The Plant-Human Research Network is issuing a call for papers for the Postgraduate Mini-Symposium taking place on Monday 19th of May 2025, 11am-3pm, at The Firs Environmental Research Station.
This Mini-Symposium is part of the Plant-Human Research Network Event Series, funded by CIDRAL.
The purpose of this mini-symposium is to showcase the research of PhD students at the University of Manchester working in the plant humanities - a burgeoning interdisciplinary field which interrogates plant perspectives and relationships in a variety of contexts. Showcasing new and innovative research into vegetal life at the University of Manchester, we aim to cultivate a thriving PhD community of plant people.
We warmly welcome submissions from all PhD students whose research interrogates, reimagines, or shifts our understanding of plant-human relations in historical, contemporary, or future contexts.
The event will take place at the Firs Environmental Research Station in Fallowfield, the longest continuously running research facility at the University of Manchester, with a history of over 100 years of active research.
The mini-symposium will consist of two, one hour long panels - one before lunch, and one after. Speakers will be grouped into panels based on the themes of their research. The details of how many speakers per panel, and so how long each paper needs to be, will be finalised once the deadline for the call for papers has passed. We advise that you plan your paper to be around 10 minutes long.
We ask interested researchers to submit the following to teodora.noszkay@manchester.ac.uk by the 21st of March 2025:
• Proposed title of presentation
• Abstract (no more than 250 words)
• Researcher biography (no more than 100 words)
We will review your submissions and confirm your panel allocation, as well as the exact desired length of your presentation, by Friday 4th of April 2025.
Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:
• Creative practice (e.g., writing, music composition)
• Gardens and green spaces
• Plant-animal relations
• Plant-human futurities
• Plant-human histories
• Plants and (or in) different media
• Plants and postcolonial/decolonial theory
• Plants in translation (incl. linguistic, cultural, spatial, temporal translations)
• Plants in urban spaces
• Thinking with plants
If you have any questions, please contact the organisers: Dora or Scott, both PGRs working in the plant humanities at the University of Manchester:
teodora.noszkay@manchester.ac.uk
scott.backrath@manchester.ac.uk
