@mingcan-rong.bsky.social
PhDing at the University of Bristol, interested in vegetal geography, plant humanities, botanic garden, rhododendron 🌺 (she/her)
My first time organising a session at @rgsibg.bsky.social! Huge thanks to my amazing co-organisers Matthew Beach and Franklin Ginn, all the brilliant speakers across three panels, and everyone coming to our HPGRG-sponsored ‘Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond’ session!💚🪴🌺 #RGS
01.09.2025 08:54 — 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Austin Read (2025) entitled 'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' with a red banner at the top. Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn.
#OpenAccess in TIBG:
'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' by @austinread.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky #geo
Cover of the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’, edited by Luís Manuel Mendonça de Carvalho and published by Springer.
📗 Luís Mendonça de Carvalho edited the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’ (Springer), which provides us with a 'unique re-evaluation of the Victorian Age and presents a new historiography based on plants'.
👉 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
This week we've been descending into mines, scaling coal-spoil tips, and swimming under waterfalls. Read about our recent CEH field trip in our latest blog post: environmentalhumanities.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2025/06/20/t... #envhum
20.06.2025 10:31 — 👍 6 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
#GARDENS & #EMPIRES - booking open! International conference @britishlibrary.bsky.social 27-28 June Convened by #BL, @rbgkew.bsky.social & @englishheritage.bsky.social Speakers include
@advollyr.bsky.social @sathnam.bsky.social & @corinnefowler.bsky.social
Booking: events.bl.uk/events/garde...
Excited to be organising a session with Matthew Beach on ‘Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond’ for the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Birmingham, 26-29th August 2025. Please take a look at our CFP if you are interested in plants, creativities, more-than-human geography! 🌱
22.01.2025 11:21 — 👍 7 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
I am so glad to finally have this piece published with the wonderful Heather Rogers. Open access, so no excuse to not check it out.
Digital Plant Encounters: Integrating Critical Plant Studies with Digital Environmental Humanities sciendo.com/article/10.2...
🥳 Behold! The CEH Termcard has landed and it's packed full of exciting events -- from workshops to walkshops, lectures to moth expeditions. We're so pleased to have @chrisjpearson.bsky.social back to deliver our annual lecture on the 26 February, along with many other brilliant speakers!
13.01.2025 11:28 — 👍 11 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 3Looking forward to meeting you in Bristol!
10.01.2025 17:42 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
@ahubschle.bsky.social and I have a new article out in @theconversation.com about how to approach the illegal succulent trade in South Africa through the lens of conservation justice.
theconversation.com/south-africa...
Huge thanks to Harry Fitzpatrick-Grimes and @austinread.bsky.social for co-organising the event at different stages 🥹 And thanks @jamesrpalmer.bsky.social and Negar Elodie Behzadi for constant guidance and the funding support from the Political Ecologies Research Group and Bristol Doctoral College
06.12.2024 13:46 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Please register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-archi...
06.12.2024 13:37 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Our workshop ‘From Archives to AI: Researching and Imagining Socioenvironmental Relations’ will be held at Bristol on 12 Feb 2025, which includes talks by @oliviamason.bsky.social @mattinbiglari.bsky.social @jwyg.bsky.social & a panel discussion chaired by Mark Jackson! 🤩
Please find details below!
One more reading for next term’s Plants and Geographies reading group 🤩🍃🌳
04.12.2024 18:51 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I've written a piece on biofuels and the potential for plants to help us rethink relationships between energy, growth and productivity – just out in Environmental Humanities 🌿🌳🌾
Thanks to @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social & Franklin Ginn for making space for this!
read.dukeupress.edu/environmenta...
Marion Ernwein and I have a new paper out in EPE: Nature & Space:
"Making the mos(s)t of nature? Cleantech, smart nature-based solutions, and the ‘rendering investable’ of urban moss"
Hopefully of interest to vegetal geographers and critical NBS scholars 🌿🌱🌳🌍
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
