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by Dr Lara Choksey
Vron Ware and Jim Scown join Lara Choksey for a conversation about the histories that connect soil to colonialism and imperialism, and why these connections matter for agricultural production now and in the future. Vron and Jim reflect on links between militarism and the English countryside, online far-right content and the decline of rural mental health services, and what nineteenth-century soil science might tell us about national identity. Discussing Vron’s book, Return of a Native (Repeater 2022), and their shared interest in the organic chemist Justus von Liebig, the conversation addresses the many scales operating in our sense of the local, from the parochial to the planetary.
Speakers
Vron Ware is a writer and photographer. From 1977 to 1983, she worked at the the anti-fascist and anti-racist magasine Searchlight. From 1986 to 1992, she was a research officer at Women’s Design Service, which pioneered feminist perspectives on urban planning and environmental design. Her first academic job was in the department of cultural geography at the University of Greenwich. She lived in the US from 1999 to 2005 where she taught at the Program for Women’s and Gender Studies at Yale University. From 2014 to 2021 she was a professor of sociology and gender studies at Kingston University. She is the author of, inter alia, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (Verso 1992/2015), Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture (with Les Back, Chicago 2002), Who Cares about Britishness? (Arcadia 2007), and Military Migrants: fighting for YOUR country (Palgrave 2012). Her newest book, England’s Military Heartland: preparing for war on the Salisbury Plain (with Antonia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar and Alice Cree), will be published by Manchester University Press in January 2025.
Jim Scown is Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Exeter. He works on the links between soils and understandings of nature, place and belonging from the beginning of the nineteenth century. After completing his PhD across the English Departments at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol, he worked for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission for two years on a project for transitioning to a socially and environmentally just agri-food system. In 2022-23, he was a BBC New Generation Thinker. His forthcoming book, Dirty Realism: Soils, Science and the Victorian Novel, traces the developing science of soils in the 1800s and its reception in novels by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.
Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in UCL English, and Faculty Associate in the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre.