Note: Check out the Seedy Futures Reading & Resource List HERE

Our inaugural Pre-Conference Discussion Series will feature three virtual events leading up to DOPE, which we envision as informal and collaborative spaces bringing people together from within and without academia around a central topic.

Full descriptions:

"In Vitro" Temporalities: Openings for Landscape Ethnography Using Climate Fiction

March 15th at 11am ET / 8am PT

This three-part session session invites the audience to explore how climate fiction offers novel modes of expanding understandings of the interface between human experience and ecological process. After introducing and screening the Larissa Sansour’s film In Vitro (2019), the panellists will present six “flash ethnographies” (McGranahan and Stone 2021), from the US, Spain, Mexico, Turkey, Georgia and Laos, that demonstrate how the film’s evocations of temporality provide generative openings for thinking about ethnographic representations of time and temporalities across different landscape formations. The panel will conclude with a writing exercise that asks the audience to use the film and flash ethnographies to rethink their own research sites.

Organized by the Landscape Lab at UC Santa Cruz:

The Landscape Lab is a graduate student-run research collective at UC Santa Cruz that explores the diversity and complexity of landscapes, in the contemporary and across histories and futures. We are interested in landscapes as places of encounter and mutual transformations between people, plants, soils, animals, geologies, bacteria, and other biotic and abiotic, natural and supernatural beings.

So You Want to Talk About Land Theft Universities

March 18th at 1pm ET / 12pm CT

The CHE-DOPE graduate student collaborative interrogates the foundations of our respective educational institutions and their "methodological narratives of benevolence" (Lee and Ahtone 2020). If you're interested in thinking through the racist premises of your home institution, the relationship between academic knowledge production and the settler colonial state, and decolonial praxes in a land grant university setting, join us!

First, our core organizers will give a brief presentation on our project, constructing our reading group, the beginnings of our archival research, constructing partnerships, and what future actions we are planning with this research and reading group. The following discussion will take up these readings:

• "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" by Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang
• "Land Reform and the Green New Deal" by Levi Van Sant
• Introduction of The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth by Nick Estes and the Red Nation Collective

Organized in collaboration between the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin and the Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) at the University of Kentucky:

Planning for Seedy Futures

March 21st at 3:30pm EDT

Seedkeeping is an over ten thousand year old practice, and in the contemporary moment people are increasingly turning toward it for connections to ancestral and community memory, building and maintaining autonomous food systems, and preparing for and adapting to unpredictable environmental and political shifts. This discussion brings together a panel of seed people to discuss forms of planning, collaborations, and solidarities through seed. 

The first hour will be a discussion among the panelists: Amirah Mitchell, Maritza Geronimo, Sophia Doyle, and Mehmet Öztan; moderated by Jim Embry, an earth and community collaborator local to Lexington. This open ended discussion will cross borders, ecosystems, population densities, bringing thinkers and practitioners together through seedkeeping, grounded by optional pre-readings selected by the panelists. The second part of the session will open up the conversation to include the participants in a working session, with the aim of imagining and manifesting connections and organizing infrastructures among seed folks in digital space. We invite all to attend, contribute, and share, regardless of expertise or knowledge.

Organized by the DopeSeeds team

Panelists:

Amirah Mitchell - Owner-Operator of Sistah Seeds

Amirah Mitchell (she/her) is a farmer, seedkeeper and community educator. She has worked in agriculture and food justice organizations since 2007 and holds a B.S. in Horticulture from Temple University. She has worked on farms in Massachusetts, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and gives community workshops on seed-keeping and agroecology. Amirah is passionate about connecting communities of color to their cultural seeds and seed-keeping practices. In 2021, Amirah started Sistah Seeds, a farm growing heirloom vegetable, grain and herb seeds from across the African Diaspora, with a focus on African-American, West African, and Afro-Caribbean cultural crops.

Maritza Geronimo - Geography Ph.D. student at UCLA, Organizing in collectivity with Eagle Condor Liberation Front, Sexta Grietas del Norte, Guerrerense Diaspora Zine, and Xicanx World-making and Futurities Project

Maritza Geronimo (they/them) is a Nahua Guerrerense Xicanx from Anaheim, CA (Tongva Lands). They are a zinester, gardener, filmmaker, and herbalist who centers BIPOC in their community work. Their research focuses on Indigenous food autonomy and struggles for land in the city. Twitter: @MaritzaGer

Sophia Doyle - London Freedom Seed Bank

Independent researcher currently based in Berlin. Her research focuses on the political ecology and metabolic histories of food and farming and seed sovereignty. After graduating from the MA in Postcolonial Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, UoL, she is currently continuing to research the nexus of agroecological memory, practice, knowledge-production and environmental justice. She is passionate about collaborative research and creative practice and always up for connecting with researchers and activists across disciplines and geographies to imagine and plan for alternative, generative and abolitionist infrastructures and futures. In her free time, she organises the reading group ‘Critical Infrastructures’ and supports the organisation of the DOPE12 conference. Beyond academia, she is a food grower and activist, recently completed a half-year Practical Residency in Sustainable Horticulture at Schumacher College in Devon and is a co-director of the seed saver network London Freedom Seed Bank.

Tw: catastrophia3

Email: sophia.k.doyle@protonmail.com

Mehmet Öztan - Co-owner of Two Seeds in a Pod Heirloom Seed Company and Service Assistant Professor in Eberly College of Arts & Sciences at West Virginia University

Mehmet Öztan is a Turkish seed keeper/grower, farmer, co-owner of Two Seeds in a Pod Heirloom Seed Company, and a public scholar who focuses on restoration and preservation of the seeds of Türkiye on his six-acre farm located in Reedsville, West Virginia. The farm is a learning space and a gateway to exploring more than fifty food crops for their cultural significance, culinary uses, climate adaptability and significance related to food justice and food security as well as a space in which Öztan builds relations with plants and their stewards.

Öztan holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering from Michigan State University and is currently a part-time Service Assistant Professor in Eberly College of Arts & Sciences at West Virginia University.

Moderated by:

Jim Embry - Sacred Earth Activist, farmer, seedkeeper

Jim Embry considers himself Stardust condensed in human form that represents billions of years of Earth’s evolution. As an evolutionary being, his purpose is to contribute to a paradigm shift towards Sacred Earth consciousness and refers to himself as a Sacred Earth Activist. As an activist, Jim has participated in most of the major social justice movements of his era and now believes that the sustainability movement encompasses all the other movements. As founder and director of Sustainable Communities Network, Jim contributes to the theory and practice of sustainable living while cultivating collaborative efforts at the local, national, and international levels with a focus on food systems. Jim is at home at every level, whether as a six-time USA delegate to Slow Food’s Terra Madre in Italy, a visitor to Cuba to study organic farming, extensive work in urban agriculture, or planting on his 30-acre farm. Jim maintains that the local food and sustainable agriculture movement is the foundation of a sustainable community. As a scuba diver and photographer, Jim has traveled widely to capture the beauty of the land and oceans. He has exhibited his photos in books, hospitals, galleries, and magazines. Working now on two books, Jim has contributed articles and photographs to We Are Each Other’s Harvest, Sustainable World Source Book, Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, Latino Studies, Biodynamics Journal, African American Heritage Guide, Stella Naturaand other publications. Jim believes that we need some big ideas that connect humans in a sacred relationship with the Earth and Cosmos, which will require us to think not just “out of the box” but “out-of-the-barn”