Sandra Calkins: "Botanical discipline. Hapticality and embodied archives in plant research"

This is the third session of the Lecture Series Sources and their Materiality: Reflecting on Nature, Reflecting on Society: A Different History of Botany. 
You can find the whole program as PDF here

Prof. Dr. Sandra Calkins will present a lecture on Botanical discipline. Hapticality and embodied archives in plant research and Dr. Robin Schmahl (Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin) will present a lecture on The Water of the Nile spreads to all lands without allocation: Administrative Materialities of Irrigation and Agriculture in Ottoman Egypt.

Botanical discipline: Hapticality and embodied archives of plant research

Sensory perception is often dismissed in scientific institutions as too subjective, yet it is central to botanical knowledge production. Botany in particular depends on training human senses to study vegetal life. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, my lectures examines everyday practices in scientific and gardening work and traces how institutional routines and the epistemic culture of botany “discipline the senses.” The institution provides criteria that shape the perception of the value of plants in the exhibit and that also affect ensuing more-than-human affective dynamics. However, “disciplined senses” such as sight and touch are also particularly attuned to the expressions of vegetal life. This chapter outlines the ways in which plants can be both disciplined and undisciplining presences, often collaborating with institutional rules and expectations but at times confounding them and the trained human sensoria that are central to knowing them.