This article by Renée Hoogland explores how citizen sensing practices intersect with soil ecology and narrative theory. Published in Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, it uniquely contributes to the environmental humanities by focusing on narrative distance and ecological alterity.
New forms of ecological citizenship are emerging. As people wake up to an ecologically damaged world while simultaneously experiencing the unsteady ground from which to imagine such a world, they use low-cost technology to sense our surrounding ecologies speculatively. This article combines narrative theory and environmental humanities while closely reading such a citizen-sensing practice as Sounding Soil (2017—now). At stake in this sensing project is the elemental alterity of soil ecology that helps us to focalize a clear narrative distance between human voice and non-human mood. Going outside the analytical contours of normative environmental discourse and the ecocritical tradition, this article argues for the critical importance of narrative distance in sensing an ecology because it subverts the logic of rendering the elemental as commensurable. Therefore, how we pursue citizen sensing practices is always premised on embodied, immersive, and discursively syncretic modes of speculative meaning-making: a sometimes uncomfortable but always critically improvisational engagement with elemental emergence. The dialectical tension between intimate sensing and narrative distance in Sounding Soil is no paradoxical story: it formalizes planetary narratives in which the ecology of soil materializes as a figure of alterity, not reducible to the human voice.
This publication was originally written in English. Click here to access the full text of the article.
Hoogland, R. (2022). “Citizen Sensing with Soil, and the Intimate Alterity of Narrative Distance.” Article: Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 16–28.
