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Pre-order. Available May 13 2027
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Description

Bringing together a diverse interdisciplinary team of academics and artists, this book reveals how plants shape future-making practices across cultures, societies, and technologies, and explores why this matters now.

The future cannot be thought of without considering the material contexts in which it is produced, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. This book argues that anticipating and planning for the future needs to be more inclusive of nonhuman work. By focusing on plants and asking what happens when we platform plants as partners in making the future, this explores how vegetal powers support, boycott, or supplant human-centred ventures.

Bringing together a global team of authors, Vegetal Futures examines how different forms of governance, technology, practice, and thought associated with plants intervene in the world to shape the future. From fieldwork with Muslim beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to houseplant bio capitalism, chapters cover a diverse range of vegetal subjects across time and place, asking critical questions throughout, such as what resources might be necessary to rethink power relations inherent in species hierarchy, democratising plant and human life? What kinds of institutions would be necessary for such a project, and what are the impacts of such conceptions?

This book explains why we cannot attempt to envision the future without plants.

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Table of Contents

PART ONE – Future-invoking through more-than-human cultures

Chapter One
Queer future and plant time: World making with(out) reproduction
Joela Jacobs

Chapter Two
Trans/plants in speculative fiction: Thinking across bodies, minds, and plants from queer and trans perspectives
Timothy S. Miller

Chapter Three
The world after: Bees, robobees and plant futures
Larisa Jasarevic

Chapter Four
Magical herbalism: Summoning plant powers to manifest the future
Giulia Carabelli

PART TWO – Contesting capitalist futures

Chapter Five
Do hydroponic herbs dream of the sun? Speculative futures through vegetal HydroPoetics
Katy Connor & Franklin Ginn

Chapter Six
The many lives and times of seeds
Helene Schulze

Chapter Seven
Anticipatory action and vegetal resistance within aroidmania
Matthew Beach

Chapter Eight
Biocapital futures: Patenting life against the commons
Gabriella Demczuk

PART THREE – Reworking the past: Planty legacies for the future

Chapter Nine
'I talk to my plants': the Victorian plant lady's cross-species amities
Ann Garascia

Chapter Ten
Mixed feelings: The intricacies of futures made in the botanic garden
Cornelia Ertl

Chapter Eleven
Where wheat and olive sing: Folklore, ecocide and Indigenous futurity in Palestine
Sarah Sinno

Chapter Twelve
Arboreal futures: Centering roots and relations in the conservation politics of northeast India
Aparajita Majumdar

Chapter Thirteen
Isale's futures: Reckoning with dispossession's wounds
Stacey Langwick

Chapter Fourteen
An autohistoria of cosmopolitical learnings from plant people
Imayna Caceres

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published May 13 2027
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 288
ISBN 9781350567313
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Giulia Carabelli

Giulia Carabelli is Senior Lecturer in the School…

Anthology Editor

Franklin Ginn

Franklin Ginn is Associate Professor of Cultural G…

Anthology Editor

Matthew Beach

Matthew Beach is a postgraduate researcher in the…

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