Soil: What Connects Us

Try to think of something that is not connected to the soil? It’s difficult, right? Soil provides vital functions that give and sustain life on our planet. Soil connects us to each other, to nature, and to life itself. For Fall 2022, Dr. William Nitzky, soil scientist and Associate Professor from the College of Agriculture, Dr. Garrett Liles, will lead our students enrolled in the ANTH 467 course Exhibition Research, Design, and Installation to curate the exhibition Soil: What Connects Us.

Every year, the Valene L. Smith Museum of Anthropology hosts a student-curated exhibition led by a museum studies faculty. Students join together as part of a curatorial team to learn skills in curation to produce a professional museum exhibition that is seen by their university peers and thousands of public visitors. Fall 2022’s ANTH 467 course will produce the first physical exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology since the start of the pandemic. Importantly, this exhibition will focus on life, connections, and our future on our planet. It will reveal the hidden world under our feet, and soil, and how vital it is to diverse ecosystems and cultures around the world.

The exhibition will take you through three themes of Adaptation, Innovation, and Regeneration to call attention to the living soil network, our use and management of soil resources and ecosystem services, and ways for improving environmental quality and the protection of our human and planet health. We plan to offer a variety of immersive, interactive, and educational displays in this exhibition that illustrates human interactions with soil and the contributions soil have made to human life and cultures. With our museum’s focus on inclusion and personal narratives of the human experience, this exhibition will bring together a collection of perspectives - archaeology, biology, art, traditional ecological knowledge, and underground creatures - allowing visitors to explore how essential soil is to our lives and our environment, past, present, and into the future.