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The talk explores ongoing PhD research centred around the 'bog body phenomenon' which takes place at the intersections of archaeology, environmental humanities, critical plant studies, vegetal ontology and more-than-human/posthumanism.

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Bog body research in archaeology examines human remains found in the bogs, fens and peatlands of (mostly) north-western Europe. Current narratives have been shaped, and continue to be perpetuated, through the largely anthropocentric lens that archaeology as a discipline is often characterised by. Where the phenomenon has had a distinct focus on the human and on the body in general, the bog has, conversely, often been discussed as a largely passive and backgrounded entity, upon which human life and death has unfurled.

And yet, peatlands are rich, diverse and vital ecosystems, covering just 3% of the world’s surface, but holding twice as much carbon as all of the world’s forests. When 25% of Europe’s peatlands are now understood as degraded, rising up to 50% within the boundaries of the EU proper, it is clear that the anthropocentric way we have enacted our current human/bog relations has proven to be problematic in myriad ways.

Exploring the ‘bog body phenomenon’ at the intersections of archaeology, environmental humanities, critical plant studies, vegetal ontology and more-than-human/posthumanism, this talk will discuss ongoing PhD research which engages with the possibility of a more-than-human bog body research, expanding on research influences from human-soil relations, environmental humanities, indigenous archaeologies, and a decentering of euro-western perspectives.

I will discuss the possibilities of what this PhD research calls a 'critical peat/bog studies', advocating for thinking-with peat and moss, embracing multivalence and ambiguity, and the possibilities of a bog body research that allows for a multivocality, of human and nonhuman voices.

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This ethnographic fieldwork examines how Buddhist principles of interconnectedness translate into practical recognition of plant subjectivity. Research explores how monastic communities develop responsive relationships through attentive cultivation practices.

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This paper explores how Buddhist monastic communities recognize and engage with plant agency through daily practices that challenge instrumental views of plant-human relationships. Drawing from ethnographic research in two European Buddhist monasteries, it examines how practitioners develop communicative relationships with plants through attentive cultivation and narrative engagement. The research documents systematic recognition of plant subjectivity in monastic gardening practices. The garden philosophy of creating space “for all beings” involves consulting plant preferences rather than imposing human designs, such as tomatoes placed according to their observed needs, tall grass left for butterfly hibernation, and individual plants given names and personalized attention. These practices extend to recognizing plants as teachers within Buddhist spiritual development. The compost heap is described as a “sacred place of transformation” where plant decomposition and regeneration demonstrate impermanence and interconnectedness. Monastics report that hands-on garden work helps visitors “see the earth with different eyes” and understand food and life cycles as expressions of interdependence rather than mere resource extraction, thus creating practices of attentiveness to overlooked beings similar to Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing”. The findings show how Buddhist principles of interconnectedness create practical frameworks for recognizing plant agency and developing responsive relationships with plant communities in correspondence with naturalistic environmental ethics. Rather than treating plants as passive recipients of human care, monastics engage in what could be defined as learning from plant responses and adapting human practices accordingly. This research contributes to understanding how contemplative traditions offer resources for more reciprocal, attentive relationships with plant life.

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How should we conceptualize human-plant relations and entanglements? This paper discusses the possibility of resonance between human and vegetal life, drawing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, in light of various philosophical critiques of the idea of world.

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How should we conceptualize human-plant relations and entanglements? What does it mean for us humans to be in a world with vegetal life? Recent philosophers of plant life and, more generally, the environment have offered several different accounts from Timothy Morton’s (2013) “mesh” and Michael Marder’s (2013) “vegetal existentiality” to Emanuele Coccia’s (2019) metaphysics of mixture. What links these various philosophical perspectives, I will argue, is a radicalization of the idea of “world”—an intentional reaction to the (post)Heideggarian tradition. Yet, might there still some reason to a hold on to the idea of the world as it has been influential in phenomenological and existential strands of thought? In this paper, I want to explore whether Hartmut Rosa’s (2019) resonance theory, which belongs, in part, to these traditions as it understands alienation as a sort of “muteness” of world and non-alienation as a state of positive world-relation, offers useful resources for thinking about the way in which humans and plants can resonate with each other. While Rosa’s theory has been insightfully applied to nature writing (Dürbeck & Lu 2024), this paper investigates, more broadly, what Rosa’s theory means for these radical critiques of world found in the works of philosophers of vegetal life. By engaging with these other theoretical perspectives, Rosa’s idea of resonance applied to plant life, I will argue, must undergo revision, yet it still ultimately provides a fruitful framing for positive human-plant relations.

