This workshop takes mud as a capacious metaphor for all those soggy, dynamic and ambiguous wetland environments – freshwater islands, banks, floodplains, marshes, swamps, bogs, and peatlands – that are prone to rapid transformations due to their sheer materiality, that take on multiple forms, and that challenge clear-cut ideological bracketing. We are equally interested in different instantiations of land (soils, mud, sand), the forms of life that emerge in such shifting encounters, and the kinds of economic, political, and social configurations that they invite and constrain. We find mud, with its ambiguous qualities that push back against the simplifications forced upon it by modern states and capitalist economies, a fitting metaphor for the “patchy Anthropocene” (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019).

In this workshop, we ask: (1) What forms of life and more-than-human relations emerge in such fluid encounters of the Anthropocene? (2) What kinds of economic, political, and social configurations make possible, and are made possible by, these encounters? (3) How can an analytical sensibility to muddy webs of life equip us with the theoretical and practical tools to curtail, repair, and reverse the unsavory effects of modernity’s excessive reduction of nature to human interests?

PROGRAM

Thursday, 8 June 2023

9:00 Opening address: Ștefan Dorondel (Romanian Academy)

9:15 – 10:15 Keynote lecture: Peter Coates (University of Bristol)
Disruptions in Wet Places: In-Placeness, Out-of-Placeness, Belonging and the Flourishing of Pesty Creatures

10:15 – 10:30 Coffee break

10:30 – 12:00 Panel I. Muddy histories
Moderator: Stelu Șerban

Constantin Ardeleanu (New Europe College)
Public health and hygiene in a marshland. Sulina in late nineteenth century

Michał Pospiszyl (Polish Academy of Sciences)
The Republic of Marshes: Eastern Europe and Fugitive Ecologies

Anna Varga (University of Pécs)
The memories of grazing by the shore and beaches of lake Balaton, Hungary

Manu P. Sobti (University of Queensland)
Riverine Narratives of Soviet Power along the Amu Darya – Transforming Notions of Space and Place

12:00 – 13:15 Lunch break

13:15 – 14:45 Panel II. Shifty infrastructures
Moderator: Adrian Deoancă

Ognjen Kojanić (University of Cologne)
From Alluvial Mud to Anthropogenic Sludge: Infrastructural Challenges in Pančevački Rit, Serbia

Suchimita Das (Ahmedabad University)
Moving Earth, Earthmovers and Perceptions of Environmental Vulnerability in the Indian Himalayas

Joana Sousa (University of Coimbra) & Raul Mendes Fernandez (Amilcar Cabral University)
Rice technology, artefacts and the making of the mud

Ștefan Dorondel (Romanian Academy), Cornelia Florea (Romanian Academy) and Gabriela Ioana-Toroimac (University of Bucharest)
Unruly Sediments and the Death of an Infrastructure

14:45 – 15:00 Coffee break

15:00 – 16:30 Panel III. Unruly materials
Moderator: Ștefan Dorondel

Bengi Çakmak (Üsküdar University)
Marine Mucilage as a Form of “Patchy Anthropocene”: The Troublesome Case of the Sea of Marmara

Adrian Deoancă (Romanian Academy), Stelu Șerban (Romanian Academy) and Marina Vîrghileanu (University of Bucharest)
Muddy Waters: ‘Dirty’ Landscapes and Muddled Institutions along the Lower Danube

Mareike Pampus (Martin Luther University, Halle)
Build On Sand: Artificial Lakes in Postmining Landscapes

Tarini Monga (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Sandy Contestations: (re)thinking coastal futures

16:30 – 17:00 Break

17:00 – 18:00 Keynote lecture: Laurent Lespez, Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne
Timescapes of European Rivers: The Intricate Ontology of Hybrids

Friday, 9 June 2023

9:15 – 10:15 Keynote lecture: Eben Kirksey, University of Oxford
Inscrutable Futures: Visions of Eternal Life, Biotechnology, and Planetary Ecology in Late Industrial China

10:15-10:30 Coffee Break

10:30 – 12:00 Panel IV. More than human lives
Moderator: Cornelia Florea

Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter)
Rhythms On the Beach: Microbial Mats Through Time

David Stradling (University of Cincinnati)
Dredging, Mudshell, and Oyster Reefs: Making the Future on the Texas Coast

Mészáros Csaba (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Mud, marshlands, and Sakhas in the permafrost landscape of Yakutia

12:00 – 13:15 Lunch break

13:15 – 14:45 Panel V. Theorizing muddiness
Moderator: Gabriela Ioana-Toroimac

David Eckersley (Nottingham Trent University)
In Media Mire: Peatlands and Elemental Mediation

Annelies Kuijpers (KU Leuven)
Sludge Matters! An inquiry into the composition of post-flood river sludge and its impact on socioecological life on riverbanks in Belgium and The Netherlands

Sara Rich (Coastal Carolina University)
Insurrections of the Swamp Things

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ABSTRACTS

Thursday, 8 June

9:15 – 10:15 Keynote lecture
Peter Coates (University of Bristol)
Disruptions in Wet Places: In-Placeness, Out-of-Placeness, Belonging and the Flourishing of Pesty Creatures

