Vegetal politics: belonging, practices and places

Abstract

Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human-plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This special issue aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. In this introduction, we explore themes of belonging, practices and places, as discussed in the contributing papers. Together, the papers suggest new kinds of 'vegetal politics', documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The papers also raise methodological questions and challenges for future research. This special issue grew out of sessions we organised at the Association

Illegal wildlife trade and the persistence of “plant blindness”

“…There is a growing body of research demonstrating the diversity of ways in which plants can be understood as intelligent and/or active beings within socio-ecological systems including across the fields of biology and botany (for reviews, see Cowell, 2018;Hall, 2011), geography (Fleming, 2017;Head & Atchison, 2009;Head, Atchison, & Phillips, 2015;Head, Atchison, Phillips, & Buckingham, 2014), anthropology and indigenous studies (Ellis, 2018;Hall, 2011;Kimmerer, 2013;Kohn, 2013;Rose, 2002), and philosophy (Marder, 2013(Marder, , 2016Plumwood, 1993). This interdisciplinary scholarship challenges basic assumptions that have historically kept plants painted into the backdrop of a livelier animal life.…”

Creative geographies and living on from breast cancer: The enlivening potential of autobiographical bricolage for an aesthetics of precarity

“…In actively refuting depoliticised depictions of botanical and corporeal interconnections, I am noting the relationship between organic life and an embodied geopolitics, one which acknowledges that many of us also benefit from the violences/mortality of others, owing to inherited privileges of race, class, place and species, among other things. This is because our fleshy relationship to death is always intensely political, as we are all meshed into an uneven vegetal political terrain (Head et al., ), in which living together is hard (Tyner & Henkin, , p. 300), death is far from equal (Tyner, , p. 278) and where killing and letting die often circulate beside care and life (Ginn et al., ; Yusoff, ). Yet, as Yusoff asks, how might this “lead us somewhere other than into the dark night” (2012, p. 582)?…”

Pangaea's return: towards an ontology of invasive life

“…A recognition of these ontological characteristics is needed in order to advance socio-cultural responses to invasive life that are more measured than often has been the case so far. that such new approaches are needed can hardly be in doubt (Head et al 2014;robbins 2014). Issues related to invasive life seem destined to increase in the future, as the conditions of Pangaea's return become more and more indisputable.…”