Ecologies of Plants and Knowledge

Taking Ursula Le Guin's early short story 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the journal of the Association of Therolinguistics' as a point of departure, Sugiera explores Bruno Latour's concept of circulating reference and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's notion of scalability as two complementary critical perspectives on the paradigm of accumulating and ordering knowledge. This paradigm, which emerged with the scientific revolution and applies to this day, is based on a model that is fundamental for modernity, namely that of the sugar plantation in the New World. Its transposition into the experimental sciences in the second half of the seventeenth century is closely related to the appearance of new public institutions in the British Isles, namely the coffeehouses that acted as 'penny universities. Sugiera concludes by proposing new scientific practices inspired by trends in decolonialism, especially Eduard Kohn's beyond the-human anthropology.