‘Plant Lives: Critical Plant Humanities – Conversations from the Global South’

WiSER’s very successful online seminar series ‘Plant Lives: Critical Plant Humanities – Conversations from the Global South’ pauses for one week as Wits University is on break.  We commence again with Haripriya Rangan on April 7, followed by an exciting list of speakers.  The online seminars run on Mondays at 4pm SAST. 

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

Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall

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 takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage. 

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.

*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term