American naturalist Roger Tory Peterson once paid tribute to so-called ‘pesty’ (or ‘nuisance’ or ‘problem’) fauna: ‘Any animal that can live with man on man’s terms – to not only survive but thrive – has my admiration’. In the context of watery environments in the UK and continental Europe, I consider the case for learning to live with (even to love) pesty and pesky animals – some of them native and others that are labelled ‘invasive’ non-natives. I also examine the assumption that aquatic and semi-aquatic species from here are more ‘at home’ (as well as more desirable and beautiful) than species from there. Examples discussed will include: mosquitoes endemic to non-tropical waterscapes, the American muskrat, American mink, American signal crayfish and American bullfrog.

10:30 – 12:00 Panel I. Muddy histories
Moderator: Stelu Șerban

Constantin Ardeleanu (New Europe College)
Public health and hygiene in a marshland. Sulina in late nineteenth century

 This paper refers to the growth and decline of the town of Sulina in the nineteenth and twentieth century, a process that has had an economic dimension, but also a geological / biological one.  Sulina developed unevenly on both banks of the Danube once the Black Sea was opened to Western capitalist merchants in the early nineteenth century. The town developed through land reclamation from the neighbouring marshland as a band of dry land was gradually widened. The town was often flooded, so since the 1860s it was reinforced by dikes on both banks, and in various portions the settlement was extended against the marshland. With support from the Danube Commission, marshy areas continued to be cleared up and the drainage channel of the muddy waters surrounding Sulina was changed. At the request of the municipality, dredgers clearing the Sulina sandbank brought alluvium from the river and raised the floodable parts of the town. Ballast discharged from ships contributed to this, making the town a collection of geological samples from, as a French visitor put it in the 1890s, ‘every quarter of the globe’. But fortified as it was against flooding, there was something utterly frail and unhealthy at Sulina. The introduction of public services and imposition of modern hygiene regulations improved the inhabitants’ quality of life, but the neighbouring marshland left its imprint on everyone and everything, in human bones and house structures. Everything was damp, and houses were slowly sinking. Stone could hardly be used as a building material, as the dampness would immediately attack it. With ground water lying less than one metre deep, houses were as frail as the health of Sulina’s inhabitants. Underneath Sulina’s modern appearance lay an inconvenient structural weakness. This paper aims to present how in late nineteenth century Romanian medical experts documented the specificities of living in a town surrounded by a marshland. With progresses in medical sciences, the Romanian authorities established a bacteriological laboratory in Sulina and invested in building a modern water treatment plant and sewage system. Physicians were equally appointed to defend the town, Romania and Europe from the perils of epidemic diseases. But for those doctors there were other, sometimes more urgent dangers threatening the health of Sulina’s inhabitants from everywhere around the town, from above it and from below it.

Michał Pospiszyl (Polish Academy of Sciences)
The Republic of Marshes: Eastern Europe and Fugitive Ecologies

The wetlands of Eastern Europe have served as places of refuge from taxation, conscription, war, serfdom, and primitive accumulation since at least the 16th century. This phenomenon has not been given the attention it is due. Such spaces were considered desolate and sparse. Using the tools of environmental history, I show that wetlands (floodplains, mudflats, flooded forests) played a fundamental role in the social history of the region. Drawing on different types of sources (hitherto either ignored or studied separately), I demonstrate that unregulated, marshy nature is not only a place of temporary refuge, but also an attractive ecological niche for the establishment of permanent settlements and a space creating favourable conditions for the defence of commons.

Anna Varga (University of Pécs)
The memories of grazing by the shore and beaches of lake Balaton, Hungary

Reconnections of the people with their surrounding environment are essential part of the ecological restoration projects. These purposes are especially important from the local community’s perspective, who live there and probably who had a long tradition living on the particular landscape. In Hungary, the floodplains and water systems are important sites for biocultural and economical reasons as well. For these reasons as well, it is important to recover connections which were disappeared for today.  In my study I would like to introduce the uses of muddy and shallow water parts of Lake Balaton for livestock keeping from the end of the 19th Century. Lake Balaton is the largest freshwater lake in Central Europe with 235 km shore length and one of the most popular tourist destinations in the region.  My research is based on visual historical materials (archive photos, postcards and paintings), which represents the importance of these usages and also how the livestocks were replaced with beach culture and uses. I also did a survey on the published press about the topic from the time period. During my research I collected 156 pictures, where you can recognize at least one livestock in the lake or by the shore. Most of them are cattle and goose, but pig, sheep, buffalo and horses could be seen as well. The pictures introduce the importance of the lake and shore for the extensive livestock keeping. During the time when livestock keeping by the lake had importance the muddy habitats had economical importance for the local communities and even for the landlords as well. This value had been destroyed by the development of beaches, which created social and economical conflicts, and later ecological issues as well.