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Ongoing global warming displaces communities in India, making plants vital refuges. This paper proposes “vegetal havens,” where mangroves, sacred groves, and mythic vegetal traditions sustain life, resist anthropocentrism, and reimagine shelter, survival, and multispecies belonging.

Paper long abstract

Vegetal Haven: Reimagining Refuge through the Vegetal Mythology in India

Goutam Majhi, Assistant Professor, Department of English,

Sadhan Chandra Mahavidyalaya (Affiliated to the University of Calcutta)

Ongoing global warming has caused rising sea levels, cyclones, and soil erosion, which have displaced many, particularly in coastal regions, creating a new category of climate refugees. As forced migration reshapes social and ecological landscapes, the search for refuge increasingly extends beyond human-built environments to the vegetal world. This paper proposes the concept of the “vegetal haven”—spaces where plants actively generate or sustain sanctuary for human and nonhuman life. Unlike metaphoric views of nature, vegetal havens foreground the agency of plants in fostering endurance, resilience, and cohabitation amid environmental and social disruption. In the Indian context, mangrove forests, sacred groves, agroecological systems, and urban green spaces emerge as vital vegetal havens. Set in Indigenous knowledge systems, ecological traditions, and vegetal mythology, these havens reconstitute cultural, spiritual, and ecological forms of refuge while challenging dominant anthropocentric notions of shelter and survival. Mythic traditions—from the kalpavriksha and Bodhi tree to Bonbibi’s mangroves in the Sundarbans—frame vegetation as divine protectors and custodians of refuge, embedding ecological ethics into cultural memory. By drawing on plant humanities, environmental studies, Indigenous epistemologies, and literary ecocriticism, this paper argues that vegetal havens reimagine refuge through nonhuman agency. This paper critically explores vegetal mythology in India to argue that vegetal havens challenge the dominant anthropocentric paradigms of shelter and survival.

Keywords: Vegetal Haven, Vegetal Mythology, Plant Humanities, Refuge, Anthropocene

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Drawing on walking ethnography and Tsing’s notion of the ‘arts of noticing,’ this paper examines bracken’s role in multispecies relationality within plots of land related to animal husbandry. Integrating photography, animation, and eco-printing, it explores what we can learn from bracken.

Paper long abstract

Bracken or eagle fern is one of the most lore-rich plants in Europe and beyond believed to have magical and protective properties. Worldwide, it is also somewhat controversial plant, often considered an aggressive colonizer that rapidly invades abandoned areas and causes habitat loss and alteration of soil properties. Drawing on walking ethnography and following “the arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015), this paper explores bracken and its multispecies relationality within steljniki. Steljniki—expanses dominated by bracken and sparsely growing birches—have in Slovenia been traditionally associated with animal husbandry. These plots of land have been used for spring livestock grazing and for harvesting bracken in the autumn. Bracken is a pioneer species that gains dominance following logging and burning, representing a stage in secondary ecological succession. Human and animals’ slow disturbances maintained the characteristic appearance of steljniki, preventing succession to oak and hornbeam forests and thereby sustaining bracken’s presence. This paper explores what we can learn from bracken in an anthropogenic landscape. To investigate this question, the presentation integrates photography, animation, and eco-prints.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork with houseplant collectors, this paper focuses on the sensorial engagement between enthusiasts and their vegetal companions. It discusses how learning to see and touch helps collectors to comprehend vegetal needs and desires and, ultimately, recognise plant agency.

Paper long abstract

Houseplants are a ubiquitous part of most households but, for most people, they fade into the background as part of the décor. This paper seeks to elicit the potential of humans to recognise vegetal agency by paying attention to the people who refuse to overlook their plants.

Advanced houseplant collectors often have upwards of one hundred plants in their homes, an amount that demands close and attentive care. Managing the individual needs and desires of so many vegetal beings is only possible through a material engagement that enables interspecific communication. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Euro-American houseplant collectors, this paper will focus on the sensorial engagement between enthusiasts and their vegetal companions. Inspired by debates on the role of touch and vision in multispecies encounters (Haraway 2008; Hayward 2010; Marks 2002), it will discuss how care experiences can become intimate and situated narratives of care. By learning to see and touch, collectors can start to comprehend vegetal needs and desires, enabling them to relate to plants as agentive beings that actively participate in their own care routines.

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Folklore and narrative offer humans a way to recognise and explore relationships with plants. This paper explores how lore and stories can be used to think about plant-human relationships as multi-directional and reciprocal.

