Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism

The Roslyn Silver ’27 Science Lecture

Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam, an interdisciplinary plant biologist and Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, Indigenous studies, and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Their third book, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), demonstrates how botany’s foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how colonizers obliterated plant time’s deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like foreign humans. Subramaniam then pivots to imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of feminist and scientific thought to chart a course for more socially just practices of experimental biology.

Speakers

Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, trained as an evolutionary biologist and plant scientist, and has since embraced tools from the humanities and social sciences to help shape the field of Feminist Science and Technology Studies. She explores the philosophy, history, and culture of the natural sciences and medicine as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, and caste.

Subramaniam is the author of three books. These include Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, and Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Ludwick Fleck Prize for an outstanding book across the breadth of science and technology studies. She is co-editor of Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001), which put Feminist Science Studies on the map, and MEAT! A Transnational Analysis.

Rebecca Jordan-Young is Interim Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of WGSS at Barnard College. Jordan-Young is the author of two award-winning books: Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard 2010) and Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography with Katrina Karkazis (Harvard 2019). She is an internationally recognized leader in gender & sexuality studies and feminist/intersectional science and technology studies, having held visiting positions at the University of Amsterdam, Radboud University and the Cognitive Neuroscience Sector of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, and is a founding board member of the International Neurogenderings Network. She collaborates with colleagues across the natural and social sciences to explore the productive entanglements of science and the social world, especially as these relate to the entrenched structures of gender, race, and sexuality. A Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Brocher Foundation, and others, Jordan-Young’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Foundation for Veteran, Worker, and Environmental Health, among others.

Natali Valdez is an assistant professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University. Prior to Fordham, she has held faculty and fellowship positions at Yale University, Purdue University, and Wellesley College. She has also been an invited visiting scholar at the University of Vienna, University of Melbourne, and Universidad de los Andes. As a medical anthropologist and science and technology scholar, Valdez applies a feminist and critical race approach to understanding reproductive medicine, science, and technology. Her award-winning book, Weighing the Future, examines the clinical translation of epigenetics and is the first ethnography of ongoing pregnancy trials in the US and UK (University of California Press 2022). Her second book project, Families in the Body: Narratives of Generational Trauma and Healing, examines how experts, patients, and the broader public draw on notions of epigenetic inheritance and trauma to explain why we get sick and how to feel better.

Accessibility

This event is free and open to the public. Live ASL interpretation will be provided.

Registration is required.