This dissertation project uses a combination of archival and ethnographic research to examine the entangled processes of moving, making and saving plants at the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. The project asks how seed banking practices in a post-colonial era differ from movement of botanical specimens during earlier eras of science and governance. It will study the changes in laboratory and visualization techniques, through ten months of archival and ethnographic fieldwork in England and the United States. It will use theories from the fields of STS, environmental humanities, and visual culture, to contribute new concepts concerning agricultural innovation, food security, biodiversity preservation, and to challenge the frontiers on basic genetic science. The results of this research will be published in scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, and as part of a book project with an academic press; in addition, they will be disseminated to specific target communities via workshops and seminars. The results of this study will also be used to develop undergraduate curriculum that will bridge gaps between the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological sciences. In addition, new primary material such as the high resolution scans of plant patent drawings will be made available to scholars and the public via the web.
The primary site of this project is Kew Garden's Millennium Seed Bank, the largest repository of cryogenically preserved plant genetics resources in the world. This project will bring to light how seed science is made at seed banks with the aim of adding value to the process and showing how it can be done better. It will do so by giving acute attention to the Seed Bank's relationship to the historical movement of plant bodies, debates around biodiversity, intellectual property, and agricultural applications. It will also examine various types of collaboration across many scales of activity, among different professions, disciplines, and scientific specialties that make seeds such widely shared objects of knowledge capable of transcending boundaries of major departments of formal scientific inquiry. The results of this project will contribute pertinent insights for important policy decisions about the fates of biodiversity, food security, and agribusiness, which all depend on the science of seeds. They will also serve in addressing pivotal questions being posed by scholars of agricultural and plant history, twentieth century US agricultural policy, intellectual property of biological materials, advocacy over rights to seeds, and visual culture.
