28. ‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientifi c Correspondence

Gianquitto, Tina

doi:10.1515/9780748692934-030

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“…Such stories can only be partially told through these specimen sheets, of course, which narrate or reveal a plant’s circulation in scientific knowledge cultures but which often isolate that plant from its historical and biocultural networks. Increasingly, researchers and others are reconnecting herbaria to their physical and historical contexts by, for instance, linking specimens to in situ plant and biocultural heritage inflection points (Cowell et al 2020 , Ryan 2015 ), rejoining specific specimens to botanical correspondence that accompanied them from global collection points (Clemit and Scott 2020 ; Gianquitto 2016 ), or, in institutional contexts, working to decolonize botanical gardens and natural history museums (Royal Botanic Gardens 2021 ; Caomhánach and Bell 2020 ). As a digital repository of personal environmental stories, Herbaria 3.0 joins projects such as Center for Plants & Culture (plantsandculture.org), an online platform for educating visitors about the ways that plants shape and have shaped our culture over time, reflecting on economics, politics, law, and medicine, focusing on Black, Brown, and Indigenous voices (2021).…”

Section: Background: the Herbaria 30 Project Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A case study in citizen environmental humanities: creating a participatory plant story website

Gianquitto

Lafauci

2022

J Environ Stud Sci

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Public engagement in crowd-sourced science projects such as iNaturalist or the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is a long-established practice within environmental studies and sciences. As a corollary to these “citizen science” efforts, “citizen humanities” engages public participation in humanities research and/or with humanities tools such as creative writing, photography, art-making, or conducting and recording interviews. In this essay, we outline our work creating a citizen environmental humanities website, Herbaria 3.0, including our motivations, process, and theoretical underpinnings. This project draws upon the critical understanding within environmental studies of the importance of narrative and storytelling for fostering a connection and commitment to environments and nonhuman beings. Situated within the field of environmental humanities, our website solicits, collects, and archives stories about the manifold relationships between plants and people, inviting visitors to read, share, or write their own story for digital publication. The kind of environmental storytelling that results, we argue, can (1) enrich our conceptualization of attachment to places, (2) expand our notion of what “counts” as an encounter with nature, and (3) help us recognize the agency of individual plants. We conclude that similar citizen humanities projects are crucial to the ongoing work of environmental humanities and environmental studies at large, for it is through such public engagement that we can meet the cultural challenges that seeded, and the societal problems occasioned by, ongoing climate change.

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Section: Background: the Herbaria 30 Project Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%