Susannah Chapman

I am a sociocultural and environmental anthropologist (PhD, University of Georgia, United States) with an interest in human-plant relations, food systems, and environmental governance. These interests are rooted in my previous life as a farmer and my enduring love of gardening. I have conducted long term ethnographic research in The Gambia and Australia, where I explored everyday practices of keeping and tending plants alongside changes in plant regulation and ownership, particularly under the expansion and transformation of intellectual property law. At UCC, I teach courses on theory in cultural anthropology, anthropological approaches to the study of “economic” life, and human relations with the more-than-human world.

My work explores the intersection of law, science, and society, with a particular focus on the commodification, propertization, and regulation of plant life since the late nineteenth century. Combining ethnographies of farmers fields, conservation initiatives, research institutes, and archives, I ask questions about the signification and care of plants but also the coloniality, biopolitics, and translational practices of efforts to regulate seeds and crop diversity. In this sense, my work explores both “grand schemes” to make plant life more uniform, stable, and traceable as well as everyday practices of keeping, tending, and relating to plants.

I am keenly interested in what understanding these different practices might hold for more just, convivial, and decolonial futures. My first monograph (under contract with Cambridge University Press) traces changes in agrarian life in The Gambia alongside the emergence and elaboration of seed markets, seed law, and seed science over the past 150 years. In following both historical and contemporary encounters concerning the seed, the book shows how attempts to regulate the circulation and reproduction of plants are rooted in a much longer history of plant reproductive governance that has entailed the discipline, assessment, and translation of diverse human and more-than-human worlds.

From 2021-2024, prior to joining UCC, I held an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) at The University of Queensland. There, I carried out research on changing practices of ownership and regulation in Australian agricultural supply chains and the rise of brand-name plant varieties. That work extended my longstanding interests in understanding the shifting remit of efforts to control the circulation and reproduction of plant life.

A closely related research interest concerns the conceptualisation of crop diversity loss and its relationship to agrobiodiversity conservation. I am particularly interested in how ideas about loss mediate such divergent intiatives as the implementation of large-scale plant collections and gene banking, the rise of farmer-to-farmer seed saving networks, and even calls for the extension and elaboration of intellectual property law (as a means to encourage future diversity).

I coordinate and teach the following modules within the Anthropology BA program (CK123):

• AY2007 Conceptualising Humanity: Theory in Cultural Anthropology
• AY3001 Anthropology Research Seminar (Dissertation)
• AY3004 Economic Anthropology
• AY 3005 Nature-Culture: Anthropologies of the More-than-Human

I also teach into undergraduate and postgraduate modules, including AY1001 Introduction to Anthropology, AY2001 Anthropology Field School, and AY6013 Anthropology: Theory and Paradigms.