Thesis ID: CBB692555133

Moving, Making, and Saving Botanic Futures: The History and Practices of Seed Banking (2018)

unapi

Based on two years of ethnographic and archival research in the UK, Norway, USA, and India, this dissertation studies the rise of seed banking in the twentieth-century as a social, political, and technoscientific practice against the backdrop of changes in environmental policy, intellectual property law, and scientific knowledge. There is consensus that seeds are critical to the future of the planet; however, the methods that decide which ones are stored, how they are stored, and how they are defined are often contradictory. At the same time, all seed banking projects have been profoundly involved with state and industry interests, not just the protection of plants for the future. If seeds are crucial to our survival, then choices made by scientists in seed banks have material and political consequences. I study how the processes are political to the scientists, as well as to other actors involved in the seed banking. By studying the history of seed banking and the contemporary practices espoused by scientists involved in the moving, making, and saving of seeds, I show how seed banking gained favour due to a particular confluence of international regulations and organisations that were responding to changes in colonial structures of control, the new concept of `biodiversity,' and the growth of the agribusiness industry. Comparing the techniques that are used to analyse, measure, and codify the characteristics of a seed, this dissertation follows the life-cycle of bankable seeds from collection to storage and investigates every element of the seed bank, including what they collect, who they serve, what they do with the seeds, and how they derive value for the seeds. I examine how science makes seeds into coherent objects that can be collectively understood, stabilised, acted upon, and translated across different knowledge practices, and the kinds of collaboration developed among different professionals through the science of seeds as a shared object of knowledge. Understanding these differences in the practices of seed banking sheds light on changes in plant science, the law around the movement and acquisition of biological materials for science and industry, and technologies of visualisation. This project provides a powerful local window on a global problem by bringing together (and interrogating the tensions between) the human responses to the profound fears of ecological disasters, and crises in food security and intellectual property (IP).

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB692555133/

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Authors & Contributors
Keiner, Christine
Eric Paglia
Fullilove, Courtney
Elvbakken, Kari Tove
Marte Qvenild
Wu, Bo
Concepts
Science and government
Science and politics
Science and industry
Public policy
Diffusion of innovation; diffusion of knowledge; diffusion of technology
Science and economics
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, late
21st century
20th century, early
Places
United States
Great Britain
Norway
Vietnam
Maryland (U.S.)
India
Institutions
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2004)
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
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