Authors: Olivia Angé & Susannah Chapman
Date: March 2026
Venue: Cultural Anthropology – Theorizing the Contemporary Series
Link to the publication: www.culanth.org

The concept of care has become central to work on multispecies relations. In scholarship with vegetal beings, care sometimes involves a situated attunement or encouragement intended for plants in that it is attentive to their interests and desires, but it also supports projects aimed at standardization, control, and culling of plant life in pursuit of agricultural scalability. Caring for plants is thus a world-making practice recognizable in farmers’ fields, home gardens, and seed-saving networks as well as different imperial, capitalist, and nationalist undertakings. This raises a wider question for multispecies ethics: if care can be enacted across such different relational contexts, what does it take to care well for vegetal beings? This series reflects on the multiplicities of plant care by attending to questions of responsability. Approached this way, responsability may index relations of responsibility in which certain beings are seen to possess a capacity to act with intention and discernment, but it may also gesture toward the possibility for dialogic interspecies response, as proposed by Donna Haraway. Contributions to this series explore vegetal responsabilities and the different "caring" practices they subtend, from attunement and endearment to standardization and abandonment, to theorize human-plant relating across various botanical and agricultural worlds. Attending to responsability unravels a politics of vegetal care that insists on fostering possibilities for relating respectfully in this era of ecological destruction and conservationist zeal.

Contributors

• Stewardship and the Difficulty of Shared Responsibility — Joeva Sean Rock
• Disease Management and Technical Regimes of Care in a Potato Genebank — Helen Anne Curry
• Eating one’s seeds: care and loss in the Mixe highlands — Gabriel G. Roman
• A Technicity of Care: Yams as Co-actors in “Abelam” Cultivation (Papua New Guinea) — Ludovic Coupaye
• Politics of Tuberous Regards in Andean Practices of Agricultural Care — Olivia Angé
• Muted meadows; choreographies of abandonment and recovery in the Nordic Arctic — Marianne Elisabeth Lien & Janike Kampevold Larsen
• After Care: On How Frozen Seeds Animate Climate Futures — Can Dalyan
• Ultracross Collards and Unsettled Practices of Plant Care - Eva Rose Steinberg
• Refusal from the seed room floor — Christian Keeve
• A caring predation: The loving perils of plants among the Kuikuro (Amazonia, Brazil) — Carlos Fausto
• Vegetal response-ability on a plantation frontier — Sophie Chao, University of Sydney
• Responsable Rice and the Silent Voices of Life — Susannah Chapman
• A Vegetal Apathy for an Asymptotic Taxonomy — Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez
• Thinking with minorities: ancient weeds and storytelling — Verónica S. Lema