plants

This short film combines remote sensing, qualitative interviews, desk research, and illustrations to show the complexities and controversies surrounding mangrove reforestation in Senegal and The Gambia.

This special section edited by Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel, and Maan Barua considers how multispecies flourishing works when the creatures are awkward, when togetherness is difficult, when vulnerability is in the making, and death is at hand.

Jeremy Brice draws on ethnographic fieldwork among winemakers in South Australia to look at pasteurisation as a way to unsettle the assumption that only individual organisms can be killed, rendering other sites and spaces of killing visible.

Anna Svenson considers the epistemological implications of the digitization of the Directors’ Correspondence (DC) collection (1841-1928) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She concludes that care is needed to avoid replicating the invisible losses of extractive approaches to knowledge production, particularly in the context of collection-based biodiversity conservation.

In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Leah V. Aronowsky uses the history of an unrealized technology, the bioregenerative life-support system, to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Salazar explores world-making processes through which extreme frontiers of life are made habitable, arguing that microbial worlds are becoming part of worlding processes and projects that further these frontiers.

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Istvan Praet focuses on the ultraviolet spectrum to examine how astrobiologists look at celestial bodies, planetary atmospheres, the skin, and the eye. He offers a reflection on how outer space can be apprehended from a humanities perspective.

In this review essay, Jennifer Hamilton responds to Michael Marder’s book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), exploring three of Marder’s concepts, plant “nourishment,” “desire” and “language,” through readings of Gabrielle de Vietri’s installation The Garden of Bad Flowers (2014), the story of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Alice’s encounter with talking flowers in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).