CALL FOR PAPERS

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Date of Conference: 2–3 May 2025 (Friday-Saturday)

Mode: Hybrid (In-person and Online Participation)

Host: Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal

Partners: Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia; Sadhan Chandra Mahavidyalaya (affiliated with the University of Calcutta); Sundarban Mahavidyalaya (also affiliated with the University of Calcutta); and Gifts from the Sentient Forest (project supported by the Kone Foundation, Finland)

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Humankind is deeply interconnected with botanical life. As sources of sustenance, agents of healing, and symbols of wonder, plants are vital to our lives. While offering us materials essential for existence, flora also inspires community identity and expresses cultural heritage. Nourishing, life-supporting, and ever-present, plants represent about ninety percent of the Earth’s biomass. In the current era of intensifying ecological crisis, however, the future of many plant species and communities remains uncertain. If left unchecked, habitat loss, land use shifts, and climatic disturbances will continue to accelerate botanical decline worldwide.

In response to this context, the Plant Humanities (PH) has gained traction internationally over the last five years as an inter-/transdisciplinary area of research, pedagogy, and activism concerning plants and their multidimensional transactions with human beings. Entering the public domain in 2018, the term Plant Humanities refers to ‘humanistic modes of interpretation’ in the study of flora, society, culture, communities, history, art, literature, and other disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (Batsaki 2021, 2). According to the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative (2023), plants offer ‘remarkable scope for research and interpretation due to their global mobility and historical significance to human cultures’ (para. 1).
 

The Plant Humanities highlights the material and affective linkages between plants, people, and ecologies. Plant humanists investigate the narratives and ideas connected to flora; the creative works inspired by various species; and the myriad values that situate plants in socioeconomic contexts. The field examines a wide range of issues—from climate change and food security to the loss of biodiversity and plant-based cultural heritage. PH is exceptionally well-placed to articulate ethical concerns including the social repercussions of genetically modified flora and the moral implications of plant intelligence for practices of cultivation.

Accordingly, PH aims to promote dialogue and exchange between disciplines to engender new approaches to plants. In North America and Europe, research to date has emphasized cross-sector partnerships between universities, botanical gardens, herbaria, and other institutions. Plant humanists have focused, in particular, on the ways in which artworks, texts, archives, seeds, and preserved specimens narrate complex human-plant relations.  

 
The 2nd International Conference on Global Plant Humanities at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2–3 May 2025, will further the dialogue between the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences towards novel perspectives on the botanical world and human-flora relations. Highlighting cross-cultural understandings of plant life, the conference will focus on developments in Plant Humanities scholarship across the globe but with emphasis on the biocultural diversity of South Asian countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka).

We invite paper and panel proposals including, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

1. Art, literature, performance, music, and plant life
2. Gender, sexuality, and flora
3. Creative practices engaging plants as partners, collaborators, and agents
4. Botanical film, media, and popular culture
5. Phytopoetics, phytocriticism, and phytosemiotics
6. Plants, posthumanism, and the posthumanities
7. Plants, postcolonialism, and globalization
8. Spiritualities and religious traditions centralizing plants
9. Plants, nostalgia, solastalgia, mourning, and memorialization
10. Interactions between flora, fauna, and fungi in literature, film, and performance
11. Traditional and folk botanical knowledge systems
12. Indigenous people’s relations to plants and ecosystems
13. Plant agency, sensing, behavior, learning, and cognition
14. Plant temporality, memory, and communication
15. Plant pedagogies including concerns of ‘plant blindness’ and ‘plant awareness disparity’
16. Citizen science and botanical conservation
17. Social implications of scientific advances in plant cognition
18. Development of the Plant Humanities in the Global South
19. South and Southeast Asian interventions in the field