Session: 5b
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.16
Chair: Béné Meillon
Agnese Martini (University of St Andrews), “Seaweed Tales: Taxonomies and Nonhuman Agency in the Victorian Algal Imagination”
Abstract: Seaweeds are among the most prolific and adaptable forms of vegetation on Earth, embodying a certain ‘wildness’ of vegetal nature: they are difficult to domesticate and resistant to human control. Seaweed life cycles and seedless reproductive modes eluded human understanding for centuries, defying classification systems centred on terrestrial plant models. Their ‘absolute alterity’ and ‘strangeness’ was reflected in taxonomic marginalization. Historically, seaweeds were regarded as ‘the lowest level of vegetal life’, imperfect and underdeveloped compared to flowering plants. Positioned at the margins of botanical knowledge, the study of seaweeds was formalized later compared to other branches of botany, flourishing only in the nineteenth century. By the second half of the century, seaweed collecting had become a popular practice among Victorian women, who contributed to the widespread wonder for these ‘ocean flowers’ through natural history manuals and children’s books.
A prime example is Parables from Nature (1855-71) by Margaret Gatty, a collection of children’s tales centred on the wonders of the natural world. This paper explores two fables from this collection in which seaweeds appear as main characters: Knowledge Not the Limit of Belief and Whereunto?. In the first, a seaweed debates with a zoophyte about scientific classification and the limits of knowledge, until a god-like scientist asserts his power to categorize the nonhuman. In the second, set on the shore, a ‘tangle’ of seaweed is central to a discussion about the purpose of each species within the marine ecosystem. By giving narrative agency to marginal non-human characters and employing anthropomorphic strategies, Gatty overturns conventional human/non-human hierarchies and parodies the anthropocentrism underlying scientific certainty. Rather than passive objects of classification and study – as they often appear when dried in algal herbaria – seaweeds emerge as active participants in debates around taxonomies and the relationship between human knowledge and the non-human.
Bio: Agnese Martini is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews. Her project, Seaweed Imaginations, investigates seaweed narratives in the UK and Italy (1843-1973) through the categories of the monstrous and the marvellous. She previously worked as a research fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice on the Horizon Europe project Bauhaus of the Seas Sails, aimed at reconnecting local communities with water bodies. She holds a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Environmental Humanities.
Damiano Benvegnù (University of St Andrews), “After a Storm: Resistance in a Seaweed Herbarium”
Abstract: Herbaria are collections of preserved biological specimens. They were foundational to the rise of modern science, designed to catalogue the world’s botanical diversity. Yet, in their taxonomic drive to classify and order, they often enacted a reductionist and objectifying gaze upon nonhuman life (Thiers, 2020). The herbarium of the St Andrews Botanic Garden in eastern Scotland houses specimens collected across the globe and across the kingdoms of life, including an extensive algal collection with tens of thousands of specimens dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite its richness, this collection remains uncatalogued and largely inaccessible, stored in folders and cupboards out of public view.
Among these neglected specimens lies a seaweed specimen pressed between folded paper, marked only with the words: “collected after a storm on a beach near Haifa and Tel Aviv, 1937.” My paper reflects on the forms of resistance embodied by this fragment of alga and the layered “storms” it holds: the material storm that washed it ashore; the historical storm of British colonial rule in Palestine that mediated its displacement to Scotland; and the ecological storm of the Anthropocene that frames our present. Suspended between preservation and erasure, memory and loss, this seaweed testifies to the entangled fates of nonhuman beings caught in human regimes of collection and knowledge. Rather than yielding to a narrative of scientific mastery, the specimen unsettles epistemological certainty and gestures toward practices of multispecies entanglement, humility, and shared vulnerability.
Bio: Damiano Benvegnù is a Reader in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is the author of Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work (2018) and The Fascist Forest: Mussolini’s Trees and the Ecological Legacy of Fascism (forthcoming, 2026). From 2018 to 2022, he served as Arts and Creative Writing Editor for Ecozon@. His research and publications span a wide range of topics, including ecopedagogy, soundscape ecology, and critical animal studies.
Diego Cagüeñas (University of Amsterdam), “Interspecies Conviviality: Mollusks, Tides and the Future of Life in Colombia’s Pacific Coast”
Abstract: For millennia, the tidal rhythms of the Pacific Ocean have directed how and when encounters among multifarious lifeforms could take place. For centuries, black people from Bahía Málaga, southwest Colombia, have harvested a mollusk known as piangua in synchrony with the high and low tides that renew the cycles of life and death. That is, until recently, when this molluscoid, human, oceanic, and lunar choreography has gone out of sync due to overexploitation. In this paper I follow reparative and protective work with creatures whose species-future is in peril, in search for caring relations that counter the destruction and violence that every extractive economy demands. I explore how a local ecopolitical imagination provides alternative forms of conviviality and care that refuse to feed racial extractivism. I argue that Bahía Málaga’s political ecology can be understood and embodied only once one attunes oneself to the directions of the Pacific Ocean’s tidal rhythms that orchestrate a mollusk’s reproductive life and the livelihoods of the afro-Colombian peoples that inhabit Bahía Málaga.
To protect the mollusk and secure their community’s future, women harvesters created the piangüímetro, a measuring device they use to prevent that pianguas smaller than 5 cm get collected. In doing so, these women create conviviality around the mollusk’s reproductive life. Timing the harvest in accordance with the mollusk’s sex life is an expression of care and foresight. Tidal rhythms and piangua’s slow reproductive maturation call for patient engagement. This is the challenge: how to resist the allure of fast profit when piangua is becoming as scarce as other sources of income? How not to get trapped into the ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital? As such, these daily interspecies relations of care represent a thoroughly contemporary political wager on future conviviality.
Bio: Diego Cagüeñas is a Colombian anthropologist and philosopher. Ph.D. in Anthropology and Historical Studies. M.A. in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis. Assistant Professor in Cultural and Ecological Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Member of the Amsterdam Institute for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Research interests include political ecology, cosmologies and perspectivism, memory studies, and 20th century Latin-American intellectual history. Latest publication: Cagüeñas, Diego. (2024). “When Forests Run Amok: War and its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories, Daniel Ruiz-Serna, 2023.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología, 60(3), e2876.