FRSEM 63w: Vegetal Humanities

This interdisciplinary freshman seminar invites a new kind of plant-consciousness.  Our guides will be the contemporary artists and thinkers who have been encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life--or recalling very old ones--as they create plant protagonists, gardens in galleries, and botany-based forms of philosophy, architecture, music and more. Following the lead of these culture-makers, we will draw on the new science of plant communication and learning; uncover plant-based global histories, and renew ancient understandings of human-plant relations. But plants themselves will also be primary sources in this class, as you follow a sequence of exercises for deepening encounters with a plant "interviewee" (one you'll grow at home from an unidentified seed), and become the class expert on a particular species through guided research in multiple forms of plant knowledge, culminating in in your own contribution to the vegetal humanities. At the same time, we'll come to this area of study with critical questions. With climate crisis upon us, in a time of social inequity, poisonous politics, and mass dislocations, why this attraction to plants? Is the vegetal turn a diversion from tough human problems?  Or a new way to approach them? Is there reason to think cultural change could, even now, change the fate of nature?