In this episode, we're discussing plants, their exuberant multispecies sexualities and what we can learn from them, how botany is always interlinked with its cultural and historic context including colonialism, and an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist.

Host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Professor Banu Subramaniam, the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. The book is about plant worlds and the legacies of colonialism. It focuses on three subfields: plant taxonomy, plant reproductive biology, and plant biogeography. Plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and its enduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonial sexuality were imposed on plants. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centres questions of what belongs, or doesn’t, when and where.

In the eighth episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to Pranay Lal, a
natural history writer and climate change advocate about the dearth of interest in publishing books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums, how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more.

Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit Fest Award and Delhi World Book Fair Award 2017. It was listed among Mint’s 50 most significant books about India since Independence. His second book, Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (2021), also received multiple awards and was named among the 20 Best Non-fiction Books of 2021 by GQ and won the Green Lit Fest Award 2023. Both books have been translated into several languages.

In this episode host Susan Mathews talks to Heather Davis, the author of Plastic Matter (2022) about plastic and how it has completely permeated our world. They cover a wide range of topics from synthetic universality, technocapitalism, chemical legacies, queer kin, reproductive questions raised by plastic, and hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism.

Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the author of Plastic Matter, Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies. You can find Heather Davis on social media at Instagram: @theoryxdaddy and on X @heather_davish1.