Panels

2025 Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference

A view of green, misty tree leaves and branches as seen from the forest floor

Complete panel descriptions forthcoming.

Banner image © Maya Karkalicheva.

A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake

Perhaps no one has done more to ignite publish interest in fungi than Merlin Sheldrake. He is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His book, Entangled Life, is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, won the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize, and was nominated for a number of other prizes, including the British Book Awards and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It has been translated into thirty-two languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. In this conversation with Rachael Petersen, Merlin will explore how fungi challenge us to rethink nature, intelligence, and the unknown.

Emanuele Coccia, "How to Make Cities with Plants"

Anthropology has shown that it is thanks to the invention of gardens and agriculture that the human species invented cities: it is thanks to plants that the human species learned to give its relationship with space a stable form, an expression of the terrestrial landscape and not just of its experience. It is therefore by reinventing our relationship with plants that we can reinvent a new relationship with all the species present on the planet today and make cities a cocoon for intensifying biodiversity. Starting from research on Amazonian archaeology, this talk aims to outline the lines of a new form of plant-based urban planning.

Giuliana Furci, "Global Patterns of Ancestral Human Relationships with Fungi"

There are numerous relationships between fungi and humans that seem to have evolved independently multiple times over time. These relationships have shaped cultures while providing medicines, materials and symbols of power that bridge continents and Peoples. In this address, we will look at some of these ‘cultural co-evolutions’, learn of an ongoing process to ethically document relationships between Indigenous People, local communities and traditional societies while exploring alternatives for the conservation of said relationships.

William (Ned) Friedman, "Tree Obsessions: Celebrating the Ephemeral in Long-Lived Plants"

In an age of environmental destruction and outright murder of our biological brethren, there is something deeply troubling about humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Technology has left us with mere facsimiles of nature - pixilated abstractions of biodiversity through satellite imagery, decoded strings of DNA – and we have become fundamentally disconnected from actual nature. I will argue that by mindfully engaging in the simple act of observing nature (and obsessing about it) in arboreta, botanical gardens, and our backyards, trees can help us forge a personal and empathic lifelong connection with the “other,” the vast and variant organisms with which we share the planet. As Johann Wolfgang Goethe aptly wrote: “To wander about among a vegetation which is new to one is pleasant and instructive. It is the same with familiar plants as with familiar objects: in the end we cease to think about them at all. What is seeing without thinking?” Indeed, seeing without thinking lies at the very heart of the human-created crisis of global change and extinction, and the disconnect between humans and the millions of other species and countless organisms with whom we share the planet. Can the simple practice of deepening our love of individual trees (that cannot love us back) make us better stewards of Earth’s biodiversity? I think so.

Banu Subramaniam, "Queering Global Flora: Plants and the Afterlives of Colonialism"

Why are plants deemed native and foreign, male and female? I argue that histories of colonialism and their foundational language of gender, race, sexuality, and nation have fundamentally shaped the language, terminology, and theories of the modern plant sciences. Plant sciences and botanical theories remain grounded in the violence of their colonial pasts. In wrestling with these difficult origins, I develop an interdisciplinary approach to retheorize plant biology, in particular, plant migration and reproductive biology. I explore new biological frameworks that harness the power of feminist thought in order to reimagine and reinvigorate our love of plants.

Jessica J. Lee, "Notes on Narration: Species, Ecosystems, and Scale in Environmental Storytelling"

How do we centre the more-than-human other in our storytelling? What do we owe the subjects we write about, and how do they invite us to reconsider conventional storytelling structures? Drawing on plant-centric essays from my book Dispersals and the challenges of my current work-in-progress on freshwater biodiversity, I ask how we navigate between scales—from individual species to whole systems, to the complications and possibilities of entanglement and agency—as creative practitioners, scholars, and kin. I consider how we might tell stories with community—rather than the individual—at the centre and propose that doing so might help us better reimagine our futures with plants, fungi, and more.

