TURBA Seminar: 'Persistent lives: How weeds and humans chase each other'

Program

Abstract

Social scientists exploring how plants are actively and materially present in various settings have acknowledged the biological characteristics of plants and how these are fundamental actors in human lives. Inspired by recent plant geographies, I “follow” weeds, which have been sparsely considered in more-than-human scholarship despite their ubiquity and considerable impact on human social life.

In the presentation, I will review how geography scholarship has considered weeds’ multiple forms: as invasive plants, as companion species in backyard gardens, and as spontaneous vegetation in urban landscapes. I will contribute to this scholarship by drafting a vegetal political ecology (Fleming 2017) of weeds at farms, the site where weeds more clearly challenge human purposes. I show how this human-weeds interaction has shaped the current industrial agricultural paradigm, considering the relations between weeds’ ecology, weeds’ management, the agrarian economy that weeds force, and core environmental problems which they are entangled with (pesticides’ pollution, biodiversity loss, soil erosion).

Lucía Argüelles

Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at TURBA.

To take part in this session, please contact larguellesr@uoc.edu.