Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how houseplant collectors create communities of practice where they share their plant-keeping experiences. Through repetitive and attentive care, collectors learn to communicate with their plants to fulfil the latter’s needs, blurring the lines between trainer and trainee.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how houseplant collectors train themselves and their plants. To ensure that tropical plants can survive in a European domestic environment, collectors need to train the plants to adapt to their home conditions and aesthetic desires. Trailing and climbing species need to be taught to hang or attach themselves to a supporting structure so they can reach maturity or simply look attractive. Variegated plants must get certain leaves trimmed to ensure the correct colour pattern. Plants must adjust to their growing medium, being trained to survive in soil, water, or moss to adapt to the owner’s preferences. Learning those training techniques is a long process, which is often also social. Collectors create communities of practice online, where they share their experiences in plant care and exchange advice. Newcomers can imitate successful techniques and progressively become more skilled plant trainers, ensuring that their vegetal companions thrive. However, the knowledge publicly shared is created through more intimate relations. It is through repetitive and attentive care that collectors learn to read their plants. Drawing on ethnographic work among houseplant collectors, this paper will explore how experimenting with care techniques enables collectors to train to see and feel the plants, eventually being able to communicate with them and understand their needs and desires. Ultimately it becomes unclear who trains who: are humans training plants to adapt to a new environment or are plants training humans to sustain them?

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on how the strategic coaxing of plants and people has been oriented towards growth to theorize ‘training’ as a new locus for recuperating value. By examining the conditions under which growth is encouraged, I argue that ‘training’ as both noun and verb demands closer attention.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst depreciating global sugar prices and rising climate concerns, agronomists in Mauritius are figuring out new uses for colonial crops. The pivot from sugar-as-food to biofuel, as one maneuver, has transformed conditions in the agricultural classroom and cropland in unexpected ways. In this paper, I reflect on how the strategic coaxing of plants and people has been oriented towards growth in multiple registers to theorize ‘training’ as a new locus for recuperating value out of discards. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the ways that sugar sector retraining programs aim to reskill redundant agricultural workers in the wake of the local industry’s near collapse and downsizing. Labourers are taught how to propagate plants in nurseries to maximize yields and, in the process, reinscribe toxic models of forced productivity. Like agricultural workers, energy crops like sugarcane and Arundo Donax are also persuaded to grow well, refiguring ideal planting conditions in order to stimulate plants’ ‘natural’ abilities to propagate. Despite efforts to encourage greater yields, crops in local field trials have stubbornly refused to grow at the insistence of human interventions. In this paper, I question the premise that all growth is good growth. By examining the conditions under which agricultural workers learn to encourage growth, while plants strategically opt out their efforts to improve yields, I contend that ‘training’ as both noun and verb demands closer attention. This paper thus contributes to anthropological understandings of neocolonial growth-centred logics, while questioning the sustainability of certain forms of training and agricultural know-how.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on perspectives in feminist STS to historically examine efforts of a group of Chinese scientists, medical professionals, and educators who worked to nurture and and train individuals with exceptional sensory abilities in an era of social and economic modernization.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how, since the late 1970s, a group of Chinese scientists, medical professionals, and educators have strived to enhance human potential through sensory training, particularly during a time when society underwent drastic political and economic transformations. Proponents of a newly emerged discipline known as "Somatic Science" argued that unlike inanimate objects, humans could consciously control their physical and mental states to harmonize with natural and built environments. They believed that the human body possessed dormant extraordinary sensory abilities, including reading texts without sight, communicating messages without speech, and moving laboratory equipment without touch. They suggested that with proper training, these sensory abilities could allow better human-machine interactions, faster scientific discoveries, and provide the state with technological and scientific advantages in the impending "new information revolution" around the globe.

This paper uses the case of "Somatic Science" in post-socialist China as an entry point into the relationship between embodiment and information technologies. It provides a historical account of humans' embodied intimacy with data and information. Situated in feminist Science and Technology Studies (feminist STS) perspectives, I aim for my research to be part of what STS scholar Lucy Suchman describes as "sciences of the artificial" by questioning the divide between nature and culture, subject and object, bodies and technologies (Suchman, 2007). As this paper shows, during the training and experimentation processes, research subjects -- primarily children and young females -- learned to develop a feeling for information (Keller, 1984).