Michael Marder, "Emily Dickinson, Plant-Thinker"

"It is hard to tell where, in Emily Dickinson’s corpus, plants end and words begin. An avid gardener and herbarium-maker, she had the habit of sending pressed plants together with her letters and poems to family and friends. Poems spoke silently from, with, and through flower arrangements—and often enough they did so about flowers. Not only the form and the content of the messages were vegetal; so was also the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds, spores or grains of pollen, preceded by lovingly tending to plants in a garden or at a “conservatory” (hothouse), walking in forests and meadows, gathering and preserving flowers. For Emily, an herbarium was a poetry collection, while a poetry collection was an herbarium, expressing fragility and tenacious preservation, humid vitality and dryness, mortality and a vibrant afterlife of mortal remains, vegetal and human. In this talk, I propose to delve into her poetic herbarium, in order to get a better sense of the threads crisscrossing vegetal ontology, including not only life, death, and survival, but also singular multiplicity, a capacious non-identity, and ecstatic being."

Jacob Erikson, “The Vegetal and the Manifold: Agnes Arber’s Botanical Panentheism”

Abstract: While the British plant morphologist Agnes Arber (1879-1960) is sometimes mentioned as an influence in contemporary plant philosophy, scholarship that attends to her writing directly is far too rare. Like humans relegate plant thinking to the peripheries, Arber’s writing rarely takes center stage. This lack may be because there appear to be two Arbers: The first, the plant morphologist writing on herbals, grains, and more, serves as a crucial fixture in the genealogy of plant philosophy. In particular, her The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Cambridge University Press,1950) proposes a philosophical theoria for contemplatively “seeing” plant forms, even as those forms recognize the living proliferation of the vegetal world as anything but static. The second Arber, strange to historians of botany and philosophers alike, is fixated on the mystical. In her final two works, The Mind and the Eye (Cambridge University Press, 1954) and The Manifold and the One (London: Murray, 1957) botany and plant philosophy slowly erode only to be supplanted by a wild, syncretic attention to religious mysticisms, histories of apophatic theology, and a proposal for a unique panentheism, where the Divine is in all things even as it may exceed all things. These latter works are frequently classified derogatively. (Even scholars such as Maura Flannery, who has done much to make Arber’s work visible, only give these latter works a passing mention, if at all). Arber’s latter scholarship seems to grow wild beyond disciplinary bounds, into religious imagination, mysticism, untamed itself, and those who appreciate Arber’s attention to plants know not what to do with her writing that seems to exceed botanical limits. This proposal argues, however, that the Arber focused on plant morphology and the Arber proposing a panentheistic mysticism of the world are one and the same and that the latter precisely develops from her sustained plant-thinking. Through reading The Manifold and the One—aiding Stella Sandford’s understanding of plant philosophy and theologian Laurel Schneider’s proposal for a Divine Multiplicity in her Beyond Monotheism (Routledge, 2007)—I reclaim in Arber a vegetal mysticism and vegetal panentheism that might illuminate further ways in religious and philosophical imagination. Arber’s attention to the contradictions of plants and the way plants undo our attempts to “capture” their forms precisely is an apophatic way of thinking that chastens zoocentric thinking. Her theo-logic in The Manifold and the One strangely evolves and borrows cues from her method for plant morphology, such that sustained attention to plants inhabits and becomes coincidental to the strange attention a Vegetal Divine.

Samira Daneshvar, “A Romantic Reading of Lynn Margulis’ Theory of Symbiogenesis”