Paper long abstract

In the proposed paper, I will explore the use of folklore and storytelling to examine relationships between plants and people. This will draw from my dissertation research, 'Plants and People: Lore, Stories, and Relationships' (2024), in which I worked primarily with storytellers based in Scotland to understand their relationships with plants as well as my own. My contributors told me about their relationships with plants and shared personal experience narratives, folktales, and legends with me. Incorporating folklore and stories into conversations about human-plant relationships provides an opportunity to think about these relationships within a world that allows plants to communicate multi-directionally in ways that are easier for people to conceptualise (Naithani 2024). Moving forward with this understanding of plants as being able to participate in interactions allows for a recognition of plants as having agency within those interactions. This has the potential to shift the conversation from human exceptionalism and plants as resources and commodities to plants as active participants in a multi-species world in which humans are only a part. This paper will also discuss how reciprocity works in the context of human-plant entanglements as well as some of the ways my contributors suggested human-plant relationships can be strengthened and maintained.

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A phytocritical interpretation of Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden and Joseph Tasnádi’s Joyride highlights often overlooked plant agency in human transportation, evoking human care and kinship, and fostering more-than-human perspectives on movement and ecological entanglement.

Paper long abstract

Perceived as immobile, rigid, and fragile and moving at temporal scales much slower than humans, plants are often overlooked as active participants in transportation, especially in motorized traffic. Yet, in the Anthropocene era, plants’ lives are profoundly shaped by these phenomena, revealing both conflict and entanglement between mobility and vegetal temporality. In the ecological crises of today, it is essential to be able to assume the plant perspective and recognize plants’ roles within transportation contexts. If regarded though a phytocritical lens, contemporary art can help understand the controversial interactions of vegetation and transportation.

Salomé Jashi’s captivating documentary Taming the Garden (2021) exemplifies this dynamic: centuries-old trees are separated from the nurturing ground and transported across landscapes and the sea, highlighting the tension between human-engineered mobility and plant longevity. The trees’ sheer size and temporal depth assert their agency, resisting full instrumentalization even as they are moved. Similarly, Joseph Tasnádi’s installation Joyride engages with the entanglement of plant life and human transport, dramatizing a true story where a tree grew through an impounded car, creating a site where human mobility and recklessness intersect with vegetal presence.

Together with further examples, these instances sketch a wide symbolic field around plants and more importantly, they also reveal them as individuals with their own strivings and sufferings towards whom we humans can feel care and kinship. These intersections thus situate plant agency not only as a theoretical concern but as a lived phenomenon, inviting more-than-human perspectives in understanding movement, cohabitation, and ecological ethics.

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An ethnography of urban tree climbers reveals how pruning practices activate interspecies attunement, challenging modern views of plants as passive resources and instead recognizing vegetal subjectivity and agency.

Paper long abstract

his paper explores multispecies relations between humans and plants through an ethnography of urban tree climbers—specialists engaged in pruning, assessing, and caring for city trees. Their work reveals forms of attunement (Tsing 2024) that challenge modern conceptions of plants as natural “objects” or mere resources (Sullivan 2010). In this context, trees emerge as relational beings with their own temporalities, materialities, and agencies (Hall 2011).

Rooted in the field of multispecies anthropology, the paper highlights how these practices involve a perceptual and epistemic decentering (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2017), fostering a sympoietic mode of coexistence (Haraway 2019). Tree climbers engage in a close reading of vegetal structures and signs, co-constructing interspecies communication that speaks to past encounters and future trajectories. Far from being a neutral technique, pruning becomes a space of multispecies negotiation, ethical tension, and situated knowledge.

By focusing on the lived experience of those who work intimately with urban trees, this contribution aligns with the panel’s aim to rethink plant agency and interspecies entanglements. It proposes that urban trees are not static elements of infrastructure or landscape, but active participants in shaping ecological and social futures. In doing so, it contributes to the broader “plant turn” by foregrounding the role of embodied human-plant relations in cultivating more-than-human communities.

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The presentation examines new media artworks that make ecological phenomena (such as mycorrhiza or VOC) perceptible; facilitate scientific research and art collaborations; provide opportunities for diverse forms of plant–human communication, while facing key challenges of Anthropocene aesthetics.

Paper long abstract

Can new media art make visible and audible how trees communicate with each other, how underground mycorrhizal networks spread, or how plants send messages to other organisms through volatile organic compounds (VOCs)? Increasingly, digital artworks seek to address these ecological hot topics. Yet do such installations genuinely foster the acknowledgment of plants’ agency and challenge ingrained assumptions of ’plants’ fixity, passivity, and resilient silent presence’? While cultural representations had long reinforced these reductionisms, plants’ presence in contemporary art also enables us to challenge them and offers the opportunity to overturn this very contingancy or at least take it as a productive starting point around which to conceive plant-being from new perspectives (Aloi 2020).

