Sandra Calkins’s research while affiliated with University of Twente and other places

Plant ethnography refers to ethnographic engagements with plants as living, sentient beings that actively participate in and shape social relationships. Plant ethnographies explore human-plant relationships in indigenous communities as well as in the contexts of plantations and agriculture, in gardens, in public (urban) spaces and in scientific institutions such as laboratories and botanical collections. A particular challenge plant ethnographers face is the question of representation in view of the radical alterity of plants. To meet these challenges plant ethnographers have highlighted the importance of cultivating forms of attentiveness to plant being and draw inspiration from artistic methods and approaches.

Aufwühlende Bilder von Krieg, Gewalt, Flucht und Vertreibung; Hasskommentare in den sozialen Medien; Gesten einer Willkommenskultur für Geflüchtete und der Solidarität unter Fremden; die geradezu mit Händen greifbare Spannung, die plötzlich den Raum zwischen Anwesenden erfüllt; Unsicherheit und Angst, aber auch Gleichgültigkeit angesichts der Klimakatastrophe – Beispiele wie diese zeigen, dass Affekte nicht nur in besonderer Weise gesellschaftliche wie private Situationen prägen, sondern dass sie in ihrer jeweiligen Verfasstheit und Zirkulation auch gesellschaftliche Veränderungen anzeigen und begleiten. Als dynamische Kräfte sind Affekte grundlegend für soziale Beziehungen und menschliches Zusammenleben. Ausgehend von dieser Beobachtung erkunden die Autor*innen affektiv aufgeladene Situationen der Gegenwart. Die Um- und Gegenstände des Interesses sind dabei denkbar vielfältig und bringen die Wirksamkeit von Affekten als Annäherung, Entfaltung, Bindung, Störung und Verschwinden zum Vorschein. Sie berichten durchaus persönlich von Beziehungen zwischen menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteur*innen, von digitalen Medien und Intimität, Solidarität und Gemeinschaft. Sie befragen die Macht der Imagination und spüren konkrete Techniken der Affektentfaltung ebenso auf wie deren subversives Potenzial. Vor dem Hintergrund einer sich rasant diversifizierenden postmigrantischen Gesellschaft, in der multiple Zugehörigkeiten alltäglich sind, aber gleichwohl zum Anlass für Ausgrenzung gemacht werden, schreiben die Autor*innen prägnante, anschauliche Gegenwartsgeschichte(n) – als Prosaerzählung, Bericht, essayistische Reflexion, Kommentar, Brief, Anekdote, Dialog oder Dramolett.

In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods – fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance – in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of ‘bundling’, reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon’s historical and linguistic scaffolding. We take this phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of socio-economic exchange and growth, one that is distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of an unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, reflects an aesthetics in which both material value and social relationships are imagined to arise through thickenings of persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. The article suggests that bundling offers conceptual resources to imagine growth otherwise, as a process unfolding in ways that complicate and clog conventional economic imaginaries.

In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan–Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinary hierarchies of value affect the distribution of labor between Uganda and Australia and thematize the role of place and its affective atmospheres that texture the quotidian scientific work in this project. Unsurprisingly, they tend to devalue Ugandan sites and contributions, and turn Uganda into a rather unlikely site for new insights to emerge. However, in spite of doing devalued and outsourced “menial” labor such as fieldwork, Ugandan biologists’ fieldwork involves affective encounters with their experimental banana plants that thereby become differently thinkable. The paper argues that attending to affective atmospheres that infuse research sites offers clues about scientists’ position in global hierarchies and at the same time can help make room for insights that emanate from unexpected places.

Cooking bananas ( matooke) are a main staple in central Uganda and are very important to well-being and health. Recently, matooke have also been associated with micronutrient deficiencies among children and women. For a number of years, this fruit has been at the heart of a public health strategy that seeks to create ‘better bananas’, that is, biofortified or nutritionally enriched bananas. The efforts to biofortify food crops are part of a recent trend in the nutrition world towards improving the quality and not only the quantity of food. This article unpacks recent configurations of philanthropy, plant science and global public health and the ways in which they make conventional food crops thinkable, for instance, as cost-effective medicines. This emergent and economized form of valuing bananas is in tension with how Ugandans appreciate bananas in everyday life. I show that emerging valuations of food matter but still should not be mistaken for changes on the ground. This article thereby searches for a middle ground between critiques of global public health and everyday practice in Uganda as well as between praxeological and structuralist/culturalist approaches to food. Instead of dismissing this banana as part of a mere paternalistic project, I show that it also is ‘good’ conceptually in that it makes bananas and health thinkable in new ways.