Abstract: This paper examines the theory of symbiogenesis as put forth by the American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis –– namely, the Serial Endosymbiotic Theory. I argue that the Romantic ethos embedded in Margulis’s approach to science transformed the century-old theory of symbiogenesis into a widely influential framework for rethinking human-non-human relations. While grounded in objective science, Margulis’s theorization of symbiogenesis inflects the romantic vision of unity in multiplicity. This vision reverberates in both the scientific content and aesthetic forms of expression. Margulis opposed competition as the driving force of evolution and instead proposed “coming together” and symbiotic “cohabitation” in deep time. She maintained that plants, fungi, and animalia originated from the fusion of different kinds of bacteria in consecutive evolutionary responses to survive planetary crises. She explained that symbiotic merging led to the organic bond that prevails between all life forms throughout space and time. In the literary and visual communication of her analyses, Margulis eschewed the disinterested and detached language of science. For instance, she marshaled literary expressions such as “touch,” “coming together,” “teaming up,” “alliance,” and “partnership” to describe interspecies associations. In visual illustrations, she often drew on the aesthetics of pointillism, where the points represent the microcosm: a multiplicity that coheres into an image, mirroring her vision of how bacteria coalesce into new forms of life. Moreover, Margulis challenged the conception of individual organisms as discrete, fixed entities with materially closed surfaces. She demonstrated this by providing various examples of interactions among organisms. Her examples included empirical instances of the transfer of genetic material between bacteria, fungi, and plants, alongside theoretical cases of the incorporation of organisms from distant taxa into one another. Parallel to her textual explications, the visual representations –– including close-up microscopic photographs of cellular membranes, life-scale images of symbionts in fusion, and analytical drawings and diagrams –– dispute the rigidity of definitive boundaries between living organisms. Consequently, Margulis cultivates a human sensibility for the fluidity of life among “individual” entities, invoking self-awareness amid the intricacy of flows. By reconciling subjective sensibility –– central to the wholistic metaphysics of Romanticism –– with objective science, Margulis appeals to readers’ sentiments through reason. Therefore, her inquiry into evolution does not culminate merely in scientific ends. Engaging sentiments to raise environmental consciousness is a key legacy for which Lynn Margulis has yet to be acknowledged.

Giovanni Aloi, “Vegetal Realism and Plant Politics: Striking an Ethical Balance”

Abstract: Which representational modalities can productively circumvent vegetal objectification and evidence, or even amplify, plant-agency? How can artists respectfully engage with the alterity of plants while emphasizing significant networks of cultural, biological, and ecological interconnectedness? What aesthetic and theoretical frameworks can facilitate the emergence of empathic engagements with plants? Since the Renaissance, plants in Western art have served as reliable keyholders in visual storytelling. Leaves and petals anchored essential virtues and admonished the faithful to fear the perils of evil. So, cherries, red carnations, and poppies evoked the blood of Christ’s passion, while the whiteness of citrus blossoms, lilies, and jasmine emblematized the purity of the Virgin. (Impelluso, 2004) Progressively gaining importance throughout the history of Dutch Golden Age still-life painting, these symbolic associations were often assigned based on chromatic or formal analogies; they never emerged from keen observation of the plant’s biological or ecological lives. By employing this fundamentally objectifying approach, artists filled the silence of plants with the resonance of human voices, reducing their vegetal being to a hollow vessel for the dissemination of religious doctrines. (Aloi, 2018)
However, over the past 20 years, contemporary artists have begun to engage with the stillness and silence of plants—the attributes that widely contributed to their historical marginalisation—in more ethically grounded ways. I have called this approach Vegetal Realism: a method wherein artists honour the distinctiveness of plant existence, magnify vegetal agency, and explore the significance of vegetal-human co-becomings. (Aloi, 2024) Artists today, motivated by the complex relationships between geography, climate, and the history of co-evolution involving non-human entities, endeavour to reevaluate notions of interconnectedness, interdependence, and ecology while prompting reconsideration of productivity, sustainability, and exploitation systems. Through innovative aesthetic and speculative conceptual strategies, artists place plants at the centre of alternative creative models, collective forms of intelligence and wisdom, and even offer opportunities to address social and ecological degradation. Through selected case studies, Giovanni Aloi outlines the concept of Vegetal Realism in art as a powerful tool of artistic engagement rooted in the indissoluble bond that ties ethicality and aesthetics.

