Article of the Year 2020

The Finnish Society for Aesthetics has awarded the Article of the Year 2020 prize to Professor Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (University of Warwick) for her article “Re-animating soils: Transforming human–soil affections through science, culture and community,” published in The Sociological Review Monographs (volume 67, issue 2, pages 391–407) in 2019.

In 2020, the award of the Article of the Year is granted Professor María Puig de la Bellacasa (University of Warwick) for her essayistic article “Re-animating soils: Transforming human–soil affections through science, culture and community”. In the article, Professor Puig de la Bellacasa challenges the human-centered tradition of division between the human subject and non-human object while bringing aesthetics into current posthuman discourses and the domain of new materialism. She introduces soil as an active agent in the process of aesthetic meaning-making. The argumentation boldly opens into different fields of inquiry and experiments with the plasticity of aesthetics, negotiating between animated and non-animated binaries. While making her argument on shared aliveness, Professor Puig de la Bellacasa uses aesthetics as an organic part of the multidisciplinary methodology. Thus, she promotes the visibility of aesthetics in other academic fields and markedly achieves one of the most important criteria of this award.

The recipient of the award was chosen by Riikka Haapalainen (Finnish Association for Avantgarde and Modernism, Finnish Association for Museum Education Pedaali) and Onerva Kiianlinna (Finnish Society for Aesthetics) and the award was announced in the annual seminar of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics in Helsinki, the 7th of December 2020.