Manu P. Sobti (University of Queensland)
Riverine Narratives of Soviet Power along the Amu Darya – Transforming Notions of Space and Place

In the transformative decades before the 1950s, Soviet propagandistic literature eulogised the Main Turkmen Canal emerging from Eurasia’s legendary Amu Darya River as a veritable “Canal of Life.” It was contended that this future waterway would breathe new life into the inhospitable Karakum sands, bolstering both Turkmenian industry and agriculture on the eve of their great upsurge. And – if mighty forests would now keep out the fierce winds where the desert had once abounded, the progressively temperate climate would beckon new and beautiful cities across Turkmenia. Within efforts to change the physical landscapes of Central Asia, irrigation projects loomed as the gargantuan constructs of the Russian and later Soviet State. Yet, the infamous Turkmen Canal probably remains only one among the many unfortunate confrontations of Tsarist and Soviet attempts towards imposing their visions of modernity on Central Asia’s riverine landscape and its terrain conditions, if not the best known one. Achieved through the mastery of the region’s most significant river – the legendary Amu Darya – this power relationship of Russia with Central Asia had remained fundamentally colonial across Tsarist impositions and even in the early Soviet period. In examining the Amu Darya’s charge, flow, manipulation, riverine structuring, and settlement patterns within this purview, this paper expands on how a verdant, natural, and ‘oriental’ landscape was effectively intersected with the notions of Russian imperialism and Soviet obsessions with civilizational progress and modernity. This modernist reformatting of the landscape was at an unprecedented scale, its brutality consisting of two seemingly heroic components. First, a quantitative and qualitative change to the scale of the region’s agricultural production via the redistribution of water; and secondly, the delineation of new spatial and imaginary borders for the region’s scattered populations, an action that egregiously defiled the continuities of a nomadic past. It is this compelling narrative of criss-crossing canals, of small and large towns of no particular character interspersed across the desert and steppe, and of the manipulated ‘riverine’ – which will be the focus of this presentation.

13:15 – 14:45 Panel II. Shifty infrastructures
Moderator: Adrian Deoancă

Ognjen Kojanić (University of Cologne)
From Alluvial Mud to Anthropogenic Sludge: Infrastructural Challenges in Pančevački Rit, Serbia

Pančevački Rit, a peri-urban area north of the Danube River in Belgrade, is arguably the prime example of a patchy Anthropocenic landscape in Serbia. Drastic infrastructural transformation stabilized this area in its current shape. Spanning decades, this transformation included the construction of approximately 90 km of dikes to protect it from seasonal flooding of the Danube and the Tamiš Rivers, the digging of a series of drainage canals to regulate the groundwater level, and the installation of several pumps to take excess water out of the area. Prior to these infrastructural interventions, this area had been a floodplain on which the Danube and the Tamiš regularly deposited alluvium. Draining the marshland through infrastructure development turned alluvial mud into fertile soil that was the basis for establishing large-scale agricultural production in the vicinity of Belgrade during the socialist period. The area has been urbanizing and industrializing rapidly in recent decades. Between 1981and 2011, the number of inhabitants almost doubled, from around 33,000 to 60,000. Much of the canal infrastructure that was developed to manage water in this area has been appropriated by residents and industries in the area that lack access to the local sewage network, which is underdeveloped. The network now serves as a recipient for household sewage and wastewater from factories. As opposed to the fertile alluvial mud that characterized this area in the past, now it is more frequently associated with anthropogenic sludge (mulj), which is turning canals into dead zones. The sludge creates problems that have been exacerbated by recent meteorological trends. During increasingly common long dry spells, there tends to be too little water in the system and the smell is overpowering. On the other hand, during bursts of intense precipitation, the potential for sludge from canals and septic tanks to overflow presents a public health threat. In the post-socialist context, the main aspects of socialist planning and modernity have been abandoned. The canal network is insufficiently maintained; the planned expansion of the meagre sewage system and the construction of wastewater treatment facilities are endlessly deferred. As the dreams of future infrastructural development fail to materialize in Pančevački Rit, locals are left to limit the detrimental effects of sludge themselves. The locals who deal with sludge need to navigate the post-socialist context of infrastructural disinvestment and learn how to negotiate with the state, new corporate actors, media, and neighbors.

Suchimita Das (Ahmedabad University)
Moving Earth, Earthmovers and Perceptions of Environmental Vulnerability in the Indian Himalayas

