Sandra Calkins: The undergrowth. Plotting human-plant futures from Uganda

Plots and other spaces under cultivation are not only vital for nourishment and health but in many cases also provide rich metaphors for social life and imaginations of the future. In south-central Uganda, banana plantations are sites of cultural attachment, of political history and ecology, and of more recent biotechnological experimentation. Bananas are central to local idioms of growth and ideas of societal development. This talk follows a transnational research effort that over the past two decades has aimed to introduce nutritionally enhanced banana plants within Uganda and East Africa more widely. It draws particular attention to the undergrowth – what has grown underneath, laterally to, at the margins of and in excess of the larger lab-based scientific endeavour of creating genetically modified bananas. Attending to the undergrowth of science allows analysing long-standing Ugandan relationships with these plants, accounting for deep histories of a place and widely spread but undertheorized quotidian forms of plant knowledge. In this way, the undergrowth foregrounds forms of knowing that are central to devising alternatives to the modernist capitalist ethos of growth and to developing other trajectories for the future of collective life.