Botanical Imaginations
The symbology of plants is all around us, representing everything from the edenic environment to one of the most consolidated, extractive industries of the modern world (agriculture). We see plants in complex, varied, and contradictory ways. We love them; we hate them; we need them; we ignore them. Theyโre useless and the basis of life. They feed us and they poison us. They make us smile, sneeze, and itch. They are a kin, our kin, and our opposite. Theyโre mysterious and unknowable, yet utterly dull and explainable; indescribably wild and yet proudly engineered and contained. They are sentient, knowledgeable, and deserve our respect at the same time that they are mere decor.
Within the Western academy, one popular narrative about plants is that there isnโt one. โPlant blindnessโ drives us to overlook the agency and even presence of plants around us as we focus instead on the animals who more closely embody our understanding of aliveness and agency. At the same time, scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Suzanne Simardย have inspired conversation around the wisdom and multispecies entanglements of plants, and journalists like Michael Pollan and Zoe Schlรคnger have reframed plants as agentic, intelligent, and conscious. This series asks, who exactly overlooks plants, and where does attention already turn to the botanical? How might we draw together a network of critical plant studies?ย
In this special series, Edge Effects seeks to diversify, complicate, and proliferate Botanical Imaginations.ย How do communities around the world relate with plants? How do plants shape our understandings of nature and ourselves? How might the principles of ecological justice apply to plant relationalities?
We invite methodologies and perspectives at the edge between humanities and social and natural sciences, as well as between cultures, ages, and time. We follow plants across the boundaries they transgress: geographically and culturally. In the cultural contact zone where ideas of and relations to plants abound and collide, we wish to explore key themes of semiotics, agency, kinship, epistemology, ontology, justice, animacies, and imperialism. Plants, after all, have never obeyed our borders, stories, or hierarchies.
We welcome submissions that may include, but are not limited to:
- The colonial trade of plants and plant knowledge, and the history of horticulture, botanical gardens, and empire
- Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic plant knowledges and relational ecologies
- Ethnobotany and the medicinal and psychoactive uses of plants across cultures
- Queer and trans plant ecologies; transpecies eroticsย ย
- Eco- and phyto-semiotics and the role of plants in conceptions of natureย
- Eco-precarity and climate change
- Emerging research and scientific discourse on plant intelligence, consciousness, and agency, including critiques of Western epistemology
- Plant temporality and blindness
- The rhetorical politics of invasive species, weeds, and the construction of borders and purity in the plant (and human) worlds
- Disability studies and discourses of โvegetalโ and โvegetativeโ bodies
- Plant-based markets, including the domestication, commodification, collection, and genetic and physical manipulation of plantsย
- The intersection of food studies and plant studies
- Plant aesthetics and visual arts
- The plants of fiction, poetry, folklore, and urban legend
- Multispecies justice, legal rights and personhood for plants, and other ethical considerations
- The relationship between plants and artificial intelligence and other (bio)technologies
How to Submit
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, February 15, 2026
Everyone is welcome to submit to this series. As always, we aim to highlight the work of graduate students, postdocs, and early career scholars across disciplines, as well as practitioners and activists who work beyond academiaโs walls. We especially welcome submissions by Black and Indigenous people, People of Color, people with disabilities, and those with underrepresented genders, including transgender, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit individuals. Accepted pieces from outside the UW-Madison community are eligible for an honorarium. If you have questions or would like more information about this, please reach out to us at edgeeffects@nelson.wisc.edu.
- If you submit a previously unpublished essay (1,500 to 2,300 words), please send both a complete first draft of your piece and a brief pitch to the Edge Effects team at edgeeffects@nelson.wisc.edu. See our Submissions page for pitch guidelines.
- If you wish to submit a creative pieceโvisual art, poetry, video, photo/comic/graphic essay, a hybrid or multimodal exhibit, etc., we encourage you to get in touch with us before submission to make sure that our website can accommodate your format. Also:
- If a version of your creative piece has been previously exhibited or published elsewhere, please let us know where and when in your pitch.
- Before publication, anyone contributing a creative piece will be asked to write a brief introduction to their work. Editors will be happy to work with you on this introduction, and the pitch will give us a good place to begin.
- Please note that Edge Effects publishes for interdisciplinary and public audiences, and our editorial process is more journalistic than scholarly. The submissions we accept will go through our editorial process, and publication will be conditional on the piece meeting our standards of accessibility.ย
- If you have any questions about how or what to submit, please reach out to us. We look forward to reading, viewing, and/or listening to your work!
Featured image: A tree from below. Photo by Lerkrat Tangsri, 2016.
