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1981
Horror Geography
  • ISSN: 2043-068X
  • E-ISSN: 2043-0698

Abstract

In this article, I challenge humanist narratives of agricultural stewardship and hylomorphic models of making, as I develop new systems of thinking and making with dynamic landscapes. I apply Michel Serres’s concept of turbulence to the dynamic materiality of the Dartmoor Commons in Devon, as I focus on Serres’s tensioned notion of order(ings) and disorder(ings). I explore how material disorder among the landscapes of Dartmoor can ‘make-visible’ fluid materiality through dramatic and contingent instances of turbulence. This material disordering can be observed in the acidic, marginal soils of the moorland, which are tensioned with the ordering material processes – human and more-than-human – utilized in the observed farming and grazing practices as practices of ‘making-with’. Ordered materiality can incorrectly appear as inert or passive; however, all materiality is fluid, relational and agentic, as the ontology of new materialism underlies these explorations. The Dartmoor Commons is an ecologically damaged moorland that is losing biodiversity and living matter due to centuries of overgrazing, which is now compounded by the uncertain effects of undergrazing. By ‘making-visible’ this disorder, turbulence provides a way into the fluid materiality of our world that simultaneously demonstrates the danger of losing matter and species that is potentially irrevocable. ‘Making-with’ the damaged moorlands offers a modest and partial recuperation of Dartmoor’s landscapes, which is urgently required at vast material, ecological and political scales for our interdependent survival. In this article, an interdisciplinary approach traverses the dynamic matter of the Dartmoor Commons, as situated by two cattle farmers’ practices, Ben and William.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
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/content/journals/10.1386/des_00030_1
2025-11-05
2026-04-19

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