Thinking Through Plants: ‘Rao’, the pharmakon and futurities of indigenous knowledge
Date: Wed Oct 28 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) at 14:15 - 17:45
Location: Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, CB3 9DP
An event by the Decolonising Plant Knowledge: Voices from Subverted Plant Worlds Research Network. To reserve a place, please register online. Karen Shiratori (PhD, Researcher and lecturer at the Center for Amerindian Studies, CEstA-USP) Françoise Barbira Freedman About this talk ‘Rao is a polysemic Panoan Shipibo concept shared among Indigenous Western Amazonians to designate plants that are transformative: medicines, poisons, entheogens, which also provide food and building materials. This initial seminar introduces our 2026-27 CRASSH Seminar around plants as ‘rao’, crucibles of creative epistemic frictions between botanical narratives and colonised plant worlds. Committed to interdisciplinarity, we explore multiple facets of the ‘colonisation of plant knowledge’ and pathways to histori
Source: crassh