Scott Backrath and Teodora Noszkay discussing Plant-human Research network and creative, critical, and relational approaches to understanding the natural world 

What are my colleagues doing? Now that I think about it, who are my colleagues in the environmental humanities? PhDs can often feel isolating due to the highly individualised nature of our research projects, leading us to wonder who we can relate to about what we spend the majority of our time writing about.

The PGR Mini-Symposium for the Plant-human Research Network (lead by Dr. Anke Bernau) was organised by us to answer these questions and to provide a space where people could discuss all things environmental. The Plant-human research network aims to bring together researchers at different career stages working on a range of plant-human relations across the humanities discipline. It organises events such as this one with the intention of further developing our understanding of these complex and vital relationships to help address ecological crises. In fact we agreed to host this mini-symposium for the network precisely because of the positive social and environmental impacts it aims to achieve. 

The symposium was held on 19th May and took place at the Firs Environmental Research Station, with Osian Thierry supporting the event on the day. We chose the Firs as we wanted our mini-symposium to be surrounded by reflections of its core theme, this being human-nature entanglements. Hot-houses, peat experiments, the moss house, and the atmospheric research station reminded us all of how we live as a part of nature, not separate from it.

This year, the symposium examined themes such as ecological grief, multispecies kinship, and the politics of vegetal life, focusing on human-nature entanglements and ecological thought. The event brought together researchers with a range of experience, from postgraduate researchers (PGRs) to established academics who wanted to know more about upcoming research, helping to entrench a sense of community in the environmental humanities at Manchester. 

Two panels, one either side of lunch in the sun, showcased the research of four PGRS. The first panel focussed on creative understandings of the natural world and human-tree relations. Haewon Yi launched this panel by explaining how her creative inquiry and performance practice, “Theatre of Decomposition: Becoming a Body in the Forest”, is rooted in her fieldwork in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia, Canada) and was developed in response to how fungi and lichen can offer a lens through which to explore ecological grief and resilience. Theatre of Decomposition offers us an active way of engaging with ecological crises and the emotions surrounding them.

Firs Environmental Research Station: outside of the moss house

Ryan Woods’ “Indigenising with Trees” provides an overview of child-tree relations in Moss Side. Ryan has worked with schools in Manchester as part of his PhD research to help children understand nature’s perspective through creative practices such as place based learning and deep listening. Poems, writing letters from the perspective of trees, and listening to the trees all deepen children’s appreciation of nature.

The second panel interrogated accumulations of nature. Teodora Noszkay’s talk “Blind Spots” gave an overview of her PhD’s theoretical framework which combines critical plant studies with social reproduction theory. Her research asks how representations of plants in different media defamiliarise capitalism’s domination of both social and vegetal reproduction, with the result being their devaluation. Scales of time are important for understanding how plants move and reproduce, something which Dora poignant remarked is underappreciated.

Closing out the mini-symposium was Cleo with her presentation “(Il)licit Allure” which examined how demand for succulent plants in China, Japan, and Korea for the illegal trade in these plants. Cleo argued that country specific historical and cultural drivers of succulent collector groups are rarely examined, but can provide important insights as to why this illicit trade 一 which threatens the survival of specific plant species 一 is now booming. 

Firs Environmental Research Station: inside the moss house

The Q&A session raised the question of researcher positionality and offered insight into how the presenters’ personal histories influenced their decisions to pursue their projects in the ways they did.

The symposium finished with a tour of the Firs by Osian. If you have not had the chance to visit the Firs then I would thoroughly recommend asking to have a look around. The moss house has an almost otherworldly vibe to it, reminding me of scenes of nature taking over abandoned buildings in movies. Whilst it would be impossible to get lost in the hothouses in the literal sense (they’re a straight line), you would be forgiven for getting lost admiring the myriad plants from around the world housed within its glass walls.

Acknowledgment 

A big thank you to CIDRAL and the University of Manchester for supporting this event. Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for future Plant-human Research Network events like this one.   

Image copyright:

The photographs were taken during the PGR Mini-Symposium 19.05.2024 and provided by the organisers for this blog. 

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