Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores what multispecies storytelling can tell us about displaced food systems. It draws on narrative and participatory research with farmers (2024-2026) enduring displacement in the West Nile sub-region of Northern Uganda.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation explores what multispecies storytelling can tell us about displaced food systems. It draws on narrative and participatory research with farmers (2024-2026) enduring displacement in the West Nile sub-region of Northern Uganda. Taking a historical approach to shifting plant relations, the presentation traces the colonial introduction of cassava, a hardy but potentially toxic root crop. Working with the specificity of cassava’s capacity for cyanogenic exposure demanded a fundamental reorientation of agricultural labour and new forms of multi-species collaboration and care in northwestern Uganda. This piecemeal, experimental, and sensory process generated embodied forms of multispecies knowing and risk. Listening to the stories people tell us about cassava reveals an archive of bodily sensations which unfold below the radar of hunger, but which reoriented agricultural and household labour in relation to the crop. During later periods of cross-border displacement, whilst farmers often explained that ‘cassava saved us’, the fraught encounters with planty agencies and the chemical qualities of the crop’s ‘defence’ system acquired new resonance. The crop’s ability to thrive in the absence of human carers provided vital forms of sustenance during displacement and return. Taking plant attributes seriously draws out the vegetal drives which shape displacement mobilities, allows space for the volatility of high-stakes plant-human collaborations, and the interwovenness of human and plant space-times.