Seeds of Diaspora - Incite at Columbia University

Part of the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, Seeds of Diaspora convenes an interdisciplinary working group of academics and practitioners.

This group is selecting a short list of non-cultivated plants found in New York City, and considering how they each embody native and non-native landscape imaginaries. The group will link each plant and its botanical descriptors to maps, images, practices, and texts that communicate ecological, herbalist, culinary, agricultural, literary, artistic, anthropological, and other cultural traditions.

In an era of fraught nationalism, mass migration and climate change, and as the boundaries between ecosystems and society are constantly reconfigured, the group will emphasize the potential of plants to connect and to describe cultural landscapes past, present, and future.