Sion Parkinson, “Reimagining Smelly Plants and Fungi in Art and Sound”

Abstract: This presentation explores the challenges of representing certain plants and fungi in art, focusing on two species that emit powerful, unpleasant odors: the titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) and the dune stinkhorn (Phallus hadriani). Despite centuries of artistic and scientific attempts to describe the natural world through visual means, these species continue to resist true, that is, “total” artistic representation due to the ways in which their foul smell appears to humans, an aspect often overlooked in botanical art and taxonomic studies. Historically, taxonomists and botanical artists have privileged visual characteristics, emphasizing the form and structure of plants and fungi while often neglecting their odors. This visual bias dates back to early mycological publications, like Hadrianus Junius's 1564 monograph “The Description of the Phallus”—a study of the dune stinkhorn fungus featuring a woodcut illustration and a poem. For centuries, botanical art prized visual accuracy, while some plants and fungi known for their pungent smells have been incompletely portrayed so as to be deodorized. As nineteenth-century English mycologist David Badham wryly observed, artists attempting to capture the stinkhorn’s likeness were quickly overwhelmed by its pervasive smell, with “ten minutes in a room with it [being] nine too many.” In recent decades, the “corpse flower” phenomenon has drawn huge crowds to botanic gardens across the world, inviting the public to experience the titan arum’s fetid odor firsthand. Such events underscore the limitations of traditional artistic representation while revealing a strong public curiosity toward olfactory experiences, both despite and because of the flowers’ foul smell. Building on this growing interest, I argue that contemporary artistic approaches must go beyond visual representation to capture the rich sensory presence of these species. By expanding into multisensory media, particularly sound and olfactory art, we can more accurately convey the complex and evocative nature of these plants and fungi. Drawing from the emerging field of plant humanities and combining historical analysis with contemporary art practice, this presentation proposes an alternative framework for representing these species. I will explore how sound-based artistic forms can evoke the temporospatial qualities of the titan arum and stinkhorn, inviting audiences to relate to them as might the coprophagous (dung-loving) or necrophagous (corpse-loving) insects—key agents in their pollination and spore dispersal, respectively. From this perspective, I argue that embracing the full sensory range of these plants and fungi not only enhances our understanding of them but also deepens our appreciation of more-than-human worlds, aligning us more closely with the ecosystems we inhabit. Ultimately, this talk proposes a new aesthetic approach—music, for example—to representing vegetal and fungal life, encouraging an ecological attunement that extends beyond the visual into a multisensory experience. By acknowledging these organisms as odorous and ecologically vital, we are invited to reconsider our own sensory biases and our relationship to the ecosystems upheld by plants and fungi, smelly or otherwise. This paper should appeal to artists, scientists, and researchers working with botanical collections, as well as historians of science, botanic garden managers, and cultural heritage curators.

Jamie Cross, “Planet Mold”

Abstract: How is climate change creating the context for multi-species acceptance with those much-maligned and abject fungi, the molds? This contribution to the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference examines changing human relationships to thermally adaptive molds as an index of climate anxieties and solutionism. Molds are environmentally ubiquitous and thermally tolerant. They can be found inside low-cost housing in Scotland, inside wholesale vegetable warehouses in urban India, inside solar-powered refrigerators in Kenya, in laboratories growing non-meat-based proteins and remediating metal nanoparticles, and in the recipes for DIY antibiotics. Molds are everywhere, and they are also changing as they adapt to rising global temperatures, new environmental conditions, and chemicals designed to eradicate them. Whilst other members of the fungi kingdom (the mushrooms and the yeasts) have received considerable attention from a multi-species and microbial turn across the social sciences and humanities, there has been little, if any, interest in those other, more abject, fungi: the molds. Yet molds are attracting enormous attention from scientists and entrepreneurs. Around the world, pathogenic mold species are emerging as hotspots for planetary health, with inflows of capital, environmental and biological science, and public activism intersecting around them. Drawing on research traditions on non-humans, science, technology, and medicine in social anthropology, Planetary Mold presents a new way of engaging with these filamentous fungi across the humanities, biology, ecology, and engineering. From Scotland to India, outbreaks of mold in buildings and agricultural produce are increasingly a matter of public concern and government intervention. In many parts of the world, exposure to toxic molds map directly onto patterns of income and health inequality, giving rise to new measures of surveillance and chemical controls. At the same time, new possibilities for biologically engineering mold species allow them to be imagined as techno-fixes for global greenhouse gas emissions and electronic waste. These molds invite us to think about emergent forms of life not just in post-capitalist ruins but also in late capitalist heat, above a planetary average of 1.5 degrees. Against the backdrop of our warming world, this paper outlines a new program of research to explore how molds are being put to work in diverse projects of consumption, valuation, and accumulation.

