Research Cafe: Plants in Civic Futures at Contact
‘Plants in Civic Futures’ brings together academics working across Literature, History, Geography, and Cultural Practices to discuss interdisciplinary multispecies perspectives on plant lives and plant thinking. It’s an opportunity to connect, over an informal lunch, with others working on Plant Humanities.
This Creative Manchester Research Café is the first of three exploring the significance of non-human presence and agency in theory and practice for imagining ‘Civic Futures’.
PANEL:
Chair – Dr Jenna C. Ashton, Research Lead for Creative and Civic Futures, Creative Manchester.
Dr Ingrid Hanson will discuss moss and acts of attention across boundaries of the human and non-human, the country and the city in nineteenth-century writings about moss and lichen.
Dr Laura Pottinger will focus on material and sensory engagements with plants, touching on both previous research with seed savers to think about plants and sharing economies/ethics; and current research around colour, creative practice and noticing natures.
Dr Anke Bernau will be talking about how particular qualities of moss – especially its ‘miniature’ size and its strange temporality – have been central to ways in which it has been both aestheticized (in literature, in popular science writing, in botany) and politicized (as standing for certain human ideals or values; as representing certain ‘naturalised’ power relations).