How does the eastern Himalayan Indian state of Sikkim try to govern the shiftiness of mud, manifesting as frequent landslides that displace rock and soil along mountain slopes and destabilize the landscape? Experiencing intense monsoons from May through September, citizens of this marginal state are accustomed to the mobility of mud around them. It renders human life immobile intermittently by washing away arterial roads and other infrastructure.  Climate change is causing extreme precipitation, triggering more landslides. The state paradoxically builds more infrastructure as a way to reduce the environmental vulnerability of this border population. It undertakes road-widening/construction projects to bring development to the frontier and securitize it against perceived threats from China. Road construction in turn displaces more mud on steep slopes, precipitating fresh landslides. Hence, while riding vehicles ferrying essential commodities and people, citizens often find that halfway into their journey the road to their destination has been replaced by flowing mud. This paper interrogates the “patchy” conditions of livability in the eastern Himalayas, by tracing how routine geological processes, non-routine processes of climate change and techno-material development interventions make and remake this muddy landscape.  The paper focuses specifically on the techno-material presence of the “earthmover” – a ubiquitous heavy machinery deployed to scoop and relocate rock and soil during landslides and during roadbuilding. Through the decade of my ethnographic fieldwork in Sikkim, the bulldozer/excavator/earthmover has proliferated in this hilly landscape. How does the earthmover succeed or fail in controlling the shiftiness of mud? What does the proliferation of the earthmover signal to the citizens of Sikkim in terms of the state’s ability to govern mud and thereby provide good governance?  Drawing on conversations with citizens, road contractors and state agents and on participant-observations of landslides through the monsoon of 2022, this paper analyses how the earthmover materially and symbolically mediates the Sikkimese citizen’s experience of landslides as a form of environmental vulnerability, their perception of the temporality of environmental disasters, and their judgement of the responsibility of the development state in this situation. The larger aim is to ask how people find hope for the future and a sense of security while living in ruined landscapes of the Anthropocene where the literal ground beneath their feet can slip away at any moment; and how are such outlooks are shaped by attunements to the confederate agency (Bennett 2010) of organic materiality (mud) and inorganic features (machinery) of the terrain.

Joana Sousa (University of Coimbra) & Raul Mendes Fernandez (Amilcar Cabral University)
Rice technology, artefacts and the making of the mud

In the swampy enclaves along the West African coast, from The Gambia to Sierra Leone, mangroves out border the coastline and mark the transition between the land and the sea. Rice, the most praised food, flourishes from a dramatic transformation of the mangroves. In coastal Guinea-Bissau, the inner part of mangrove forests is replaced by an organized mosaic of secondary dykes, ditches, and culverts, each of which arranged at specific heights, depths, locations, to provide the caring conditions for rice to develop. This is all embraced by a longitudinal, long, and robust main dyke and ditch, which, by their turn, are crosscut by canals and sluices permeating or opposing to the movement of saltwater, freshwater, sediment, fish, and crabs. In these transformed landscapes, technology is embedded in intermingled socioecologies where knowledge, meaning and arts are composed. Resisting to the persisting eroding forces of the swamp, where sediment deposition constantly works on making the mudflat, rice farmers know, shape, and create categories, technology, and artefacts. Mud is transformed into household ceramic items used for storing rice and water, for pleasing the spirits, and to produce artistic representations of the cattle feeding on rice leftovers in the upper part of the swamp. We heard about places where the “mud grows” and where the “mud wears out”, about how the compactness of the mud changes against different types of mangrove trees, and how slight differences in altitude are important to rice technology maquettes. A lot remains immersed in the invisibility of the mud and in the rhythms of the tides: trails, harbors, fishing creeks, old dykes, evidence of colonial architecture, shell mounds, beehives and crocodile pathways, messages to the dead and to the living. All invisible to those who have not given enough time, observation, and touch to the challenge of its flatness. Mangroves have mainly been portrayed, and simplified, as places of refuge and protection. Yet, histories rooted in the swampy soils of West Africa are of struggle, opportunity, creation, and transformation, as much as they are of protection and refugee. This is evident by the secondary technological diversification of the African rice (Oryza glaberrima) technology, by the role of mangrove enclaves during the transatlantic slave trade in 15-18^th centuries and during the struggle against Portuguese colonialism (1963-1974), in which these swampy environments were used all for protection, opportunity and struggle. These coastal enclaves in Guinea-Bissau have been part of the Patchy Anthropocene for a long time now and yet global warming and sea-level rise are just reaching its shores.

Ștefan Dorondel (Romanian Academy), Cornelia Florea (Romanian Academy) and Gabriela Ioana Toroimac (University of Bucharest)
Unruly Sediments and the Death of an Infrastructure

This paper aims at engaging an ethnography of the hydrological and geomorphological processes in order to examine the political and economic consequences of sediments accumulation which led to the death of an infrastructure. We examine the curious case of a river port build with EU funds which, due to an island movement, has never worked, not even for a day. The paper documents the history of the old port and the history of the newly created port seeking to show how unruly Danube sediments interfere with human affair. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork, on historical maps and satellite images we attempt to suggest that geomorphological and hydrological processes can be the subject of history and ethnography. Moreover, this perspective may bring new insights equally to the study of islands, to the anthropology of infrastructure and to the “geological turn in anthropology”.

