The Mobile Soil Lab

 
 

Why a mobile soil lab?

As academic researchers studying soils at the intersections of food, environmental and climate justice, we offer a queer intervention into STEM’s perpetuation of settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. We offer the mobile soil lab. The lab is flexible, constantly shifting, and renders hidden processes visible to the public. Soils are endlessly dynamic, intricate, vast, and essential for terrestrial life. Yet soils are relentlessly exploited, degraded, or considered to be toxic and filthy. Soils are nothing if not queer. Studying and caring for soils is a humbling, awe-inspiring, and often ecstatic experience. The mobile lab is nothing if not queer. Like all genders and identities, the role of scientist is performed. We invite people, particularly those who have been systemically excluded from STEM, to become friends with the living and beyond living aspects of soils. We invite you to put on a lab coat and perform science with us.

The mobile soil lab seeks to align with and contribute to anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-heteronormative patriarchial modes of knowledge construction. We, in this lab, are grateful to and inspired by many anti-colonial scientists and researchers working in these ways. In particular, thank you Dr. Lydia Jennings for your synchronicitous alignments (i.e., your simultaneous yet unique creation of a mobile soil lab!) and your collaboration. Thank you Dr. Max Liboiron for providing models and methods to learn from and cite for anti-colonial lab experimentation. Thank you Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, for consistently insisting we let science be as expansive and ecstatic as the world can be. Thank you Dr. Zhongqi (Joshua) Cheng, Dr. Peter Groffman, and Dr. Howard Mielke, who initially led me to and through the world of soils.

This mobile soil lab was conceptualized in 2015. Prior mobile lab experimentation was performed with the mobile sewing lab, created in 2008. Equipment for the mobile soil lab was assembled and purchased with funding from Pace University, beginning in 2023.

Sites of Mobile Lab Experimentation (since 2024):

  • Pace Land and Labor Acknowledgement Farm, Manhattan

  • BK ROT, Brooklyn

  • The Museum of the Moving Image, Queens

  • Gotham Park, Manhattan

  • NYCHA Lexington Houses with WE ACT, Manhattan

Mobile Lab Technicians:

  • Ryan Kai Kinningham

  • Christina Jean

  • Abigail Cardenas

  • Ruby-Summer Marshall-Shkymba