Lecture
ASCL Seminar: Plotting human-plant futures in Uganda
- Date
- Thursday 1 February 2024
- Time
- Address
- Pieter de la Courtgebouw
Wassenaarseweg 52 52
2333AK Leiden - Room
- 5.A23
Plots and other spaces under cultivation are not only vital for nourishment and health but also provide metaphors for social life and imaginations of future. In Uganda, banana plantations are sites of cultural attachment, history, but also novel natural-cultural experimentation. This lecture by Dr Sandra Calkins (University of Twente) examines forms of human-plant intimacy emerging in a transnational research project that aims to introduce nutritionally improved banana plants to Uganda. These forms of intimacy and the mundane plots where they unfold are undertheorised in the larger lab-based scientific effort of creating genetically modified bananas. Attending to intimacies between Ugandan biologists and their experimental plants, Calkins shows, offers an alternative way of narrating and accounting for the history of a place, embodied forms of quotidian plant knowledge that are widely distributed in Uganda and allows sketching other trajectories for the future of collective life.