Vegetal Studies

This is just to give a brief introduction and description of my interest in plants. 

My interest in plants starts from my years working as a gardener, so it is informed by a deep familiarity, but not a great deal of scientific expertise. I am particularly interested in the stuff that's in the background of people's interactions with plants, especially in public spaces: aesthetic conventions and practices of cultivation, habits of perception (such as 'weed', 'not weed'), anxieties about excessive growth, and so on. Part of what I like about the plss project (as I understand it so far), is that it provides a new setting for interactions with plants, and maybe disrupts a lot of that stuff, making new perceptions and interactions possible.

For my thesis research, I spent a lot of time in gardens experimenting with activities that would help me to change my own perception of plants and gardens - that is, to see and experience them in new ways and thereby come to some understanding about what the plants/gardens were doing while I was there. I also have a special interest in plants considered weeds, and in general, people's reactions to plants that grow quickly or travel. Recently I have been focused on how plants are treated in specific ways in the urban landscape to make people feel more safe (in relation to crime and terrorism but also, I think, the threat of out-of-control plants, which in some contexts start to seem like the same thing). Among plants I think weeds have a particularly underappreciated creative potential.

I'm looking forward to learning more about this very interesting project!

All the best,

Erin Despard
PhD candidate, Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal QC