Eco-Feminism in Practice: Documenting Plant Knowledge and Oral Histories
Tuesday, November 25, 2025 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1JJK Hall (W15) Cafe
Clarissa Shane (BCB HAST '23) returns to our campus to share how the preservation of plant stories within Indigenous and diasporic communities offers a framework for rethinking relationships to land, lineage and memory through an ecofeminist lens. Drawing on oral history methodologies and feminist theories of care, relationality and embodiment, Clarissa will discuss how plants function as archives of intergenerational knowledge and as actors within broader socioecological systems. By foregrounding the everyday practices of women, gendered caretakers and marginalized communities who have historically stewarded seeds, herbs and food traditions, she will highlight the ways that ecological knowledge is transmitted, suppressed and reactivated across borders and generations.
Engaging concepts from Indigenous studies, transnational feminism and environmental humanities, Clarissa considers how attending to plant stories through listening practices and sensiobiographical approaches reveals alternative modes of ecological memory and cultural continuity. Ultimately, she proposes that plant oral histories offer not only a method for documenting community knowledge but also an ecofeminist praxis that counters extractive relationships to land and emphasizes reciprocity, resilience and collective survival.
We are asked to pay attention when plants come to us; they carry teachings we need to hear (adapted from Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass).
Clarissa Shane is an interdisciplinary creative and plant oral historian from Stockton, CA. Her research explores how plant stories connect communities to ancestry, land, and healing, including her project “Re-Rooting Orality” in Paredones, Michoacán, Mexico. She holds an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University and a B.A. from Bard College Berlin, and continues to study Ayurvedic herbalism in her free time. Find more of Clarissa’s work at: https://clarissashane.sandbox.library.columbia.edu
Email: [email protected]