Current Events

 

The New England Botanical Club is resuming monthly meetings in a virtual format using Zoom this fall. Meetings will be the first Saturday of the month at 7pm. Non-members may register for the meeting access link here.

 

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Dr. Banu Subramaniam

Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
College of Humanities and Fine Arts
UMass-Amherst
Amherst, MA

"Decolonizing Botany"

Mark your calendar for the next NEBC Meeting on Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 7pm via Zoom.

Abstract: What does it mean to be a feminist botanist? Tracing the colonial roots of botany, I re-imagine a more inclusive and capacious field of botany untethered and decentered from its origins in histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism. Drawing on recent scholarship in the biological sciences, queer ecology, indigenous ecology, and postcolonial and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), I show how gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation shape the foundational language, terminology, and theories of modern botany, and how botany remains grounded in the violence of its colonial pasts. Decolonizing Botany reckons with these difficult origins and lays a roadmap to imagine a new feminist botany that harnesses the power of feminist thought to reimagine the practices of experimental biology.

 

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