Digital installations have an important educational impact when thematizing trending phenomena such as the “Wood Wide Web” or VOC-mediated communication. However, I argue that this medium also allows for more sophisticated artistic reflections. Accordingly, I examine two additional conceptual approaches: first, collaborations between scientific research and art through plant-friendly ’digital twin’ technologies; and second, the diverse forms of plant–human communication that can be enabled in new media artworks.

Furthermore, the artistic forms we give to plant-beings stand in a metonymic parallel with the three main challenges of Anthropocene aesthetics: latency, entanglement, and scale (the clash of incompatible orders of magnitude) (Horn 2020) — my presentation also takes this correlation into account.

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In our presentation, we will review the complex fruit-growing knowledge of Kóspallag, a settlement of 700 people in the Hungarian middle mountain range. We will also review the many roles these plants played in local society, economy, and the complex attitudes of local residents toward them.

Paper long abstract

Since the summer of 2020, we have been conducting research on local fruit varieties in Kóspallag, a village of 700 inhabitants in the Hungarian middle mountain range, in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration with a participatory and action-oriented approach. Our aim was to map the entirety of fruit-growing knowledge and the social and cultural role of fruits in the village, as well as to assess the potential of this knowledge in current village development and to put it to practical use. This is justified because fruit growing is a particularly important area in the economic life of similar mid-mountain settlements, which not only covers conscious cultivation and agricultural activities, but also includes gathering and the use of the available natural resources. Fruits played a significant role in self-sufficiency and commodity production, and therefore meant an area of local life full of emphatic, complex relationships and strong emotional connotations. In our presentation, we will explore the many ways in which fruits has played a role in local society in the past and present, how it has affected people's lives in many different ways, how it appears in various narratives, and how local conscious agricultural and nature-transforming activities have affected the landscape through fruit cultivation. We will also discuss the practical role that local fruit varieties and related knowledge can play in shaping the future desired by the village residents, and what specific actions we have taken so far in cooperation with them to achieve this.

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Exploring two works of speculative fiction, 'Wegetacja' and 'Lekki Lekki', this contribution highlights the importance of reimagining plant–human entanglements, where vegetal agency unsettles anthropocentrism and opens difficult but vital paths toward multispecies survival on a damaged planet.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how speculative fiction reimagines plant-human entanglements as difficult, often unsettling pathways for survival on a damaged planet. I focus on two contemporary narratives: 'Wegetacja'(2021) by Polish writer Dominika Słowik and 'Lekki Lekki' (2020) by Franco-Senegalese author Mame Bougouma Diene. Both stories foreground human-plant relationships while avoiding either uncritical celebration of frictionless universal kinship or the revenge-of-nature trope, typical of ecohorror. Instead, they depict complex negotiations in which humans must acknowledge their entanglement with the vegetal world, accepting their noncentrality within ecosystems.

In 'Wegetacja', the protagonist’s evolving intimacy with plants moves from indifference to attunement and response-ability, raising questions about vegetal agency, communication, and subjectivity. The narrative demonstrates how recognizing plants as actants reshapes human consciousness, behavior, and even ethical stance. The Africanfuturist narrative 'Lekki Lekki', blending science fiction with indigenous spirituality, imagines a community compelled to merge with plants to survive a planetary crisis. The text invites readers to envision cohabitation on nonhuman terms, encompassing such timely themes as mourning and memory.

Read together, these narratives illuminate the costs and possibilities of multispecies survival: negotiation, adaptation, and recognition that not all lives can be preserved, yet cooperation across species may offer fragile futures. Drawing on posthumanist and new materialist thought (e.g. Haraway, Morton) alongside critical and literary plant scholarship (e.g. Marder, Sandilands), I argue that these stories function as speculative exercises in response-ability, indispensable amid environmental crisis and biodiversity loss. They exemplify how contemporary SF reconfigures vegetal agency and relationality to imagine alternative forms of multispecies cohabitation.

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The recent turn to flora in the environmental humanities represents an effort to reconfigure deep-seated historical conceptions of plants as insentient, immobile, and inconsequential. ‘Plant studies’ critiques dominant narratives of flora as passive and promotes awareness of botanical diversity.

