting to mend ecologies as they rear their cattle. As they do so, they contribute to a deep re-materialization of the ecology of the farm, including its socio-technical, non-human and human elements. Mending ecologies are therefore low-key, steady and care-ful actions.

Obedecer a la Vida (Obey Life, Abide by Life) was the expression Roberto Saenz used when referring to what made him feel and think. This is the way he expressed his commitments to the Tenasuca Lagoon (located in the Tequendama Andean Cloud Forest of Colombia); to his colleague Arnovis, who worked every day in agroecology; and to his private nature reserve and small organic market. In addition, he added, “I do not practice civil resistance. I obey life.” Roberto’s statement struck me deeply and led me to think about the different ways of considering emergent practices for repairing a certain place. These practices respond to what the situation demands in the face of changing ecological and social conflicts. However, in my interpretation, Roberto’s practice doesn’t follow the same framework as the nation-state’s liberal environmental policies – at least, in Colombia. What kind of environmental-oriented action are we talking about? How does the statement ‘obey life’ relate to concrete practices in the field of agriculture? And then, how does this practice differ from other ways of practicing a policy that addresses nature conservation? These are some questions I will unravel in this chapter. My aim is to elucidate whether liberal citizenship can promote and support ecological reparation. More broadly, I wonder if the liberal framework of political thought is the only way in which the current environmental crisis might be addressed. Colombian nature conservation policy has centred on the production of discourses, knowledge and subjectivities that aim at, on the one hand, overcoming the negative effects of development, and on the other, securing strategic ecosystems in terms of biodiversity. However relevant these efforts are, biodiverse ecosystems are still valued under a utilitarian logic based on capitalist profit-making. In this sense, sustainable development discourses are articulated within liberal societies’ economic structure.

To this end, I will narrate the story of agroecological practitioners in the Tequendama region of Colombia, aiming to elucidate how their practice explains what ‘obey life’ means. If the liberal framework is based on the notion of rights and obligations (and its cognate notions, namely, individuality, universal thinking, self-interest and antagonism among political actors), ‘obeying life’ seems to follow another framework.

Introduction

In both scholarly and applied research on marginalised groups, there is a prominent focus on capturing and communicating life histories to illustrate the affective and other dimensions of people’s lived experiences and how agency is exercised and constrained. This is as much the case in anthropology, history and sociology as it is in critical gender and development studies concerned with identifying barriers around, and strategies women use for, improving their wellbeing and reducing gender inequity (Miller and Bell, 2012; Ellis, 2016). However, constructing and communicating such narrative forms carries an inherent tension for the feminist researcher when making ethical choices on minimising potential harms and sometimes unknown risks for research participants, honouring their desires on how their information is used, and adhering to open access principles. Open access research is not only important for participants in feminist research in owning and accessing the knowledge they have contributed to, but it is also frequently demanded by funding agencies and research institutions (Miller, 2012; Miller and Bell, 2012; Jones and De Breo, 2017).

How best to make ethical choices when conducting research and publishing analysis in the life history narrative form is not always easily foreshadowed, nor a process constrained to following the steps surmised in institutional ethics applications. Researchers need to respond to the ‘ethically important moments’ they encounter in practice, and not all risks may be known (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004; Mauthner, 2012). This is often the case when working with highly personalised information of interlocuters from vulnerable groups (Liamputtong, 2007). Choices are also increasingly complex in a digital age in which open access principles are lauded, and published analysis is available in multiple, more accessible forms rather than being behind paywalls (Mauthner, 2012; Miller, 2012). Despite this complex ethical landscape, as feminist researchers so frequently highlight, it is unethical to abandon attempts to conduct research with vulnerable groups to avoid the possible risks, as it inevitably silences the voices and experiences that are often the very subject of concern in tackling perennial issues such as gender inequity (Liamputtong, 2007; Ojermark, 2007).

To explore the tensions for feminist researchers in making ethical choices when constructing and sharing women’s life histories, this chapter draws from the experience of conducting research between 2019 and 2020 into how women from marginal groups in rural Indonesia might influence structures of power and development decision-making.