Seeds of Diaspora - Incite at Columbia University

Completed Project

Seeds of Diaspora

Photo by Lynnette Widder.

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.

Three people sitting in front of two blue buckets outdoors.
Working group members at Truelove Seeds Farm, Glen Mills, Pennsylvania.

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.

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