Xan Sarah Chacko
Biographic Data
| ID | 119204 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Xan Sarah Chacko |
| GIVEN NAMES | Xan Sarah |
| FAMILY NAME | Chacko |
| SIGNATURE | CHACKO X S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4315-781X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Making Queer Kin in the Labor of the Greenhouse
STS is in a unique position to expand pedagogical practice. Classroom activities can build comprehension but also present opportunities to reckon with the limits and affordances of theory. Field trips to see rare books, taxidermy animals, and plants—both pressed and alive—provide exciting but obvious ways to enrich STS coursework. We could also be designing board games, making kombucha, or growing a garden together. As we experiment with old and …
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary section of Catalyst
In preparing the tenth anniversary section of Catalyst, the current editorial team met to reflect on the legacy, politico-ethical vision and future of the journal. Using the introduction to the inaugural issue as a prompt for our reflections, we discussed what makes the journal distinctive, how it has contributed to the field of technoscience, the intellectual inheritance of feminist scholarship on which our work builds and the generative associa…
An Origin Story for Feminist Science Studies
Christa Kuljian’s Our Science, Ourselves chronicles the life histories of seven trailblazing women whose work, activism, and ferocity forms an originary node for feminist science studies. These figures formed a powerful network in the Boston area from the 1970s to the 1990s. Inspired by the women’s movement and organizations such as Science for the People and the Combahee River Collective, they led critical analyses of gender and racial biases in…
Introduction
This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: How do ordinary and domestic objects, techno…
How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy
Reviewed by: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy Xan Chacko (bio), Sushmita Chatterjee (bio), Laura Foster (bio), Brian Sabel (bio), sam smiley (bio), and Banu Subramaniam (bio) Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree. Yale University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780300260441. This is an unusual book. As you begin reading, you realize it is unlike most academic books. Overall, a deeply pensive collection of pieces—memories of childhood, meditations on various books,…
(Un)making labor invisible
From industrial psychology and occupational therapy to the laboratory bench and scenes of "heroic" fieldwork, there are important connections between the science of labor and the labor of science. Participants in the 2022 Gordon Cain Conference explored how greater attention to these connections might deepen historical understanding of what constitutes "science" and what counts as "labor." Our conversations circled around themes of vulnerability …
Nothing comes without its story
Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”
Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, a…
Seed
This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed . We both work on practices of care and control related to seeds, from seed banking and agricultural development projects to everyday practices of keeping, saving, and tinkering with seeds. As a term, seed evokes gendered ideas about human reproduction that center masculinity and virility, even though the botanical seeds are in fact already‐fertilized embryos. This ent…
The cosmopolitics of food futures
The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed: The Untold Story and Food Evolution, weave different – …
Creative Practices of Care
Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to "tech" work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds…
Care of the species
In Care of the Species, John Hartigan invites us to embark on a journey as he learns about the entangled social and biological world of plant science in the twenty-first century. At the same time a
When life gives you lemons
In the early twentieth century, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded international expeditions with the aim of finding plant specimens for introduction into the agricultural landscape and the new experimental projects in hybridization. One such agricultural explorer, noted for his eponymous lemon, was Frank Nicholas Meyer, an immigrant from the Netherlands whose expeditions in Asia have brought to the United States celebrated…
Creative Practices of Care
Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to "tech" work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds…
The cosmopolitics of food futures
The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed: The Untold Story and Food Evolution, weave different – …
When life gives you lemons
In the early twentieth century, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded international expeditions with the aim of finding plant specimens for introduction into the agricultural landscape and the new experimental projects in hybridization. One such agricultural explorer, noted for his eponymous lemon, was Frank Nicholas Meyer, an immigrant from the Netherlands whose expeditions in Asia have brought to the United States celebrated…
When life gives you lemons
In the early twentieth century, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded international expeditions with the aim of finding plant specimens for introduction into the agricultural landscape and the new experimental projects in hybridization. One such agricultural explorer, noted for his eponymous lemon, was Frank Nicholas Meyer, an immigrant from the Netherlands whose expeditions in Asia have brought to the United States celebrated…
Creative Practices of Care
Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to "tech" work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds…
Care of the species
In Care of the Species, John Hartigan invites us to embark on a journey as he learns about the entangled social and biological world of plant science in the twenty-first century. At the same time a
The cosmopolitics of food futures
The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed: The Untold Story and Food Evolution, weave different – …
Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”
Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, a…
Seed
This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed . We both work on practices of care and control related to seeds, from seed banking and agricultural development projects to everyday practices of keeping, saving, and tinkering with seeds. As a term, seed evokes gendered ideas about human reproduction that center masculinity and virility, even though the botanical seeds are in fact already‐fertilized embryos. This ent…
Introduction
This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: How do ordinary and domestic objects, techno…
How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy
Reviewed by: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy Xan Chacko (bio), Sushmita Chatterjee (bio), Laura Foster (bio), Brian Sabel (bio), sam smiley (bio), and Banu Subramaniam (bio) Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree. Yale University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780300260441. This is an unusual book. As you begin reading, you realize it is unlike most academic books. Overall, a deeply pensive collection of pieces—memories of childhood, meditations on various books,…
(Un)making labor invisible
From industrial psychology and occupational therapy to the laboratory bench and scenes of "heroic" fieldwork, there are important connections between the science of labor and the labor of science. Participants in the 2022 Gordon Cain Conference explored how greater attention to these connections might deepen historical understanding of what constitutes "science" and what counts as "labor." Our conversations circled around themes of vulnerability …
Nothing comes without its story
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary section of Catalyst
In preparing the tenth anniversary section of Catalyst, the current editorial team met to reflect on the legacy, politico-ethical vision and future of the journal. Using the introduction to the inaugural issue as a prompt for our reflections, we discussed what makes the journal distinctive, how it has contributed to the field of technoscience, the intellectual inheritance of feminist scholarship on which our work builds and the generative associa…
An Origin Story for Feminist Science Studies
Christa Kuljian’s Our Science, Ourselves chronicles the life histories of seven trailblazing women whose work, activism, and ferocity forms an originary node for feminist science studies. These figures formed a powerful network in the Boston area from the 1970s to the 1990s. Inspired by the women’s movement and organizations such as Science for the People and the Combahee River Collective, they led critical analyses of gender and racial biases in…
Making Queer Kin in the Labor of the Greenhouse
STS is in a unique position to expand pedagogical practice. Classroom activities can build comprehension but also present opportunities to reckon with the limits and affordances of theory. Field trips to see rare books, taxidermy animals, and plants—both pressed and alive—provide exciting but obvious ways to enrich STS coursework. We could also be designing board games, making kombucha, or growing a garden together. As we experiment with old and …
Sociology (9 works) · Art (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Ecology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (3 works) · Art history (3 works)