CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Farago, Liadh |
|---|---|
| Title | Down to the Soil: Developing a Latourian Terrestrial Account of Soil |
| Summary | The world's soils are one of the most important parts of the natural environment to the maintenance of human life, and they are also one of the most threatened by the contemporary environmental crisis. In this thesis I will discuss Bruno Latour’s arguments about escaping from the problematic worldview that he thinks led to the current environmental crisis, and investigate its applicability to soils in particular. Latour argues that as a result of globalisation and modernism, we have found ourselves in the problematic position of viewing ‘nature’ through a dualistic and mechanistic lens; which has resulted in the unfortunate political and environmental situation we are in today. Latour’s solution is a shift in perspective; from viewing humans and ‘nature’ as separate and viewing ‘nature’ as passive and lacking agency, to seeing everything that creates and causes change on earth (human and nonhuman) as interconnected and capable of some degree of agency. This perspective is called “terrestrial” in Latour’s terminology. To the best of my knowledge there is currently no scholarly work that either lays out in detail what a “terrestrial” approach to any given aspect of ‘nature’ might be, or that applies Latour’s concept of terrestrialism (and actor-network-theory, which I will draw on later) to soils and soil systems. This is the gap that this thesis is attempting to fill. |
| Supervisor | Maria Kronfeldner |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/farago_liadh.pdf |
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