Lacey Jones, “Morel Ideals: Having Your Anthropocentrism and Eating it Too”

Abstract: This paper interrogates the exponential outgrowth of books that tether humanity’s future to the marvels of fungi. Mushrooms, Merlin Sheldrake proclaims, are an epistemological revolution, one in which non-human actors might teach people to think beyond the “I” and toward mutuality instead. Perhaps this is why so many mushroom books share the same anxiety: if empathy is a qualifier for care, is anthropocentrism a qualifier for empathy? How do we learn from things different from us without turning to comparison? The mushroom canon, I argue, posits method itself as the answer: knowing mushrooms the way that mushrooms themselves know. I read its project in light of a recent theoretical trend that offers “the meta” as an effective interpretative strategy for practices of epistemological and ontological repair. In religious studies, we might think of a book like Jason Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which hopes that a postmodern-esque reading of postmodernism might lead us straight to the future of theory. In literary studies, Jonathan Kramnick's Criticism and Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2023) declares that “a writing practice like in-sentence quotation both describes and creates a kind of knowledge.” And Karen Barad, a science studies scholar working at the intersection of philosophy, physics, and feminist praxis, posits diffraction as a perspectival apparatus that is reparative by way of its turning the very question of method into a methodology. By reading the mushroom library in conversation with Isabelle Stenger’s “ecology of practices,” I’ll argue that its turn to method is an attempt to hold oneself in relationship to non-human actors through means other than conflation or alienation—both of which are underpinned by anxieties about not being able to see something that might save us, about being blinded by ourselves. In making this argument, my paper contributes to the discourse surrounding an ontological turn in both anthropology and material religion alike by holding recent critiques of new materialist discourses and the language of entanglement, such as those by Axelle Karera, in conversation with the work of Mary-Jane Rubenstein and Lisa Sideris work on the value of wonder as an affective and intellectual posture. This paper closes by suggesting that today’s stretch of mushroom books are simply acts of confirming our own thinking under the guise of transformation. At the heart of the mushroom library is also a fiction: attention to mutuality is goodness; how a person sees is the measure of how good they are. Academics aren’t learning to be good from nature; we’re naturalizing a preconceived understanding of goodness and then pretending to stumble across it in the forest. Mushroom reveries entail the projection of our longing for an entire affective, conceptual, and political revolution onto beings whose driving desire is to digest the world around them in order to survive. This makes the mushroom library—and its deep investment in the idea that simply looking for/at mushrooms can change the way we understand life itself—either the most nihilistic group of books on the market or the most blindly optimistic. This paper aims to discover which.

Rebecca McMackin, “Ecological Horticulture for the Masses! Growing a Gardening Movement”

Abstract: Ecological horticulture, a garden practice that supports biodiversity, is growing and spreading like goldenrod. Most American gardeners are now working with native plants, hoping to encourage pollinators and other wildlife, while similar movements flourish all over the world. These gardeners cultivate beauty while also laboring to support relationships among plants, animals, fungi, and themselves. It’s a fundamentally collective practice that heals broken threads among communities and one, I will argue, that can lead naturally to more broad social and political actions. Ecological gardening can be, and often is, radicalizing. But not for everyone. Many practitioners seek to prioritize the plants that evolved on the land they are on while removing those plants that cause ecological harm. This practice of planting “native” plants and removing “invasives” can be interpreted as xenophobia by some, and the rhetoric used undoubtedly echoes right-wing talking points. In addition, there have been multiple and serious historical instances of fascists weaponizing native plants to rationalize racist policies, and a small faction of American gardeners advocates for kicking out “foreign” plants still today. This paper will show that the practice of ecological horticulture is a sound and important path toward creating a just and verdant world as gardeners realize their potential to take action to support others, both human and non. However, as this movement grows and evolves, the approach and the rhetoric of proponents must shift. Using terms like “invasive” and demonizing organisms for the mere act of thriving hides the hand of the forces that cause the ecological damage we spend our lives repairing. This work is fundamentally about supporting communities. It is time to cultivate language that does the same.

