Join plant evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar Banu Subramaniam and Radical Ecology’s director Ashish Ghadiali for a conversation about experimental biology, activist science and the entanglement of plant, animal and human histories.
This event is part of Invasion Ecology: online conversations - a series of discussions with artists and writers around the themes of the group exhibition Invasion Ecology. The exhibition, presented by Radical Ecology and Southcombe Barn, questions what we mean by ‘native’ and what it means to belong - reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals and landscapes.
Banu Subramaniam is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Originally trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science as they relate to experimental biology. She advocates for activist science that creates knowledge about the natural world while being aware of its embeddedness in society and culture. She co-edited Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005) and Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (2001).Her book Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (2014) was chosen as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2015 and won the Society for Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Prize for science and technology studies in 2016. Her most recent book, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism was published in June 2024.
Ashish Ghadiali is Radical Ecology’s Founder/Director. He is Co-Chair (with Professor Paul Gilroy) of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network and Co-Principal Investigator (with Professor Tim Lenton) of Addressing the New Denialism, a programme of research and public engagement backed by the Open Society Foundations that culminated in the influential 2023 paper, Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming (of which he is also co-author) for the journal Nature Sustainability. Ashish is a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Observer and a practising filmmaker with recent credits including the video installation, Invasion Ecology (2024), the immersive film installation, Planetary Imagination (2023) for The Box and the feature documentary The Confession (2016) for the British Film Institute and BBC Storyville.