Friday, April 25, 2025
11:00 am – 1:00 pm, reception to follow
Humanities 2, Room 259 + Zoom (RSVP by April 17th)
Please join the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) for a hybrid slow seminar, a discussion (and celebration) of Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines, a new book by Professor Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez of the UCSC History Department. The slow seminar will be on Friday, April 25, from 11am-1pm. There will be a reception with light refreshments to follow.
Please RSVP by Thursday, April 17th by filling out this form. Graduate students interested in a copy of the book will be able to indicate so on the form.
Please feel free to circulate this email with the attached flyer to relevant groups. What is a Slow Seminar? Read our explainer and check out past events here.
About Unmaking Botany
Unmaking Botany traces a history of imperial botany in the Philippines from the last decades of Spanish rule through the first decades of US colonization. Gutierrez approaches this history through the tension between how vernacular knowledge systems both revealed the limits of botany at the same time as they reinforced the dominance of botanical science over other ways of knowing plants. These “sovereign vernaculars” both made and unmade botany, a concept that is a methodological provocation to study the history of science from multiple vantage points and examine the interplay between different knowledge systems.
The e-book is now available through the UCSC library at this link. A number of physical copies of the book will be available free of charge to graduate students, courtesy of the author. If you wish to order the book from Duke University Press, you may receive 30% off with discount code E25GUTRZ.
About the Author
Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in Philippine history, postcolonial science and technology studies, histories of plant science, agrarian migration, and community-engaged research. Gutierrez is co-PI of the Watsonville is in the Heart community archive and research project and co-director of SEACoast.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of History, and the Science and Justice Research Center