ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Activating Plants in the Humanities Lab

• In Event: Plant Humanities 1 - Mapping an Emerging Field

English Abstract

Plants afford extraordinary opportunities to historians interested in the construction and circulation of knowledge about the natural world and how it has shaped our social and environmental predicament. Not only have botanical developments (from the herbarium to Linnean classification and genetic modification) been foundational to Western scientific practices, but economic botany and its ties to colonialism and the plantation system have prompted ongoing debates about the instrumentalization of these scientific practices and their lasting impact. As biocultural organisms, plants invite the convergence of different epistemic approaches, bringing together the deep time of evolutionary processes and the timespan of human and cultural histories. Plants thus offer unique opportunities for interdisciplinary research, innovative pedagogy, and public communication. This paper will describe the development of a plant humanities methodology through the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative (2018-). It will focus on two aspects: the digital platform we have developed, the Plant Humanities Lab (https://lab.plant-humanities.org/), as an open access resource for faculty and students, as well as the public; and the forthcoming Plant Humanities Handbook, as a convening space for plant scientists, curators of scientific collections, and historians working to develop a set of shared concepts and case studies to support our emerging field. The paper will end with some reflections on how plants as the focus of inquiry can provide important (and provocative) nuance to questions of urgent contemporary relevance such as climate change, migration, and extinction.

Author

• Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University