15:00 – 16:30 Panel III. Unruly materials
Moderator: Ștefan Dorondel

Bengi Çakmak (Üsküdar University)
Marine Mucilage as a Form of “Patchy Anthropocene”: The Troublesome Case of the Sea of Marmara

In November 2020, a large pile of slimy mucus appeared on the surface of the Marmara Sea in Istanbul, Turkey. It was called a sea snot, or marine mucilage, which is composed of a variety of microorganisms and caused by an increase in phytoplankton. The occurrence of marine mucilage is caused by draught, static water, intensification of certain substances, and climate change. The Ministry of the Environment, Urbanization, and Climate Change intervened in and has struggled with it ever since, alongside non-governmental organizations, academicics, scientists, and the people who have witnessed the situation. For two years, with a gradually decreasing sense of urgency, discussions have focused on the possible methods of cleansing it, the measures to prevent it in the future, and its travel along the coasts of the Sea of Marmara. The repercussions concerning its appearance at different places and in different shapes, depth, and size include the ecological anxiety and grief, which have become familiar due to climate change. However, interestingly enough, such sentiments and reflections are intertwined with feelings of disgust, abjection and loathe. The slimy and oozy character of the snot has turned a natural outcome into an abomination in the eyes of many, and, in the literal sense, a scum of the Earth. In this paper, I want to elaborate on how such sensations and exclamations burst in dealing with climate change and related natural-cultural crises. My purpose is to grasp and discuss this as a specific aspect of anthropocentric perspective and the formation of mucilage as a consequence of the Anthropocene. I will use discourse analysis to reveal the reactions and reflections such as prioritizing fishing, tourism, and the anthropocentric aesthetics over the health of the sea, other marine species, and the ecosystem of the snot itself. I propose that the agency of mucilage, gained after its creation as an abomination, should be discussed as a dis/appearing, gross, filthy, moving, stalking, and haunting entity in contrast with the humanist comforts and claims of omnipotence. I wonder what mucilage would narrate as a more-than-human actant and how it could be traced towards an alternative ‘ethico-onto-epistemology,’ recalling Karen Barad, within the concept of ‘patchy Anthropocene.’

Adrian Deoancă (Romanian Academy), Stelu Șerban (Romanian Academy) and Marina Vîrghileanu (University of Bucharest)
Muddy Waters: ‘Dirty’ Landscapes and Muddled Institutions along the Lower Danube

This presentation provides a pluridisplinary comparison of the consequences of infrastructuring projects (Blok et al. 2016) along the Lower Danube River in Romania and Bulgaria as a way of investigating the micropolitics of nature and infrastructure in Eastern Europe. Throughout the region, the failure of postsocialist governments to maintain the hardware of the high-modernist yesteryear has enabled feral forms of nature to flourish in the cracks (Bubandt and Tsing 2018; also, Dorondel and Posner 2022). Members of the riparian communities in the two countries often describe the shifty river islands that impinge on the course of the Danube and the border between the two states, the expanding sandbars that hinder shipping, and the unruly plant and animal life thriving in a once carefully engineered landscape as ‘dirty.’ The perceived disorderliness of overgrown landscapes is often regarded alongside unkempt waterways, shuttered industrial sites and informal forestry practices by marginalized Roma populations, as enduring symptoms of state disinvestment, corruption, and disconnection from global economic flows. In this paper, we make use of mixed methods combining remote sensing tools – such as orthophotoplans and Geographic Information Systems data – with archival and long-term ethnographic research with town residents of Tutrakan (Bulgaria) and Corabia (Romania) to examine how the technological (mis)management of the Lower Danube throughout the socialist and post-socialist period contributed to the contemporary proliferation of ‘dirty landscapes’ (Carse 2016). Furthermore, we show that the new state agencies in charge of waterways are unfit to discipline increasingly hybrid assemblages of nature and infrastructure due to their fragmentation and muddled or contradictory competencies. As such, they often resort to ‘ecological fixes’ (Bakker 2009) such as the punctual dredging of river chokepoints, that further damage these landscapes. These processes amount to a new and enduring ecological order whereby non-human actors exert increasingly more agency over human projects.

Mareike Pampus (Martin Luther University, Halle)
Build On Sand: Artificial Lakes in Postmining Landscapes

An opencast pit is a deepening in the earth’s surface as a result of the extraction of mineral raw materials (lignite, ore, sand, gravel). The volume of the pit includes the mass-deficit from raw and usable extraction after the pit was backfilled with the non-usable material (overburden). By German law, decommissioned open-pit lignite mines must be restored. But how can landscapes be restored? Or, to put it in the words of the anthropologist Anna Tsing, how can new lifeworlds emerge in the ruins of a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017)? In Germany, flooding of residual pits is the predominant practice, often in order to create ‘recreational landscapes.’ However, flooding a pit literally means building on sand as the ground mainly consists of sandy, nutrition-poor substrates from ice age deposits and highly acidic substrates from the Tertiary overburden. Flooding this sandy ground requires for instance the flattening of the shore zones and the planting of specific flora, thus a complex entanglement of human and more-than-human actors in shifting assemblages. The iron sulphide in the overburden sediments causes a fall of the pH-value of the waterbody after flooding. Additionally, the ground is extremely low in nitrogen, yet some plants can fix this. In many successions N-fixing plants occur anyway, for example various types of clover and sea buckthorn. Originally a coastal species, sea buckthorn’s complex and far-reaching roots allow the plant to live with droughts and gain grip even in sandy grounds, which tend to move and slide. The ground in return gets stabilised by the roots while its nutrition is enhanced since the plant makes the atmospheric nitrogen biologically available in the soil for itself and neighboring plants through a symbiotic relationship with a bacterial species. From a more-than-human perspective, this paper highlights both continuity and rupture to accentuate the radical and interconnected character of land restoration and to identify insights that contribute to ethical and sustainable futures. Following Tsing et el., this paper traces ‘multispecies socialities and histories that both shape and become shaped by such landscape differences’ (2019: 187). Attending to a landscape requires to broaden our understanding of social relations into ‘more-than-human space and time’ (ibid. 186) to go beyond the mere visual description of postmining areas and instead contextualise them through a deep understanding of ecological systems and interactions between different species and materials.

