LE3 .A278 2011

2011

Whitehall, Geoffrey

Acadia University

Master of Arts

Masters

Political Science

Politics

This thesis will argue that the problematcs of logistcs overdetermine industrial and sustainable discourses of soil fertlity and food producton whenever the soil is considered in terms of security, scarcity, health, nutriton, and ecological demise. Through genealogical method the ambiguous origins of industrial and sustainable approaches to soil fertlity are explored, revealing their discontnuous and difuse beginnings. By politcizing the genealogy of soil through the work of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guatari and Jane Bennet (among others) the thesis ofers a critque of contemporary discourses of sustainability and food security. The concept of salubrity—or “the state of the environment and those factors of it which make the improvement of health possible”—is employed to to show the paradoxical nature of sustainability discourse: the human environment that we seek to sustain is itself a tangle of ecologically harmful infrastructures that threaten life.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:173