DPhil Student
Hertford College
Thesis: Exploring the Urban Jungle: Affective explorations of human-houseplant relations (working title)
Research: My project focuses on European houseplant collecting as a leisure, knowledge-making, and affective activity. Through ethnographic fieldwork with houseplant collectors, horticulturalists, and botanists, as well as tending to my own plants, I seek to understand how enthusiasts learn to understand and provide for vegetal companions. How does attentive care enable collectors to communicate with their plants and thus create new planty knowledge and techniques? How can houseplants foster social relations among enthusiasts? What can these more-than-human entanglements teach us about ideas of nature and how humans can live within it?
