UCalgary professor digging deep on soil research

A University of Calgary professor is working on a transdisciplinary project to get people thinking differently about soil. 

Dr. Katherine Lawless, PhD, an assistant professor in the departments of Communication, Media, and Film and Geography in the Faculty of Arts, is working with soil scientists, artists, farmers, conservation workers, Indigenous Elders and others to explore human-soil ecologies. 

Lawless’ project emerged from the recognition that protecting and restoring soils cannot be separated from protecting and restoring relationships, both human and non-human.

“We wanted to look at soil as a social and cultural medium rather than just the thing plants grow in,” says Lawless. 

She conducts interviews with various soil stewards (e.g., farmers, ranchers, tree nursery workers, etc.) to understand how soil appears to them in their different contexts, and what that means for how we treat soil.

“Soil is something different for each of these different stewards,” says Lawless. 

Some of the social components that Lawless is looking at include land-management practices, which are themselves shaped by different world views, policies, regulations, and economic and social pressures. 

“I’m trying to tease out some of the complexity so that we can more fully appreciate why soil stewards approach the soil in different ways and why a universal mandate for how to care for soil may require more nuance,” says Lawless. 

The goal of the project is to highlight the diversity of knowledges regarding soil, and to think about some of the already existing relations that could support certain soil practices long term and in what contexts. 

“There’s lots of research coming out about soil health, which is great, but sometimes it takes the form of a blanket prescription that doesn’t always account for differences across social, economic and ecological systems,” says Lawless. 

One of the ways she is showcasing this research is through a Soil Memory Atlas pilot project with the Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage at the University of Lethbridge that will bring together the biophysical and geochemical “memory” of the soil as measured through sampling and analysis and combine it with data gathered from interviews and archives to get a fuller understanding of the complex outcomes of human-soil relations in a particular place.

This atlas will be an online resource and have an exhibition component to it. Lawless says it’s a way to bring the work of the social scientists, soil scientists, artists and soil stewards involved in the project together and translate their knowledge to the public. 

With funding for the pilot project from an Arts Inspire Grant, Lawless hopes to extend the atlas to additional stewardship sites where interviews have taken place, including OH Ranch, the historic ranch owned by the Calgary Stampede.

Previous stages of the project, including the ongoing (Re)mediating Soils exhibition series, have received support from a New Frontiers in Research Fund Exploration Grant, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant, and the Soil Champions Committee. 

Lawless wants to understand the relations to soil that exist right now, how they are working and what can be learned from them moving forward. 

She has encountered a wide range of understandings about soil, from it being a medium for plant growth to soil as a habitat, soil as infrastructure and soil as a living system. 

“This investigation into soil tells us something about how we relate to our environments more broadly,” says Lawless. “This will be important to understand if we want to create more sustainable relationships with those environments.”