Plant Lives - Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
WiSER is proud to announce a new online seminar series
Plant Lives: Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South.
Convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
February to June 2025
In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them? Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global south? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves? Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives? And if so, with what consequences?
This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable. We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global south take shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage.
Feb 17: Isabel Hofmeyr : Plant Lives: Framings from Southern Africa
Feb 24: Banu Subramaniam : Queering Global Flora: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire
March 3: Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho : Return and Recovery in the Land Practices of Bakoni, a Soundscape
March 10: Yota Batsaki : The Plant At the End of the World: Invasive Species in the Athropocene
March 17: Ruth Sacks : Behind Johannesburg: Plants and Possible Futures
March 24: Helene Strauss : Breathing with Trees
April 7: Haripriya Rangan : Recombinant Landscapes and Biogeographical Knowledges
April 14: Stephané Conradie : Transferred Matter: Reflections on Articulage in Ecoprinting Practices
May 5: Sumana Roy : The Quest for the Plant Script
May 12: Luvuyo Wotshela : Existing with the Multi-purpose Plant: A Social History of Prickly Pear in Contemporary Eastern Cape
May 19: Riley Snorton : The Capitaloscene and the Resurgence of Pioneer Species
May 26: Nox Makunga : Plants for Health - from Past to Present and into the Future
June 2: Luciano Concheiro San Vicente : Among Ahuehuetes, Dwarf Japan Cypress, and Hey: Chapultepec as seen through the Critical Plant Humanities
Click here for Abstracts
The seminar series will run on Mondays from 4-5pm SAST. Papers will be sent a week beforehand.
Click here to register
*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term