Paper long abstract

The recent turn towards plants represents a concerted effort to reconfigure deep-seated historical conceptions of vegetal beings as insentient, immobile, and inconsequential. The burgeoning field of ‘plant studies’ critiques prevailing cultural narratives of flora as passive and promotes awareness of the multidimensional value of botanical life. In dialogue with empirical breakthroughs, researchers reevaluate the longstanding belief that plants lack sentient behavior. To a significant extent, the rise of plant studies has been galvanized by ‘plant neurobiology’, the science of plant intelligence pointing to the existence of altruism, communication, memory, sensing, and other percipient capacities in the botanical world. Traversing art, the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, plant studies considers how emerging intersectional views of plants are reshaping cultural, social, and literary engagements with them. Reimagining human-plant entanglements, researchers examine the narratives and ideas connected to flora; the creative works inspired by species; and the heterogeneous values that embed plants in socioeconomic milieux. The field attends to a broad range of concerns—from climate disturbance and food security to biodiversity decline and plant-based cultural heritage. Research, to date, also foregrounds ethical issues surrounding genetically modified plants and the moral consequences of plant intelligence for agriculture. This presentation will delineate the major theories and methodologies of plant studies as well as its origins in critical plant studies (philosophy), plant humanities (history and archival research), ethnobotany (anthropology), human-plant studies (cultural studies), phytocriticism (literary studies), plant geography, and neurobotany (plant science).

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This paper analyses the Bengali Hindu festival Nabanna as a case of Hindu Plant Spirituality where paddy/rice is the embodiment of the Absolute and functions as a ritual co-agent. Through ecomusicology and ethnobotany lenses, it explores how agrarian religious practices resist commodification.

Paper long abstract

Louise Fowler-Smith, based on her fieldwork in India, in her book Sacred Trees of India (2022), has emphasised that cultural reverence towards trees can stop the deforestation and commodification of nature. and the tradition of veneration towards plants in the Buddhist, Indian Muslim, Hindu, and Adivasi traditions. Drawing from this premise, this paper proposes the Bengali Hindu festival Nabanna (New Rice) as a case study of Hindu Plant Spirituality. Hinduism asserts, all beings, living and non-living, are manifestations of Brahman; hence, Plants are the embodiment of the Absolute. So, the Hindu approach towards Plants can be gauged by analyzing Nabanna, which is a paddy harvesting festival celebrated in the Sankranti (last day of the month) and Pahela (first day of the month) of Kartik and Agrahayana, (October and November) in West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. The core argument of this paper is that in Nabanna, Paddy/rice functions as an active ritual co-agent whose consecration, address, and redistribution organise social, spiritual, and ecological relations across a more-than-human community. This research explains the Kinship framework where paddy/ rice is both Goddess Laxmi and Annapurna. Methodologically, the paper combines ‘Ecomusicological’ analysis of the traditional Bengali harvesting song “Notun Dhaner Khoi”, ‘Ethnobotanical’ mapping of cultivation stages, and multispecies ethnography of ritual practice. Within the Nabanna framework, newly harvested rice is treated not as a mere commodity, rather as a sacred and spiritual agency. The paper argues that agrarian religious practices model resists commodification and offers insights for rethinking sustainability in the Anthropocene.

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This paper analyses conceptions of Chinese dwarf trees to suggest how dominant aesthetic interests in gardens were not visual resemblance of nature, but the suggestion of the spirit peculiar to the manifold creation of the world. Twisted trees (bonsai) are considered especially spiritual entities.

Paper long abstract

In The World in Miniature (originally published as Le monde en petit, 1987), Rolf Stein

compares the process of dwarfing trees to the Daoist traditions of twisting one’s body to achieve certain animal-like figures. The first miniature trees were discovered on high mountains where conditions were insufficient for healthy growth, leading to a twisted appearance. These twisted trees were considered especially spiritual (ling靈 ) and even more so when they were old. A gu shu 古樹 (old tree) was associated with cults and shrines dedicated to healing, health, longevity and posterity; it was also the name given to dwarf trees which were understood to increase the health and longevity of their cultivators. The appearance of weathered old age developing spontaneously under the controlled conditions of the miniature garden leads to spiritual enlightenment; the artificial (miniature garden) is not less than the real (old forest). Following Stein, I explore Daoist takes on useless, ugly trees (the interaction between the giant oak and Carpenter Shi in the Zhuangzi) and their importance for a philosophy of life which valorizes effortlessness, leisure, and ease. Looking at early conceptions of the Chinese garden in which the beauty of landscape was embodied in miniaturized forms, I suggest that the dominant aesthetic interest in gardens was not visual resemblance of nature, but rather the suggestion of spirit peculiar to the manifold creation of the world. The pen jing (bonsai) ultimately connotes an inactive receptive posture which facilitates an intuitive identification with the dao.