Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

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).