A study of the visual image as a mode of discourse, together with an analysis of the terms in which images have been interpreted and criticized. Focus may be on the rhetoric of a particular image or set of images, or on more broadly theoretical writings about image.

What does it mean to "center" plants in humanistic inquiry? How do the methods, stakes, and conceptual frameworks of research shift when we attend not only to plants, but to their agency? And how does this approach differ from other strands of scholarship on the non-human? This graduate seminar explores emerging fields that reconceptualize human and non-human life through the lens of plant being. We will examine key approaches such as Critical Plant Studies, with its European philosophical foundations; Plant Humanities, grounded in sociohistorical analysis; and critiques of plant-centrism from the perspective of Animal Studies. These will be read in dialogue with more established disciplines, including the History of Botany, Ethnobotany, Archaeobotany, the Anthropology of Medicine, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Central to the course are debates over scale and objecthood, scientific legibility, temporality, and the meanings of intelligence, mobility, and sociality. These will be considered alongside enduring concerns with taxonomy, classification, indigeneity, genomics, visualization, coloniality, and geography. We will also situate scholarly discourse within or against alternative and speculative approaches, including Pseudo-Botany, Speculative Botany, Ecocritical Art and Literature, and Ecosemiotics. The course is structured around a series of experimental writing exercises, culminating in a final seminar paper.

Repeat Rules