Date/Time
Tuesday
9 Sept 2025
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
2111 Bancroft Way, IEAS Conference Room, 5th Floor
Event Type
Book Launch
About the Talk: In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
About the Speaker: Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez (Ph.D. Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian history and the history of science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While at Berkeley, she received a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the STS DE program at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society (CSTMS). She writes on the history of botany, botanical taxonomies, and the recent scholarly “plant turn.” Her research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous affiliations include De La Salle University, Manila, the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She presently serves as co-Principal Investigator for a community-engaged research initiative on Filipino agrarian labor and migration titled “Watsonville is in the Heart” (WIITH). For her work with WIITH, she was awarded in 2024 the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California, a biannually awarded honor that recognizes one individual in higher education evidencing steadfast commitment to community engagement in their early careers.
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.
For more information about this event, please visit the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.
