Alternative agricultures in the midst: sensuous ways of knowing, imagining, and labouring toward post-extractivist futures

This dissertation is a story of working, growing, and learning with agriculture and food communities who seek sustainable alternatives to a global extractivist food regime. Through sensory ethnographic fieldwork and reviews of literature the dissertation threads a sensuous, relational, and more-than-representational approach to research on global extractivisms and those who attempt—through their everyday practices—to forge alternative, post-extractivist, and therefore post-capitalist futures. The dissertation spans four published articles and one unpublished manuscript.

The dissertation, carried out under the auspices of the Extractivisms and Alternatives (EXALT) Initiative at the University of Helsinki, can be seen as comprising two distinct but complementary parts. The first part (Articles I and II) consists of establishing global extractivisms as an organising concept and way of relating to the world. The second part (Articles III, IV, and V) uses sensory ethnography—which examines the overlooked multisensory aspects of everyday life that include but exceed verbal articulation—to understand the practices of alternative agricultural communities and gain insight for conceptual and practical interventions toward post-extractivist world-making. Altogether the dissertation addresses a variety of critical issues that work to develop a series of future-oriented inquiries: the development of a relational approach to research that is necessarily ongoing and future-oriented; the ‘sensuous atmospheres’ of life in the farm; the politics of imagination; the politics of knowledge concerning the ways that farmers, farm workers, non-humans and others come to know landscapes and relate in/with them; the spectre of carbon offset-oriented multinational companies interested in regenerative agriculture; and a critique of capitalocentric analyses—particularly the notion of self-exploitation—in the literatures concerned with these spaces. The interdisciplinary foundations of this dissertation are rooted in sensory anthropology and global development studies, and heavily influenced by works in human geography, political ecology, philosophy, history, and science and technology studies.

Overall, the conceptual and analytical review work of articles I and II delineate, historicise, and describe the prevalence of global extractivisms, while suggesting that extractivist relationalities are codified into modern legal, economic, and political systems and thus condition particular socioecological relationalities to world. The meshworked theoretical and methodological approaches of sensory anthropology and ethnography in articles III, IV, and V, help to reveal ways of knowing, knowledge practices, and more-than-human emplacement amidst an extractivist world order, while simultaneously being engaged in practices aimed at forging alternatives. Altogether, these approaches contribute new insights into common global challenges to sustainability and highlight obstacles and pathways toward the production of sustainable ecological livelihoods while working to open new horizons of imagination and practice toward alternative, post-extractivist food futures.