Healing people, soils and science through ‘urban soil remediation’ research? A conversation in transdisciplinary agroecology research

This paper reflects on entanglement of soil care practices, agroecological values, and transdisciplinary research in a two-year research project on urban soil remediation for food production. We conducted two field and lab-based quantitative studies exploring agroecological soil remediation in Latin America and South Africa and eight online workshops with international soil care practitioners, addressing the gap between policy and practice in remediating damaged urban soils. While transdisciplinary research is often advocated for, and its benefits taken for granted, its tensions are overlooked as “detritus” of complex research projects. However, it is often in the liminal spaces of not-fully-spoken tensions that concepts and ideas evolve, or evolutions turn into cooptation and transfiguration. Refusing to give in to homogenizing accounts of research “results,” we foreground tensions, conflicts, and dilemmas emerged through the research, offering them for scrutiny to the agroecology community. Through this novel approach we aim to nourish a collective and generative journey to evolving urban agroecological research. In particular, we offer a toolkit for regenerating the agroecology movement’s politics of knowledge and theories of change as they come to life in- and live with the trouble of- urban political agroecology research, in the folds and crumbles of capitalist worlds.