Panel 1: Plant Politics

The first panel, Plant Politics, foregrounded how botanical archives and natural history collections bear witness to histories of extraction, empire, and care. Laura Briscoe (New York Botanical Garden) introduced the herbarium as an active record of human and ecological relations, asking what plants observe across time that institutional data often obscures. Her emphasis on decolonizing collections, rematriation, and contextualizing scientific archives reframed the herbarium as a site of power as much as preservation. Victoria Hattam (The New School) extended this reflection to the visual and spatial politics of borders, situating plant mobility within broader frameworks of global circulation and control.

V I C K Y H AT TA M , Professor and Chair of Politics, The New School for Social Research, works in three research areas: US-Mexico border politics, design and production in the global economy, and visual and spatial politics. 

Laura Briscoe, Assistant Director of the Herbarium for the Cryptogamic Herbarium, William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, New York Botanical Garden