Knowing Plants

Knowing Plants

Tuesday 16 June 2026, 12pm - 1.30pm

Schwarzman Centre, Ground Floor, Seminar Room 00.063

Free to attend, but registration is required.

Register via Eventbrite

Speakers:

June Bam (TORCH-AfOx Fellow 2026, Director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT), University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

Shailendra Bhandare (Curator, Ashmolean Museum Oxford)

Lauren Daly (Secondary Education Officer at the Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, chair of the Botanic Gardens Education Network)

Tara Inniss (CaribOx Fellow 2026, Department of History and Philosophy, Deputy Dean of Outreach, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus)

Madeline White (Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy and Culture, Northwestern University)

This interdisciplinary workshop discusses humanities approaches to plant knowledge, in the past and the present. Speakers will share the methodologies they use to research and disseminate knowledge about plants.

June Bam will discuss deep-time knowledge of the Cape Khoi-San 'Ausi' of landscape and changes, and what the interconnected global migration of 'Ausi' plants tells us about the past and the present. Lauren Daly will outline how the Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum tackles 'plant blindness' through interdisciplinary storytelling. Madeline White will share details of her BLOOM digital humanities project, which reconstructs historic plant material while translating archival material between science and the humanities. Tara Inniss will discuss her work using ethnobotany for the history of Barbados. Shailendra Bhandare will provide insight into curating the Ashmolean Museum's In Bloom exhibition.

This event is supported by the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology.

Environmental Humanities, TORCH Hubs