Despite the ‘vegetal turn’ in various branches of sciences and arts, plants remain relatively understudied within anthropology, and our disciplinary perspectives on plants have been selective and fragmentary. While some practices, species, and locations have received much attention, many others have remained on the margins of anthropological inquiry. The aim of this conference is precisely to focus on multi-species worlds emerging with/through more common, less charismatic, less visible, disregarded plants, practices, and places. Our approach to ‘common’, ‘disregarded’ and ‘marginalized’ is twofold: On the one hand, we are interested in explorations of the margins of socio-cultural worlds (‘weeds’ in the gardens, ruderal plants in the cities, and so on), and on practices, species, and entanglements that have been less studied. On the other hand, we invite papers that, while empirically focusing on more popular topics, offer new theoretical perspectives and methodological insights.
With this in mind, we invite ethnographically grounded papers and methodological reflections related (but not limited) to the following themes:

1. Plants and cities: The potential/existing roles plants (can)play in urban areas and/or in the politics and practices of urban governance; Practices of everyday care; Multispecies relations, encounters, and affects involving plants; Ethnographies of urban nature and vegetal life.

2. Politics of plant life: Ethnographies of plant governance; Rights and response-abilities of plants; Vegetal agency and political representation of plants; Plants and global politics, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

3. Vegetal relations in more-than-human worlds: Vegetal ontologies and imaginaries; Plants as particular forms of being alive; Plants as participants in human-nonhuman webs of kinship and relatedness.

4. Plants mobility; New perspectives on ‘common’ species, practices, and places.

5. Explorations of vegetal speculative futures: Planthroposcene (Myers, 2021); Plantocene (Kennedy, 2020), Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015), others.

6. Ethnographies of/with plants: methodological reflections and interventions.

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words along with a brief biography by filling up this form https://forms.gle/XHU1G5MRs13TvA729 by March 1, 2025.

Limited financial support for transportation, lodging and meals will be available–please indicate in the form whether you would like to be considered for such support, or whether you are able to rely on your own institutional funding. The conference is organized by the Institute of Anthropology, University of Gdańsk, and partially funded from the project “Plants as urban citizens: exploring possibilities for more-than-human flourishing in a metropolis (PLAURCI)” (project No 2022/47/P/HS3/03403) https://plaurci.ug.edu.pl/

For questions, please contact:
Anna Zadrożna anna.zadrozna@ug.edu.pl
Filip Rogalski filip.rogalski@ug.edu.pl