Tarini Monga (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle)
Sandy Contestations: (re)thinking coastal futures

The ecological urgency of rising sea levels and coastal erosion is anchored within the global dominance of concrete and the construction industry, which remains deeply reliant on sand. In assuming the role of a political actor in the face of rapid urbanisation, sand is central to theorising coastal futures. An examination of the politics of coastal infrastructuring practices will reveal the granularities and temporalities of the material. Drawing from existing studies on the ever-shifting coastlines of Indian cities such as Mumbai and Chennai, this paper will examine these transformations through material agency emerging from social, political, and technical systems. First, means of reclaiming land from the sea to extend urban landscapes seawards carve a new role for coastal sand and pose geospatial consequences which demand attention. At the same time, coastal defence mechanisms such as sea walls continue to be put in place to protect and border cities from changing movements of the sea. The structures of ‘protection’ and resistance to coastal erosion, force through new engagements with neoliberal forms of safety. Second, in turning to moments of urgency and disempowerment in the face of disaster (Hastrup, 2011) such as floods, tsunami waves and cyclones, disruptions in sandy landscapes are made evident. The instability and transformative properties of sand revealed through these ‘disasters’ also probe questions around its durability and the urban landscapes they are within. The mobility and ability of the material to perform aesthetic roles point toward its sporadic agency. On the other hand, it remains critical to recognise sand’s position in global forms of production and space through its material qualities, spatial scales, and temporality. The future orientation of infrastructural projects (Harvey and Knox, 2015) conveys an ongoingness of the material while highlighting the importance of a political orientation for the analysis. Through this examination of urban landscapes where multiple actors intersect with sand and its movements, this paper will grapple with social potentialities of non-human agents in understanding everyday moments of environmental change and shifting lifeworlds.

17:00 – 18:00 Keynote lecture:
Laurent Lespez, Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne
Timescapes of European Rivers: The Intricate Ontology of Hybrids

Friday, 9 June

9:15 – 10:15 Keynote lecture:
Eben Kirksey, University of Oxford
Inscrutable Futures: Visions of Eternal Life, Biotechnology, and Planetary Ecology in Late Industrial China  

10:30 – 12:00 Panel IV. More than human lives
Moderator: Cornelia Florea

Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter)
Rhythms On the Beach: Microbial Mats Through Time

Coastal microbial mats are sun-light driven consortia of microbes often found in intertidal zones, where they provide a protection against erosion. Diverse functional groups of microbes interact to form multispecies ecosystems that some researches liken to a macroscopic living entity. The close coupling of these diverse microbial groups is achieved through the cycling and recycling of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur. Scientist speak of syntrophies when one group of microbes lives on the products of another group of microbes. Syntrophy literally means, “eating together”; syntrophic relationships are symbioses based on metabolic processes. As cyanobacteria the main photosynthesizer of these microbial consortia follow a circadian rhythm, the elemental cycling doesn’t simply require the presence of specific elements in specific layers of the microbial mat, but they also have to be produced and consumed at the right time; in other words, interacting metabolic processes have to be tightly tuned. Circadian rhythms enable cells to coordinate their physiology with cyclical changes in the environment such as Earth’s light/dark. Hörnlein et al (2018) liken the complex ecosystem of microbial mats to a choir, in which microbes with clock genes act as choirmasters, directing the rest of the consortium such that multiple ‘parts’ of the microbial mat become entrained in a cooperative way. This paper explores how microbial mats become differently legible through the attention to rhythms that require scientists to adhere to carefully timed sampling protocols. What I call a requirement for ‘intra-active synchronization’ (see Schrader 2010) has implication for response-able scientific practices and nonhuman agencies. The forms of life that emerge in these muddy encounters literalize the notion of life as a “sentient symphony” (Margulis & Sagan 1995). Paying attention to the technical ‘apparatuses’ that allow for the manifestation and the historical revision of these phenomena in the light of climate change, this paper asks – drawing on field work at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research – how these microbial rhythms interact with human experiences, scientific measurements and earthly cycles. In other words, what emerges, beyond anthropocentric frames of time, when ways of seeing become attuned to the interlocking of bio- and geo-rhythms of microbes in intertidal zones and their alterations due to climate change?

