About

This reading group (or a ‘journal club’ as fellow scientists would call it) aims at bringing insights from different disciplines together to examine, contest, and reconfigure ‘gardening’ practices at different scales to bear on the debates regarding the relationships between human and nonhuman, the urban and the natural, the domestic and the wild in the age of Anthropocene.

This reading group seeks to explore at a wide spectrum of ‘gardening’ practices. They can encompass our home garden cultivation, colonial and capitalist sites of exploitation, ecological preservation and restoration, as well as the science of geoengineering—a practice that, according to contested ecologist and futurologist Stewart Brand, ‘is all about gardening’.

We invite insights across disciplines Lodged in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities, and with a humble aspiration to practice entanglement—often blocked from discipline-bonded thinking yet fundamental to understanding the current ecological crises—this reading group aims at providing a platform where scientific, philosophical and aesthetic approaches and inquiries can engage in a dialogue.

Drawing inspiration from the green spaces in and around St Andrews, from the medieval times to the present, we hope to navigate between our local experience and the global climate crisis from and through the ‘down-to-earth’ idea of garden(ing).

This event is part of the Environmental Humanities Month 2023 Program.