Tuesday, April 9, 2024
12:00 - 1:00 pm Central US Time
Join us for this free online conversation with scholar Keith Williams about plants as relatives, partners, and co-creators with humans.
Have you ever wondered about the connection between humans and plants and what it means to live in good relationship with our vegetal kin?
Join scholar and professor Keith Williams in a conversation about plants as relatives, partners, and co-creators with moderator Laura Pustarfi, board member of The Plant Initiative.
Our relationships with the vegetal world are typically informed by human exceptionalism and colonial extractivism animated by the flows of global capital. This conversation explores an alternative perspective that figures plants, fungi, and other relatives as partners and co-creators rather than resources to be exploited.
As part of the discussion, Keith will draw on Indigenous philosophy and post-humanism to offer a different way of being with our planty kin featuring examples from his personal experiences with gardening, wild food gathering, and with sacred plant medicines.
There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
Keith Williams is an assistant professor (educational studies) at Athabasca University. His work focuses on better understanding how to be good relations with our more-than-human kin.
Keith draws heavily on Haudenosaunee teachings (part of his paternal lineage is from a Mohawk community on the shores of Lake Ontario), posthuman philosophy, and his lived experience with family members—human and otherwise.
Keith has an undergraduate degree in plant science, a master’s in mycology, and a Ph.D. in educational studies with a focus on Indigenous ways of knowing and being.
Learn more about Keith from his Athabasca University web site. Some of his many publications are listed on his ResearchGate site here.
Each month, The Plant Initiative sends out an e-mail newsletter to provide timely information and resources about improving the plant-human connection as well as to keep you up to date on our work.
Here's the link to the March 2024 e-newsletter which was sent on March 15, 2024.
To subscribe to the e-newsletter, just visit our home page and enter your e-mail address on the form on that page. If you have a suggestion for a resource, event, or other item that may be of interest to subscribers, please consider sharing it with us at info@plantinitiative.org.
Thank you
The video recording is now posted on The Plant Initiative's YouTube channel of the online program "Plant Intelligence, Rights & Ethics - A conversation with Alessandra Viola" held January 31, 2024. Access the one-hour video directly here!
A December 2023 Plant Initiative report Toward a Plant Advocacy Movement is available now for download. This report presents reasons why a plant advocacy movement is timely, outlines challenges that such a movement would face, considers what can be learned from the animal advocacy movement, and suggests potential approaches that could be useful for operationalizing a plant advocacy movement. Access it free here.
Join the new Plant Networking site on Hylo!
This new free Hylo networking tool is a special interactive web site set up for those interested in the human-plant connection supported by The Plant Initiative and Networking with Plants in the Anthropocene. It's a space for sharing active research, collaborations, art, and any forms of humans and plant relations. Use this page to collaborate, share, and to connect with others interested in thoughtful ways of relating to plants.
Visitors to The Plant Initiative's web site are especially invited to join this online community!
The video recording is now posted on The Plant Initiative's YouTube channel of the online program "The Plant Thieves: A Conversation with Prudence Gibson" with Laura Pustarfi held November 29, 2023. Access the one-hour video directly here!
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