Rhetoric and Plants
My dissertation defense is five years behind me, and it seems like a lifetime has transpired between then and now. As I turn back to the manuscript in earnest, I find myself with new perspectives on science, human sociality and behavior, communication, academic writing and knowledge production, time—even my relationship to backyard gardening has had to be reformulated post-Covid. (Side note: we need a word that means "after the onset of Covid," but doesn't imply that Covid is behind us the way "post-Covid" does.) My dissertation project originally developed out of an interest in animal studies, which very quickly led me to wonder about the kinds of questions that could be asked within something like “plant studies,” which did not seem to exist at the time. Hell, animal studies barely existed at the time, at least in rhetoric. Throughout the process of writing Rhetoric and Plants, I resisted taking the ecocritical turn until the very end. It felt, to me, like there were logically prior questions I needed to ask before I could begin to think the relationship between humans and plants ecocritically. In hindsight, the apocalyptic pressure we probably all feel was certainly a driving force behind the urgency of the project for me, even as I wrestled with more organism-level problems like sex, pain, sentience, and consciousness. Though I did turn to environmental rhetoric in my final chapter, it was primarily as a form of critique in light of the new perspectives on plants that my previous chapters had developed, with the idea that this pointed the way toward a plant-inclusive ecocriticism. I still believe that it’s a mistake to endocytotically engulf plants into these preexisting conversations without re-theorizing our understanding of and relationship to them. As I revisit the manuscript, however, the ecological urgency that underwrites the whole endeavor is becoming far more explicit as context for the conceptual questions I’m continuing to ask.
'Actually satisfied': Developing a Scientific Writing Course
With this piece, I seek to share the lessons I took from the process of developing a scientific writing course in which I adopted lab-based inquiry without the benefit of a lab. Though still in its early stages, this article will come to include assessment, institutional navigation, student comments, and advice for other teachers who find themselves embarking on a scientific writing journey, especially those who must first build the ship.
Foreign and Familiar: Making Space for Plants
This short video served as the introduction to my work preceding the roundtable discussion, "The Language of Roots and Pollen: Toward Transformative Theories of Plant Communication," delivered at the 2021 NCA Annual Convention.
