CALL FOR PAPERS

 

The 4th Global Plant Humanities Network Conference

Urban Plantscapes: Cities, Working Landscape, and Botanical Life 

30 June – 2 July 2027

 University of Rzeszów, Poland

 

Plenary speakers: 

Joela Jacobs, University of Arizona

Łukasz Łuczaj University of Rzeszów, Poland

Michael Marder, the University of the Basque Country

 

Cities are often imagined as places where nature has been displaced, disciplined, paved over, or reduced to ornament. Yet plants are everywhere in the urban world: splitting concrete, feeding residents, cooling streets, absorbing toxins, marking ruins, invading riverbanks, greening interiors and balconies, lining roads, occupying wastelands, and surviving in the cracks. Urban vegetation is often treated as “a problematic issue, a potential opportunity, and an inspiration” (Vega et al., 2021). Far from being mere decorative elements, they actively shape urban ecosystems and remain indispensable companions to human urban life.  By foregrounding the role of urban plants, cities must be reengineered as “sustainable natural habitats” (Tague 2025, 42).

The 4th Global Plant Humanities Network Conference, 2027,  is intended as a large-scale exploration of the “city plant”. We invite papers, panels, performances, workshops, and creative-critical contributions on the theme of city plants: the botanical life of urban spaces, the cultural meanings of urban plantscapes, and the vegetal agencies that shape the built environment. The conference will examine the place of urban plants in the emerging fields of plant humanities, human-plant studies, and critical plant studies, where they have received limited scholarly attention.  

We are especially interested in approaches that move beyond the beautified green façade. What happens when we consider the working green of the city: plants as laborers, healers, migrants, archives, pollutants, medicines, invaders, commodities, witnesses, and co-inhabitants? How do plants participate in urban survival, regeneration, exclusion, and care? What stories do they tell about migration, toxicity, climate crisis, urban inequality, war, food systems, public health, and everyday life? In asking what plants do in cities, we also ask what cities become when seen through the lens of vegetal life. What if the urban is not the opposite of the botanical, but one of its unruly habitats?

Rzeszów, a city shaped by histories of movement, borderlands, development, agriculture, industry, and recent geopolitical transformation, offers a compelling setting for these conversations. From roadside vegetation and allotments to river corridors, spontaneous flora, urban trees, medicinal plants, invasive species, and the green afterlives of infrastructure, the city allows us to ask how plants inhabit and transform urban life.

We welcome contributions from plant humanities, literary and cultural studies, art history, landscape architecture, botany, ethnobotany, performance studies, environmental history, urban studies, anthropology, geography, heritage studies, political ecology, and related fields.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

·       Urban botanical life in literature, film, visual art, performance, and public culture

·       Invasive species, migrant plants, and botanical nationalism

·       Urban plants as laborers, infrastructures, and climate workers

·       “Working green” versus decorative green

·       Spontaneous urban flora, weeds, wastelands, ruins, and cracks

·       The balcony, windowsill, and the houseplant

·       Plants in postindustrial, postsocialist, postwar, or borderland cities

·       Vegetal life, toxicity, and remediation

·       Urban herbalism, medicinal plants, and vernacular plant knowledge

·       Cemeteries, memorial plants, grief, and vegetal remembrance

·       The legal and political status of urban vegetation

·       Plant-human collaborations in design, architecture, activism, education, and art

·       Ethnographic approaches to researching urban flora

We encourage proposals that are experimental, interdisciplinary, or collaborative. Contributions may take the form of traditional academic papers, roundtables, creative-critical work, artist talks, workshops, and walking seminars.

Guidelines for Abstract Submission

Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words, a short biography of 100 words, and any technical or format requirements, including whether you intend to present online (virtually) or in-person (offline). Abstracts should not be submitted as PDFs. Please send MS Word documents only to the conference address: gphn2027@ur.edu.pl

Important Dates:

  • Deadline for abstract submission: 1 April 2027
  • Abstract Acceptance Notification: Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis

Essential Information

  • Venue: University of Rzeszów, Institute of English Studies, Rejtana Campus, al. W. Kopisto 2b, Rzeszów, Poland
  • Conference webpage: https://www.ur.edu.pl/gphn2027
  • Conference fee:

800 PLN/210 USD/185 EUR (does not cover accommodation) for in-person participants

370 PLN/  95USD/85 EUR for online speakers

Payment details will be sent once the abstract is accepted. No travel grants are available to attend the conference.

 

See you in Rzeszów!

Materiały do pobrania