Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”
From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22126477 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Xan Sarah Chacko (0000-0003-4315-781X, Wellesley College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2380-3312 • E-ISSN: 2380-3312 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Libraries - UOTL (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35133 |
| OpenAlex | W4225984219 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 25 |
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, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing tensions between Indigenous struggles and settler-colonial nation building, and the urgency around climate change, are far from resolved. The politics of the Anthropocene are particularly poignant in Australia because anthropogenic destruction looks very different when viewed from the perspective of either Indigenous people or settlers
Agroforestry · Anthropocene · Archaeology · Biology · Colonialism · Commodification · Economics · Economy · Geography · Indigenous · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Ecology
When Nature Goes Public
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Data-Centric Biology
“A Structure, Not an Event”
Botanists, Aborigines and native plants on the Queensland frontier
Duress
Saving embryos in stem cell science and embryo adoption
Convention on biological diversity
Nodes of Desire
Nurture commodified? An investigation into commercial human milk supply chains
From working collections to the World Germplasm Project
Trading the Genome. Investigating the Commodification of Bio-Information
Cloning wild life
Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures
Reckoning with Saving
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
Global Fertility Chains
When life gives you lemons
Acclimatizing the World
Racial Politics of Frozen Embryo Personhood in the US Antiabortion Movement
The First Step Is to Bring It Into Our Hands
Creative Practices of Care
Seed Banking as Cryopower
Freezing Seeds and Making Futures
From "Genetic Resources" to "Ecosystems Services
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |