Slow Seminar

Slow Seminar- Thus Spoke the Plant

seacoast Slow Seminar

Happy Spring quarter everyone!

SEACoast is delighted to invite you to our first Slow Seminar in Spring. We will discuss Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke the Plant (North Atlantic Books, 2018) on April 27, Wednesday, 8-10am Pacific Daylight Time (yes, it’s a morning event for those in California.) We are thrilled to have Dr. Kat Gutierrez, Assistant Professor in History at UCSC and currently Mellon fellow at the New York Botanical Garden, to be our discussant.

Participants are asked to read the book in advance. If you plan to attend, please fill out this form. The Zoom link will be sent out at least an hour before the event. Please feel free to circulate the attached flyer.

We hope to see you there!

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A few words about Thus Spoke the Plant from its publisher:

“In this “phytobiography”–a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant–research scientist Monica Gagliano reveals the dynamic role plants play in genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own ‘voices’ and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.”

For more info about the author, please visit Monica Gagliano’s personal website:
https://www.monicagagliano.com

Slow Seminar- Apichatpong’s Cemetery of Splendor

seacoast Slow Seminar

SEACoast is happy to invite you to our last event of the Winter quarter!

This is an online movie party. We will be watching Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2015 movie, Cemetery of Splendor (trailer), on March 3, Thursday, 5-8pm PST. We plan to use the last 50 minutes for discussion, and we are delighted to have Natalie Ng, PhD candidate in Anthropology at UCSC, to start us off with some thoughts.

If you plan to attend, please fill out this form. The Zoom link will be sent out at least an hour before the event. When you arrive at the Zoom meeting, you will be given a URL and a passcode to access the film.
This event requires no preparation. We hope to see you there!

 

Slow Seminar- The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

seacoast Slow Seminar

You are invited to SEACoast’s last event this Fall!

On December 2, Thursday, 5-7pm PST, we will discuss Amitav Ghosh’s new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. We are thrilled to have Prof. Noriko Aso, historian at UCSC and member of the SEACoast Advisory Board, join and start us off with a few questions. We would like to ask participants to read the book in advance of the seminar. RSVP by filling out this form. The event flyer is attached. Please forward to colleagues and students who might be interested in attending. Participants will receive a Zoom link at least 30 minutes before the event.

A few words about this book from the University of Chicago Press: “A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.”

 

Slow Seminar- Film Screening of Lost Worlds by Kalyanee Mam

seacoast Slow Seminar

On Friday, October 8th, from 5-7pm PST via Zoom, we are fortunate to have Kalyanee Mam share and speak about her short film, Lost Worlds. The film shows how the dredging of sand in Cambodia feeds the foundations of Singapore’s development projects, while altering the social and ecological bases of survival for coastal communities in Cambodia.

The film screening will be followed by brief comments from Gonzalo Carrasco (Environmental Chemistry) and Kirk Lange (Human Geography), each of whom will share their knowledge and experience of land reclamation at their respective fieldsites in Singapore and Bali. The slow seminar will be a space to build on these contributions and enrich our thinking about the social, ecological, and environmental entanglements of land reclamation.

No reading preparation or prior knowledge of the topic or region is required for this event. Simply come and get to know SEACoast, what the process of a Slow Seminar conversation between different fields might look like, and learn with us about the complexities of environmental change in Southeast Asia.

 

Kalyanee Mam is an award-winning filmmaker whose work is focused on art and advocacy. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge regime, Kalyanee immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family. Her debut documentary feature, A River Changes Course, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Best Feature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Her other works include documentary shorts Lost World, Fight for Areng Valley, Between Earth & Sky and Cries of Our Ancestors. She has also worked as a cinematographer and associate producer on the 2011 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job. She is currently working on a new feature documentary, The Fire and the Bird’s Nest

| Please RSVP for Zoom link by October 4th


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