Elaine Ayers, “Mossy Imaginaries: Moss, Colonial Violence, and Radical Possibilities in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”

Abstract: In grappling with the extreme violence enacted by colonial botanists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the most downtrodden, mundane, and overlooked plants emerges as a model for anti-capitalist, queer, and attention-based focus: moss. Thriving equally in the cracks of urban pavements as in tropical rainforests and even Arctic environments, moss has been used and abused within colonial settings for centuries. Used as a “packing noodle” for more “valuable” specimens in long-distance shipping, moss nevertheless emerged as a subject of study worthy in its own right during this period of geographical and political expansion, conjuring moments of pious reflection, sexual possibility, and community-based kinship for working class laborers, women edged out of botanical knowledge production, and, of course, Indigenous experts who had used moss as preservative agents for generations. While Scottish explorer Mungo Park used moss to “show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation” after finding himself “a stranger in a strange land” in 1790s West Africa and 1850s Amazonian explorer Richard Spruce “found reason to thank heaven which had enabled me to forget for the moment all my troubles in the contemplation of a simple moss,” women back in Britain used moss as a model for how they could reproduce and form community with or without men, sometimes expressed in women-centered pornography. Like other plants and fungi that formed Linnaeus’s infamous 24^th category, Cryptogamia, moss created a space for beyond-human thinking, pushing back on constructed categories of “normalcy” for people, often working within the colonial context, to envision alternative possibilities for being. Drawn from my current archivally based book project and building on work by Robin Wall Kimmerer and others—as well as an NEH-funded project (2020-2024), this paper uses the history of moss, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to argue that even during the height of colonial collecting, in all of its destructive, violent, accumulative, and silencing methods, plants offered explicit, alternative, often radical ways of thinking about community while prompting naturalists of all kinds to pay attention to the shipping material that cradled other “objects of value.” Throughout the colonial mission, throughout increasingly restrictive systems of control over bodies, and throughout the growing divide between science and religion, moss was there. Taking a historical lens to the way that moss traveled, was studied, and was used for roughly a century, this paper offers ongoing hope for the way that people have thought with plants to envision other ways of being, even in the face of extreme violence.

Rebecca Mendoza and Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, “Copal Resin and Incense as a Conduit of Life and Death Forces: From Precolonial Mesoamerica to Contemporary Nahua Ceremony”

Abstract: Copalli (copal) is an aromatic tree resin and a central relational being in Mesoamerican ceremonies. Produced from various species of the Bursera genus, copalli is the blood of trees (iezzo cuahutil in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl). Across historical sources, including iconography, ethnographic accounts, and textual analysis of the Codexes, copalli has been historically portrayed as a food substance consumed by deities while also being a medicinal plant for human healing practices. Archeological findings substantiate this cosmological significance. For example, at the Huey Teocalli (Templo Mayor in Mexico City), copalli is one of the most abundant materials found in Mexica offering caches. Likewise, in the Yucatán Peninsula, hundreds of ceramic vessels of copalli incense offerings were dredged from Chen K’u (Cenote Sagrado), affirming the regional and cosmic importance of this plant. Hundreds of years later, copal continues to be central in rituals in Indigenous and diasporic communities in Mexico, Central America, and the United States. Contemporary ethnographic accounts indicate that even beyond its role as an agent in ritual settings, the methods of harvesting copal could be termed "animist," as they engage in reciprocal traditions rooted in ancient relational kinship. Today, we can see this powerful ancestor across ritual settings, whether that is the center of the altar for Día de los Muertos (Huey Miccailhuitl), temazcales (ritual steam baths), or various healing rituals and ceremonies. In this talk, Rebecca Mendoza will provide engagement with precolonial Mesoamerican sources (archaeological, codices, etc.), while Sabina Cruz de la Cruz will offer a contemporary curanderismo approach from her life and research in Nahua communities of Veracruz, Mexico. Together, they argue that copal remains the blood of trees, a sacrificial offering and substance of life and death. Additionally, they reveal how the ritual consumption of copalli by humans, deities, fire, and water reveals its simultaneous durability and ephemerality while blurring ontological boundaries between plants, food, smoke, and blood. Attention to precolonial Mesoamerican and contemporary Nahua cosmologies ultimately provides a critical lens for understanding the appropriation and commodification of nonhuman plant kin in spiritual marketplaces.