David Stradling (University of Cincinnati)
Dredging, Mudshell, and Oyster Reefs: Making the Future on the Texas Coast

Lined with a series of shallow, muddy bays, the Texas gulf coast is rich with shellfish. It has been for centuries. As the state grew rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, dredges took to the bays, first Galveston, then Matagorda, then San Antonio. The dredges hunted and extracted mudshell, the old oyster shells that had accumulated in the bays, buried in the mud. The old shells became an inexpensive alternative to mined limestone, used to create cement, and to gravel, used as roadbed material. As the scale of shell dredging increased, conflict ensued. Mudshell formed many of the banks that supported live oysters, which themselves supported an important Texas food industry.  As dredging mudshell helped feed the rapid growth of Houston and other Texas cities, it also fed controversy. Dredging altered the bays, in many ways permanently. Galveston Bay, for example, became deeper, less suitable to growing oysters. Dredging threatened fisheries and, potentially, the large populations of migrating birds, including the rare whooping crane, which wintered along San Antonio Bay. This rapid and poorly regulated intervention in muddy ecosystems, the exact effects of which were hidden from view, even from the eyes of those most concerned, forced Texas politicians to decide what type of state Texas would be. Not surprisingly, rapid growth and wealth accumulation in cities trumped the preservation of the rich ecosystems of Texas’s natural heritage. This paper uses the extensive archival collections of two participants in the shell wars of the 1950s and 1960s to describe the very different paths the state might have taken. Muddy ecosystems are surprisingly complex, but they are unsurprisingly unknown and under-appreciated. The sandy beaches of Texas’s Padre Island to the south would be protected; the muddy marshes and shallow bays to the north would be exploited. Even as the environmental movement gathered momentum and the National Audubon Society entered the fray alongside Texas sportsmen and oystermen, Texas continued to dredge. This paper is part of a larger project on the history of dredging from Ancient Rome to modern Florida. My broader goal is to uncover the many ways dredges served as a city builder and protector of urban wealth. The sites of intervention, of course, tended to be the fluid environments surrounding cities, often the shifty, muddy wetlands in bays and along rivers.

Mészáros Csaba (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Mud, marshlands, and Sakhas in the permafrost landscape of Yakutia

Yakutia’s permafrost landscape is one of the world’s most vulnerable ecotopes, exposed to human disturbance and rapid climatic changes. Indigenous Sakha land- and waterscape management has transformed this landscape in the course of the last four centuries, especially in the densely populated areas alongside the river Lena, Aldan, and Vilyui, where thermokarst depressions provide pastures and hayfields for horse and cattle breeding.
Muddy wetlands have played a pivotal role in Sakha place-making process. Firstly, it is a complex interface between ecological conditions in space and time.  It demarcates wet and dry areas, freshwater bodies, and meadows, but it also provides an interface between the frozen wintertime and the arid summertime. Secondly, the emergence of a muddy surface shows the disturbance or the rapid change of the permafrost landscape. Therefore, the whereabouts and the extent of muddy soils are an intrinsic part of local ecological knowledge, that helps local Sakhas to adapt to ecological challenges. Apart from more traditional ways of permafrost meadow management (drainage, deforestation, and creating artificial lakes) to turn pastures and hayfields into arable land, irrigation, flattening and tilling as well as muskrats appeared in the Soviet era in alaases. These aquatic rodents turn the hayfields around the lakes into inaccessible muddy wetlands. After the demise of the planned economy, two new factors started to influence the spread of muddy wetlands in Yakutia. Firstly, the increased thawing of the permafrost soil, and the humidification of meadow soils, and secondly, the increased frequency and expansion of forest fires wiping out taiga vegetation and thus contributing to the formation of boggy marshlands. In understanding the role and place of mud in Sakha environmental perception it is important to note, that most meadows and lakes formed in thermokarst depressions are regarded by Sakhas as live, animate entities with unique character traits. These sentient landscapes are receptive to external disturbance; may it be anthropogenic or not. According to local hunters, the emergence of muddy areas is the most obvious way a meadow hinders further human or non-human intervention in its body. It is the primary way to isolate herself from other entities.

My paper intends to highlight how mud and marshlands play an eminent role in local ontologies, environmental perception, and land management. Mud is much more than an unused, abandoned area, it is the outcome of continuous, complex, and highly stratified communication between human and non-human agents of the permafrost landscape.

13:15 – 14:45 Panel V. Theorizing muddiness
Moderator: Gabriela Ioana-Toroimac

David Eckersley (Nottingham Trent University)
In Media Mire: Peatlands and Elemental Mediation

