The Last Seed

Between 2009-2017 I visited ten seed banks in India, Norway, Sweden, USA, UK, and Costa Rica to understand how conservation science is responding to anxieties about the future of plants and food.

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, my first book manuscript, The Last Seed: Botanic Futures in Colonial Legacies, contextualises the rise of cryogenic preservation as the conservationist technique against the backdrop of changes in environmental policy, IP law, and scientific knowledge. I use a feminist science studies approach to trouble the science of seed preservation and ask what kinds of futures are made possible by this technoscientific endeavour. As a feminist project addressing woefully underrepresented dimensions of the history of both plant and agricultural sciences, The Last Seed pays attention to the gendered practices of care espoused by seed scientists in the banks to ask who it serves to render seeds bankable.