Dr Anna Krzywoszynska
Department of Geography
Research Fellow

+44 114 222 7969
Full contact details
Department of Geography
Room A9b
Geography and Planning Building
Winter Street
Sheffield
S3 7ND
- Profile
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Anna Krzywoszynska is a Faculty of Social Sciences Research Fellow. She is also an Associate Director at the University of Sheffield Institute for Sustainable Food.
Her research concerns agriculture and food as the key spheres for the interaction between human and more-than-human worlds.
She is especially interested in environmental knowledge, ethics, and affect, and how these shape and are shaped by rural and food-related spaces and practices. Her work engages frequently with the natural sciences.
Consequently, her research also investigates the potential for ‘opening up’ the spaces of scientific knowledge production to non-certified expertise, as well as challenging the persistent division of labour between social and natural sciences in speaking about materiality, life, and ecology.
For the last few years Anna has been exploring the reconceptualisation of soils as lively ecosystems in conventional agricultural practice and its related knowledge fields, and the consequences of this for the future of agriculture and land use.
- Qualifications
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Anna graduated in European Social and Political Studies, specialising in Anthropology, at University College London (2002), and obtained her PhD degree in Geography at the University of Sheffield (2012).
She then held a position as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the department of Geography, Durham University, as part of a transdisciplinary project funded by the EPSRC.
During that time she also worked as an ESRC Nexus Network-funded Fellow at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Anna’s research to date has engaged with key sustainability themes, including food production and consumption (PhD), renewable energy (PDRA), and waste and sustainability (PhD).
- Research interests
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Knowledge and care in natural resource management
Scientific knowledges dominate our understandings and practices of managing natural resources.
We need to pay attention to how these knowledges relate to practical and affective engagements with the environment in our work of cultivating sustainable human-environment relations.
Care, as practical action and normative commitment, is a promising new framing which situates knowledge in a praxis-oriented manner.
I am interested in the interplays between different kinds of knowledge about, and care for the environment, and the politics inherent in these processes.
Knowledge co-production
The blurring of traditional divisions between academic and public knowledges, and between different areas of ‘expertise’, offers an opportunity to imagine ways of creating and mobilising knowledge which are both more socially robust and advance human understanding.
I am interested in what kinds of social infrastructures and processes enable knowledge co-production to flourish in a meaningful and valuable way, and I research these themes both as an observer and an active participant.
Soil Care Network
Anna is the founder of the Soil Care Network, an international and interdisciplinary community of scholars and non-scholars animated by a fascination with soils.
- Publications
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Edited books
Journal articles
- Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome. Palgrave Communications, 6(1). View this article in WRRO
- Toward a relational materiality of soils: Introduction. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 190-204. View this article in WRRO
- Nonhuman labor and the making of resources: making soils a resource through microbial labor. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 227-249. View this article in WRRO
- Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: the role of attentiveness in more-than-human ethics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. View this article in WRRO
- Book Review: The Great Climate Robbery: How the Food System Drives Climate Change and What we can do about it. Human Geography, 12(1), 64-65.
- Making knowledge and meaning in communities of practice: what role may science play? The case of sustainable soil management in England.. Soil Use and Management. View this article in WRRO
- Opening Up the Participation Laboratory: The Cocreation of Publics and Futures in Upstream Participation. Science, Technology & Human Values, 43(5), 785-809. View this article in WRRO
- Interdisciplinarity in Transdisciplinary Projects: Circulating Knowledges, Practices and Effects. disP - The Planning Review, 54(2), 77-93. View this article in WRRO
- Winners of the 2017 Jim Lewis Prize. European Urban and Regional Studies, 25(1), 3-7.
- Doing the ‘dirty work’ of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4), 541-555. View this article in WRRO
- Co-producing energy futures: impacts of participatory modelling. Building Research and Information, 44(7), 804-815. View this article in WRRO
- Anatomy of a buzzword: the emergence of 'the water-energy-food nexus' in UK natural resource debates. Environmental Science & Policy, 64, 164-170. View this article in WRRO
- What Farmers Know: Experiential Knowledge and Care in Vine Growing. Sociologia Ruralis, 56(2), 289-310.
- Simon Bell and Stephen Morse: Resilient participation: saving the human project?. Agriculture and Human Values, 32(3), 565-566.
- On being a foreign body in the field, or how reflexivity around translation can take us beyond language. Area, 47(3), 311-318. View this article in WRRO
- Vaclav Smil: Harvesting the biosphere: What we have taken from nature. Agriculture and Human Values, 32(2), 363-364.
- Wine is not Coca-Cola: marketization and taste in alternative food networks. Agriculture and Human Values, 32(3), 491-503.
- Christopher Rosin, Paul Stock and Hugh Campbell (eds): Food systems failure: the global food crisis and the future of agriculture. Agriculture and Human Values, 31(2), 323-324.
- Development of Community Led Renewable Energy Projects. MRS Proceedings, 1657.
- Michael S. Carolan: Embodied food politics. Agriculture and Human Values, 30(4), 659-660.
- ‘Waste? You Mean By-Products!’ from Bio-Waste Management to Agro-Ecology in Italian Winemaking and beyond. The Sociological Review, 60(2_suppl), 47-65.
- Affect and Artificial Intelligence. Emotion, Space and Society, 5(4), 284-284.
- We are all surprised by action: Writing materials from a cultural perspective. City, 16(5), 607-609.
- Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal. Geography, 96(2), 101-104.
Chapters
Conference proceedings papers
- Development of community led renewable energy projects. Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings MRS Fall Meeting. Press
Reports
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome. Palgrave Communications, 6(1). View this article in WRRO
- Research group
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Anna is a co-supervisor of three PhD student funded by the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures:
- Jenny Veenstra whose PhD project is exploring farmers' decision-making around the adoption of no-tillage soil management in Europe.
- Hannah McCarrick whose PhD is investigating the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies and soil conservation and land management practices in Tanzania.
- Nancy Muringai, whose PhD explores the relationship between farmers’ and scientists’ understandings of and practices related to soil health.