This paper takes Kinder Scout, one of the UK’s most famous moorland plateaus, as its point of departure. Among the shifting assemblages of humans and non-humans that can be found on, in, under, over, beyond and across its squelchy reaches – ancient settlements, commoners’ subsistence, mass trespass in the struggle for access, occult teachings and interplanetary parliaments, sphagnum mosses and bog lilies, labor, leisure, environmental devastation, carbon capture, ring ouzels and a unique mountain hare population are but some of the actors that energize these mental, social and environmental ecologies (Guattari, 1989) – it explores the uncertain but fertile grounds of conceptualizing peat as a form of media. Not only does peat fulfil the three functions ascribed to media by Friedrich Kittler (2010), processing, storage, and transfer, as ecologist Harry Godwin (1981) observes, in acting as a fossilized record of ecological change and an archeological repository, it is archival. Moreover, peat can be understood as an ordering device, at both an interscalar and multi-species level. Drawing on aspects of an ongoing artist-research project, Bleak Plateaus: Ecological Aesthetics in the Dark Peak, and building on scholarship that pushes beyond a singular understanding of media as decidedly human-centered technical objects or systems designed for the transmission of signals and symbolic meaning (e.g., Jue, 2014; Peters, 2015; Young, 2020), the paper examines an understanding of peat as ‘elemental mediation.’ It does this in order to test out and tease out the potential for such an approach to provide a speculative platform for pluralising our modes of engagement with the shifting materiality of peat, providing an epistemic check on the tendency to address peat through the disembodied I/eye of science and its accompanying reductivism.

Annelies Kuijpers (KU Leuven)
Sludge Matters! An inquiry into the composition of post-flood river sludge and its impact on socioecological life on riverbanks in Belgium and The Netherlands

In July 2021 the Midwest of Europe was terrified by torrential rains, resulting in severe floodings that killed 220 people. In this paper, I discuss the less visible, long-term social and ecological consequences of these devastating floodings that hit Belgium and the Netherlands through the prism of river sludge. By taking river sludge as point of entry I adopt a post-humanist perspective, concentrating on how non-human elements, like rivers and sludge, impact human life and vice versa (Cohn and Lynch 2017:285). I perceive here rivers as ‘non-human’ living creatures and turn the gaze towards a substance that is part of the river, as something that a river absorbs and secretes, and the way it interacts with socioecological life worlds. Sludge is considered here an active agent that has consequences in the world (Lorimer 2015).  Sludge matters. This at-first-sight, meaningless foul-smelling, sticky substance is versatile in its composition and how it interacts with the world. Sludge can be nourishing and fertile, for instance, post-flood sludge contains exotic seeds, deposited in the river along old trade routes, that resurfaced, spread out and transformed the local vegetation on riverbanks at the Vesder river (Belgium) with non-native plants from i.e., Australia, and South- Africa. Sludge can also be toxic, comprised of pollution from industrial pasts or fuel oils and cleaning supplies kept in people’s basements. In Belgium and the Netherlands, farmers’ unions advised farmers not to let their cattle graze on land that had been submerged because of polluted sludge (Gillis 2021). Thus, sludge not only informs and transforms local ecologies but also has an effect on people’s daily lives. By looking at its composition and the way sludge is entangled with human and non-human entities I unravel not only narratives about contemporary and past ways of living, but also bring together different temporalities and inform critical debates about industrial histories, contemporary pollution, and the way these impact the ecology and social life along riverbanks. Reckoning with these multiple encounters, seeing the way they are (partly) linked to each other, and how they impact current and future lifeworlds can help to make ‘political sense of the Anthropocene’ (Matthews 2018: 387), and gives deeper insights into the way the human and non-human are intertwined (Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt 2019) and can no longer be separated in studies on natural disasters.

Sara Rich (Coastal Carolina University)
Insurrections of the Swamp Things

In the swamp, trees are never just wood, and rivers are never just water. The mud, rising with floodwaters, settling with mosquito eggs, sticks to everything, even the things that should wash it away. Mud here in the South Carolina Lowcountry doesn’t just grow mosquitos and crawdads. It also furnishes the soft ground from which great bald cypresses emerge, their knobby knees holding them steady amidst the waterlogged clay and peat. Also included in this mud’s powers is the ability to create strange perfumes infused with methane and sulfur that waft a hint of rot through the air. Once, mud even created a geological seam against the sand, and that seam now forms the bed of the Waccamaw River, named for the Indigenous people here, whose ancestors are buried in that same sand and clay. The Waccamaw’s blackwater slowly cuts at the sandy banks on the east side while the sticky clay holds out to the west. More recently, the mud married chattel slavery to bear such offspring as rice fields, cotton and indigo plantations, and timber barons whose slaves were forced to strip the thick forests of longleaf pines. The broken trees were sold to shipwrights, who built ships for selling wares, waging wars, and killing whales. But some of those boats never made it very far; some of them are still here in the black silt at the bottom of the river, charred remains like blackened skeletons in even blacker water. The once-complicit mud seems to have taken its trees back by force, perhaps admitting its error and growing stronger because of it.  Now, as builders of housing developments, rather than builders of ships, threaten these ancient swamps and all their soggy constituents, perhaps we are due for another uprising, an upwelling, of mud. As the shipwrecks show us, mud doesn’t just bog things down or sink them in quicksand; it can also rise up and take things with it. Armed with Indigenous philosophies of place-based research, object-oriented thinking, tree-ring records, and tales of shipwreck, this paper will consider some ways that the generative qualities of mud might yet triumph over the destructive qualities of suburban development. It offers a vision of a near future that might stink or even suck, but where new ways of life will eventually emerge – dirty, yes, but also lively.

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This workshop is organized by ‘Francisc I. Rainer’ Institute of Anthropology, Romanian Academy, The Institute for Southeast European Studies and New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest.