[EASST-Eurograd] CFP AAA 2026 - On the Verge of Blooming: Flowers and Vegetal Futures
Aline Bravo via Eurograd
On the Verge of Blooming: Flowers and Vegetal Futures
From a blooming desert to a 9-feet tall corpse flower in a botanical garden, flowers have often captured human imagination. Not surprisingly, ecological research on plants often revolves around their reproductive organs and mechanisms. But from anthropology, more than sexual elements, blooms can also be read as liminal moments when a plant is on the verge of its own future. A future that is anything but certain as the plant throws itself into the unknown without any assurance or hesitancy (Marder 2013, 135). Yet this futurity is never politically innocent: the line between living and non-living is itself a governance problem (Povinelli, 2016), one that determines which entities merit care, conservation, or mourning. To think with flowers, then, is also to ask who gets to count as life.
This conversation calls us toward different registers of thought. Plants ask us to contend with lively difference rather than anthropocentric likeness, and to engage ethics and politics in place-specific, situated ways (Sandilands 2016). Inspired by a vegetal ontology of indifference (Marder 2013), this panel seeks to think with flowers and beyond them to question vegetal futures. In a time of climate disasters and biodiversity collapse, what can plants teach us about living in uncertainty and building new futures? We invite collaborations that engage ethnographically, theoretically, or experimentally with plants to question vegetal reproduction and its potentialities. Some possible topics include the affective potential of flowers, vegetal epistemology, queering of (vegetal) sexuality, histories of plant propagation and reproduction, and botanical colonialism. But not forgetting that many plants do not blossom, we also invite those working with bryophytes, pteridophytes, and gymnosperms to contribute and tease the limits of human-vegetal relations that are not mediated by the more striking colours and smells of flowers.
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