Custodians of Precarious Seeds: Risk and Vulnerability in Global Seed Banking Practices, between Dystopian Infrastructures and Decolonial Commons
Lead Research Organisation:
Goldsmiths University of London
Department Name: Media and Communications
Abstract
Against the backdrop of man-made climate change and disproportionate levels of vulnerability in the Global South, this thesis focuses on seed banking practices as sites of struggle in the mitigation of future risks.
Through divergent empirical case studies, I map an underexplored interdisciplinary space of seed banks as emerging infrastructures within scientific communities and as sites of resistance. Using a feminist, decolonial reading of biopolitics, combined with Science and Technology Studies, I propose that seed banks exemplify a lack of analysis of the gendered, neo-colonial implications of conservation/biodiversity practices.
The case studies reveal contrasting views regarding who the legitimate custodians of knowledges and plant materials are, and how access to collections is regulated. The banks actively contribute to the iconography and epistemology of the Anthropocene, neoliberal capitalism and the politics of vulnerability. Central to my thesis is how global seed banks perform scientific and political claims regarding the control of 'nature', knowledge and future scenarios, whilst feeding into discourses of 'precarity'.
Through divergent empirical case studies, I map an underexplored interdisciplinary space of seed banks as emerging infrastructures within scientific communities and as sites of resistance. Using a feminist, decolonial reading of biopolitics, combined with Science and Technology Studies, I propose that seed banks exemplify a lack of analysis of the gendered, neo-colonial implications of conservation/biodiversity practices.
The case studies reveal contrasting views regarding who the legitimate custodians of knowledges and plant materials are, and how access to collections is regulated. The banks actively contribute to the iconography and epistemology of the Anthropocene, neoliberal capitalism and the politics of vulnerability. Central to my thesis is how global seed banks perform scientific and political claims regarding the control of 'nature', knowledge and future scenarios, whilst feeding into discourses of 'precarity'.