Paper short abstract:

Based on teaching sociology through Aikido, ethnographic sensibility through art and examining what butchers and carvers can teach scientists, this paper will examine how training in embodied skills may transfer to various modalities of inquiry in arts and sciences?

Paper long abstract:

“Nature should be carved at its joints,” Plato advised, but such carving is notoriously difficult in practice. Master cutters, such as butchers and carvers, could teach us about slicing at the joints as a modality of flexible inquiry, or “elastic rigor” across arts and sciences. “The carver begins as a god and ends as slave; the carving begins as a slave and ends as a god” – so did the late master carver David Esterly formulate this carving chiasmus. From this skillful conversation between cleavers and tendons, or sharp chisels and wood it is but a step to the dance biologists use in their laboratories to extract 3D models of complex protein molecules from the fuzzy X-ray crystallography images. I follow Zhuangzi’s famous dexterous butcher, skillful carvers, motorcycle mechanics and molecule dancers as teachers and models of flexible inquiry across arts and sciences. I am interested not only in how embodied craft skills can provide metaphors and models, but even more whether actually training in such skills (dance, martial arts, woodworking or motorcycle maintenance) may be transferable across domains and modes of inquiry. I will use my own experience in teaching ethnographic sensibility through training developed in fine arts, sociology of conflict through Aikido, and the way my own woodworking has informed my thinking.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the importance of olfactory training among chemists that study the aroma of tropical fruits in Colombia. It will describe how sensory training opportunities are made locally available beyond the classroom and amid scarce resources.

Paper long abstract:

Aroma chemistry is a small academic field with large industrial effects. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, its research and development largely depended on the flavor and fragrance industry and has come primarily from Europe, North America, and Japan. In Colombia, aroma chemistry only began in the 1980s, when a small research group led by women chemists from a public university started investigating the aroma of Colombian tropical fruits. Their group has steadily consolidated since then and had a major industrial breakthrough by contributing to the making of a highly successful local blackberry aroma in the national food market. Based on interviews, life stories, and ethnography of the classroom, this talk will focus on how olfactory training for chemistry students interested in aroma has occurred at different research periods and across the classroom, the laboratory, and the industry. It will highlight students of chemistry and chemists' perceptions about the importance of this type of training for their research and work, and how training opportunities are made locally available amid scarce resources. Moreover, this case study seeks to contribute to elucidating the role of the senses and sensory knowledge in technical and analytical practice in chemistry- a discipline known by its learning-by-making approach.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on how "Ceylon Tea" brokers are trained in tea-tasting, this paper moves beyond the apprenticeship model and challenges the traditional binary opposition between expertise and skill. Rather than embodied skill, taste becomes expert knowledge, whereas the market is learned tacitly.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork among "Ceylon Tea" brokers and buyers -the Sri Lankan tea industry’s de facto tea-tasters, this paper asks what a training in tea-tasting entails. Ceylon tea is traded through an outcry auction system and tea tasting is a crucial component in the valuation of tea. Thus, tasting and price speculation go hand in hand, blurring the boundaries between aesthetic and economic knowledge and practice. During my fieldwork at one of Colombo's major Ceylon tea brokering firms, training involved the systematic and repetitive tasting of different tea samples bound for auction, as well as a ubiquitous corporate pedagogy in calculative reason: the tea market was equally –if not more– important to the tea itself, the latter treated as a material given of sorts, to be precisely learned via the act of tasting, whereas the former was imparted tacitly through the trainee's participation in the network of relationships and discourses that sustain the trade. I find this a productive reversal of the skill-expertise binary: rather than embodied skill, taste becomes a form of expertise, whereas the market is taught tacitly and relationally, akin to a craft. Paying close attention to how tea tasters are trained, I hope to move beyond the apprenticeship model of training and to transcend the binary oppositions between expertise and skill, hand and mind, knowledge and practice. In addition to aspiring tea tasters and senior stakeholders, my observations include some auto-ethnographic notes on training as a component of conducting fieldwork and participant observation.