How do plants shape histories, cultures, environments, and futures – and how can the humanities help us understand these complex entanglements?
Ghent University invites PhD students from across the humanities and social sciences to join a 4-day interdisciplinary summer school in the Plant Humanities, bringing together scholars, artists and thinkers working at the intersections of botany, history, literature, philosophy, art, anthropology, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies.
When: July 14-17
How: Summer school for active PhD-students, travel and accommodation paid for up to 3 participants at Uppsala University, no registration fee.
Application: Apply via email to daniel.mossberg@cemus.uu.se with a statement of interest (max. 1 page), including your full name, student status, current institutional affiliation and research interests.
“B-MOVE: Beyond Migration: Organisms, Matter, Voices, Ecologies” is an ENLIGHT Thematic Network (ETN), part of the wider ENLIGHT university network. B-MOVE brings together students, researchers, and educators to explore migration and mobility beyond human-centred perspectives, connecting ecological processes with cultural and creative practices.
ENLIGHT is a European university network to promote equality, increased quality of life, sustainability, and global engagement through higher education.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The Plant Humanities
The Plant Humanities respond to ecological crisis, biotechnological transformations, and longstanding anthropocentrism by repositioning plants as historically, culturally, and conceptually consequential beings rather than a passive background to human action. They seek to overcome ‘plant blindness’ by cultivating new ways of seeing, reading, and thinking that are relational, earthbound, and ethically attentive. This summer school aims to understand plants not as mute resources or decorative motifs, but as co-constitutive participants in shared worlds and shared futures. We aim to cultivate modes of attention – historical, literary, visual, and theoretical – that make plant life perceptible and meaningful, and to explore how thinking with plants (a concept coined by Michael Marder) might unsettle dominant philosophical assumptions about subjectivity, agency, and cognition.
Plant life foregrounds processes over events, coexistence over mastery, and vulnerability over sovereignty. Reading and thinking with plants thus encourage alternative interpretive practices that are slower, more relational, and attuned to nonhuman timescales, many of which will be explored over the course of this summer school.
Join us to rethink plants – not as background, but as central actors in Humanities research and human ways of being.
- Keynote lectures and seminars by leading international scholars in the Plant Humanities
- Hands-on workshops exploring new ways of centring plants in creative and scholarly
work - Collaborative discussions across disciplines, fostering new perspectives on plant–human
relations - PhD-focused sessions, including opportunities to present work-in-progress and receive
feedback - Site-based learning in and around Ghent, engaging with botanical, cultural, and
historical collections
Themes will include:
- Plant agency and multispecies worlds
- Colonial, imperial, and global plant histories
- Plants in literature, art, and visual culture
- Agriculture, biotechnology, and environmental justice
- Methods and methodologies in the Plant Humanities
Who should apply?
This summer school is designed for PhD students working in:
- History, literature, philosophy, archaeology
- Art history, cultural studies, anthropology
- Environmental humanities, STS, geography
- Or related fields with an interest in plants and plant–human relationships
Why Ghent?
Held at Ghent University, one of Europe’s leading research universities, the summer school
offers a stimulating academic setting in a vibrant, historic city with rich botanical and cultural
heritage.