Joela Jacobs and Isabel Kranz, “Plants and Place: Cultivating Un/Belonging through Vegetal Tropes”

Abstract: Plants are intricately connected with the places in which they thrive. Yet, because of human intervention, they have never stayed put, and their movement across the world has gone along with often-harmful histories of the “cultivation” of places and people. Notions such as native and invasive species reflect some of the common vegetal tropes that determine the relationship of plants to place today. Yet, the question of who belongs is quite complicated, depending on where you look and whom you ask. In this talk, we show how plants have shaped discourses of un/belonging. Our focus on vegetal tropes about place and cultivation allows us to map a specific Germanophone tradition of connecting natural landscapes with cultures: the "Kulturraum" (culture-space). We will trace Alexander von Humboldt’s eighteenth-century idea of connecting the (agri)cultures of peoples with specific places and climates to the charged Nazi notion of blood and soil, in which the forest is distinctly "German" and diasporic (and here specifically Jewish) people are located in literal and metaphorical deserts. Contrasting this line of thought about place with that of a native people’s stolen land in settler-colonial contexts, we ask how plant studies can rethink the topoi and tropes that describe the relationship of people, plants, and place in less harmful ways. In other words, what can plants teach us about a decolonial, transcultural, and multilingual approach to place and belonging? Our suggestions return us to Humboldt’s climate zones, as we connect prickly pear cacti in Gaza with those on Arizona reservations and old-growth forests protected by First Nations people with the legacy of Bertolt Brecht’s reflections about the political "nature” of trees in his famous 1939 poem. Ultimately, turning to plants and the often poetic language we use to describe them, so we argue, helps us unpack conceptions about people and places that raise the question of whether and to what we want to belong.

Abigail Culpepper, “How Are We Still Reading? Towards a Theory of Textual Sessility”

Abstract: This paper considers how the formal similarities between plants, fungi, and texts might form the basis for a new mode of ecocritical reading. I conceptualize this formal similarity through the notion of sessility, a scientific term used to refer to species that are incapable of locomotion, which I extend to include plants and fungi. Sessile creatures are inseparable from their environments and rely on other beings for their survival. Sessility is also a multi-scalar concept. On a microscopic level, or when viewed from the longue durée of non-human time, sessile creatures like plants and fungi are mobile, forming connections between each other and their environments. Similarly, close reading reveals that seemingly fixed texts move, too, establishing intra- and intertextual relations that are legible even as the work is read generations later. The dynamic lives of sessile organisms are thus akin to those of texts whose circulation and survival depend on their context and readers. I developed, by extension, the concept of “reading sessility” as an approach to ecocriticism that takes the multi-scalar relations of texts as its focus. Through my analysis, it emerges that literary criticism is not so methodologically different from the scientific observation of plants and fungi. Both close reading and scientific analysis trace the dynamic relations that make their object of study possible. I conclude this paper with a brief exemplary analysis of the poem “Elevation” by French poet Charles Baudelaire to illustrate how reading might consider the synergy between plants, fungi, and texts. While “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” allows me to conceptualize a new mode of ecocritical reading, I ultimately consider how literary works might extend their relations beyond the limits of the material world. Not constricted to a lived reality like sessile organisms, texts can form virtual relations that bridge the divide between the “fictive” literary world and the “real” empirical world, and in turn allow us to imagine what other worlds and futures might be possible.

Panels - 2025 Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference