ABSTRACT Grounding the physical materialities of the ‘natural’ environment in social relations of power and lived identities has become vital in geographic scholarship. Using a Critical Physical Geography lens, this paper demonstrates how the physical materialities of soil fertility are filtered through the politics of water and gender in two irrigation valleys in semiarid Ghana. Through laboratory analysis of soil samples, in‐depth interviews and focus group discussions, we make two key contributions to Critical Physical Geography scholarship. First, we show how water and gender politics shape the spatial pattern of soil chemical properties along irrigation canals. Second, by examining soil fertility within broader socio‐biochemical processes, we contest sanitised views of nature and draw attention to the connections between the physiographic and sociographic paradigms in geography. Overall, we argue that critical physical geography scholarship could be further enriched by attending more seriously to the gendered politics of resource access and control.
Dinko et al. (2026) studied this question.