Welcome to the new Mahindra Humanities Center website! This site transition is a part of Harvard's website migration. You can still find all of our events, information, content, and more in the same places, just with a new look.
announcement
Please note that our URL has also changed: we are now mahindrahumanities.harvard.edu.
SPEAKERS: Rachel Mundy (Rutgers University), Cana F. McGhee (Harvard University), and Ellie Irons (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
The ongoing climate crisis has produced endless streams of announcements about changes in the world as we know it. Many of these are imagistic in presentation: rising waters, drying deserts, de-treed rainforests, dilapidated buildings, oil spills… But what of the smaller day to day encounters with these changes? What of the miniaturized modes of coming to terms with the looming threats in our midst? What of the soundings that accompany the small? This roundtable attunes to some of these smaller things in the form of plant life. Thinking within the botanical context untangles some our narratives about who deserves to live, be protected, or be used in service of deeming the life and protection of other species. Throughout this roundtable, we grapple with the challenges of writing and sounding (with) planthood, both because of and despite their alternative forms of legibility and audibility.
Rachel Mundy, Protecting Your Garden from Moths and Worms
In this contribution to our panel, Rachel Mundy examines the meaning of life, death, and survival through the bodies and voices of moths in your garden. Today’s backyard moths are invasive aliens or treasured natives, pestilence or prize. Literature on the subject is divided between advice on the insect’s identification and tips on its eradication. Looking back to twentieth century traditions, she shows how conservative perspectives on gender framed the moths of nature guides as doomed voiceless “girlfriends” modeled on the heroines of 19th-century opera. Scientists in this tradition borrowed Romantic-era associations of the insect’s “silent” voice with death and femininity, naming the insects after tragic-exotic roles such as Delilah, Cleopatra, and Briseis. Underlying these names is an interconnected and uneven morality that affects both moths and men. Mundy concludes by asking how this ethic of gendered sacrifice has informed the disposability of the natural and the feminine, setting the terms for a developing crisis in and beyond our gardens.
Cana F. McGhee, Marble Kweens: Digital Performances of Plant Parenthood
In addition to being a landmark year for racial justice, public health crises, and sourdough starters, 2020 was also the year of the houseplant. Increased garden and nursery sales accompany the flourishing presence of plant-themed content that has propagated over the last year. Today’s participatory digital culture transforms our individual suburban jungles into an expansive “virtual greenhouse.” In this paper, Cana F. McGhee tours some of this greenhouse to explore enactments of identity through plant-human performance, particularly for Black and queer folx. She considers the musico-sonic intimacies in the audiovisual genre of the “plant tour,” and argue that these intimacies shape the agency of beings historically bracketed as lesser- and other-than. Despite lineages of western thought that situate botanical beings as silent, un-affective, and unthinking, these digital performances craft lively semblances of life in musico-sonic form.
Ellie Irons, Practicing Plant-Human Solidarity: Learning with and from Weeds through Ecosocial Art
Guided by the vegetal beings commonly known as weeds, Ellie Irons' collaborative, interdisciplinary artistic practice combines socially engaged art and ecological art through a multispecies lens. With fields like urban ecology, critical plant studies, and feminist and Indigenous science studies as key interlocutors, this form of ecosocial art takes a phytocentric pedagogy approach, offering a suite of fieldwork-based strategies ranging from weedy watercolor workshops to lawn (re)disturbance sculptures. Across these forms, she investigates how building plant-human solidarity in disturbed habitats has the potential to contribute to intertwined struggles to dismantle exclusionary forms of human supremacy and cultivate ecosocial justice, essential tasks for those of us who find ourselves alive in—and complicit with—the era now contestedly known as the Anthropocene.
How To Join
Please add your name and email address to this registration page. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with a link and passcode to the event.
