Tag: plant-human relations

Maintenance of Forest Restoration: The Fragility of Promised Futures

Syed Shoaib Ali December 10, 2024

As a growing area of inquiry in STS, maintenance studies brings two critical insights to the post-Actor Network Theory (ANT) landscape. First, relations are not a state of nature, but once established, take a great amount of ongoing, behind-the-scenes effort to maintain and mend (Star, 1991; Denis and Pontille, 2019). Second, a greater locus of scientific research and innovation is invested in the assemblies of maintenance and repair than in the creation of novel ones (Edgerton, 2011). Stability is ever produced through a constant recognition and remediation of the material fragility of things (Denis & Pontille, 2023). In their seminal article in Theory, Culture & Society, Graham and Thrift (2007) dug forth the ever-expanding arena of maintenance and repair that constitute infrastructures and objects which otherwise remain invisible to the public eye, doing their job. Moments of breakdown cast socially unacceptable ruptures in the fabric of life, inviting all forms of labor, learning, and innovation to keep going. Their dig on the inevitable politics of maintenance, “to invent the train is to also invent the train crash” (p. 4), struck me as a gut-churning reflection on the state of Himalayan forests in the aftermath of large-scale tree plantation programs. On one hand, global afforestation and nature restoration programs aim to repair the historical excesses of extractive industry and empire. On the other hand, the science which guides these programs tends to be far removed from the place, history, and nature of the contagion. This dissonance instills a deep sense of fragility on the promise of restored futures in the Global South. What if the “politics of maintenance” never takes place, and rural populations are forced to live with the inevitable crash? (read more...)

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Grafting with Care: Encountering Human-Plant Relations Through Experiments with Roses

Tayeba Batool February 14, 2023
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When seen through the experiences and histories of experimentation and care, plants such as roses can bring new insights into the affective and material entanglements of more-than-human relations. My ethnographic encounter with Mr. Changa, a prominent figure in the world of horticulture and plant nurseries in Pakistan, gives us a glimpse on “seeing and being-with” (Haraway 1998) non-human others, such as roses, to foreground the making of social worlds through affect. These encounters show that even though colonial inscriptions on social understandings of nature were marked in influences over tastes and attitudes (Mintz 1985), an attention to nuanced affects, articulations, and values can disrupt the process of creating “authentic” relations with plants and singular legacies of expertise. Writing against the dominance of an object-oriented ontology in mainstream science and technology narratives, this post follows scholarship that emphasizes an “anthropology beyond the human” (Kohn 2013) to center the connections between plants and humans as not only metaphorical but literal (De La Cadena 2010). (read more...)

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