Until recently, the humanities and social sciences largely positioned plants at the margins of life, society, and thought, marking them through the absence implied in the notion of “vegetative life.” Yet recent interdisciplinary research and theorists following the path opened by posthumanism have discerned here not an absence, but rather a rich and abundant form of life: an entire web of relations, a different understanding of embodiment, and an alternative temporality. The trajectory of thought inaugurated by the “plant turn” has opened up for discussion not only how we think about plants, but also how we understand capacities such as sensing, knowing, and thinking that have traditionally been attributed exclusively to humans.
What can plants know? How might they think? How do they remember, and what kinds of witnessing are they capable of?
Drawing on several foundational works in the field of Plant Studies, this seminar will explore these questions.
Sibel Yardımcı has been a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University since 2004. In addition to her doctoral dissertation, published in Turkish under the title Biennial in Globalizing Istanbul (İletişim, 2005), Yardımcı has contributed to edited volumes and published widely on urbanism, nationalism, biopolitics, queer theory, disability studies, and posthumanist debates.
