Franziska Dahlmeier (PhD student, Hamburg University): "Between Care and Control: Artificial Ecologies as Standby Infrastructures of Care in the Anthropocene"

Franziska presented her research from Kew Garden’s tropical nursery (London), where many extinct and endangered so-called 'tender' plants are being propagated, grown and kept alive with the help of different forms of automatised and manually operated technologies as well as the botanic horticulturists' practices of care. She writes: "I want to conceptualise the tropical nursery as an artificial ecology in which different elements affect each other permanently and enter into symbiosis with each other in a form of 'reciprocal capture' (Stengers 2010) in order to keep alive certain species of plants. The formerly colonial project of the botanic garden is thus composing a heterogeneous infrastructure of care with the goal of conservation – which nevertheless is based on practices of selection and killing. My work wants to contribute to the question of the actual configuration of artificial ecologies as well as to the growing field of multispecies ethnographies that cross the boundary between 'the natural' and 'the artificial'."

Xan Chacko (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies, Department of Wome?n's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College): "Invisible vitality: The hidden labours of seed banking"

Xan presented work from her forthcoming book, Invisible Labour: Power and Politics in Twentieth Century Science, which brings forward the obscured labours of seed scientists, seed bank architecture (both physical and digital), and seed reproductive labour itself. She is a feminist science studies scholar who combines methods from history, philosophy, and anthropology and was previously a visiting researcher at Aarhus University as part of the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) project.

This seminar was part of the Centre for Environmental Humanities’ autumn series, ‘Saving European Nature: Longing for Landscapes Past.’