Migrant Ecologies: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire

Migrant Ecologies: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire
Banu Subramaniam, Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College
Part of the Fall 2025 Social Sciences Forum

How have histories of colonialism and their foundational language of gender, race, sexuality, and nation shaped the language, terminology, and theories of the modern plant sciences? How and why do botanical theories remain grounded in the violence of their colonial pasts? In wrestling with these difficult origins, Subramaniam develops the concept of migrant ecologies to retheorize plant migration and reproductive biology. She explore new biological frameworks that harness the power of feminist thought in order to reimagine and reinvigorate our love of plants.

Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is author of Botany of Empire (2024), Holy Science (2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin (2016).

Admission is free.

This event is organized by the Department of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, and cosponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship, the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and the Department of Geography & Environmental Systems.

Photo courtesy of the speaker.