GSSC Seminar Series
10 March 2026
On Granite, the Collectivized Peasant, and the Pest: Chemical and Geological Socialities in the Agri-Cultural Periphery
Michal Lehečka (Charles University in Prague)
12:00-13:00
Facing the impacts of accelerating digital farming and advanced chemical engineering, the tenuous entities of land, ground, and soil are increasingly subject to extractivism-driven quasi-events such as erosion, degradation, decay, and carbon loss. At the same time, these existents act as agents of geontopolitical endurance (Povinelli 2016). In other words, despite the gravitational pull of major agricultural technology providers such as Monsanto, Syngenta, AGCO, and John Deere, practices of well-cultivated soil and proper crop care remain contested through local, more-than-human entanglements. Based on ongoing long-term ethnographic research in the South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, this talk seeks to evoke and examine relatively quiet and porous agricultural landscapes situated in the niche between large-scale industrial agriculture and ecological or regenerative (particularly small-scale) farming. This niche—occupied by medium-sized cooperative farms—constitutes a sphere of attentive practice, grounded agri-cultural knowledge, and durable yet fragile socio-material interweavings.
I argue that dominant forces of late-liberal governance and technological innovation are locally contested, reimagined, and solidified through extimate geo-social and chemo-social bonds (Povinelli 2021; Shapiro & Kirksey 2017). More specifically, the talk demonstrates how imaginaries, and the in/visible socialities of fundamental geomorphological existents and chemical elements—present or absent in soils, crops, phenologies, fertilizers, and pesticides—co-navigate the metabolism of farmers’ taskscapes.
Michal Lehečka is a social anthropologist based at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. His research focuses on agrarian transformations, chemo-socialities, and the geontological endurance of agricultural existents in Central and Eastern Europe. His talk takes place as part of his internship stay at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at UoC (March 2026). In his previous research, he has been involved in applied and engaged anthropology projects addressing impacts of late liberal urban planning and issues of environmental justice in contemporary cities.