A Special Issue on Plant Humanities 

Humankind is deeply interconnected with botanical life. As sources of sustenance, agents of healing, and symbols of wonder, plants are vital to our lives. While offering us materials essential for existence, flora also inspires community identity and expresses cultural heritage. Nourishing, life-supporting, and ever[1]present, plants represent about ninety percent of the Earth's biomass. In the current era of intensifying ecological crisis, however, the future of many plant species and communities remains uncertain. If left unchecked, habitat loss, land use shifts, and climatic disturbances will continue to accelerate botanical decline worldwide.

In response to this context, the Plant Humanities (PH) has gained traction internationally over the last five years as an inter-/transdisciplinary area of research, pedagogy, and activism concerning plants and their multidimensional transactions with human beings. Entering the public domain in 2018, the term Plant Humanities refers to 'humanistic modes of interpretation' in the study of flora, society, culture, communities, history, art, literature, and other disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (Batsaki 2021, 2). According to the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative (2023), plants offer 'remarkable scope for research and interpretation due to their global mobility and historical significance to human cultures' (para. 1).

The Plant Humanities highlights the material and affective linkages between plants, people, and ecologies. Plant humanists investigate the narratives and ideas connected to flora; the creative works inspired by various species; and the myriad values that situate plants in socioeconomic contexts. The field examines a wide range of issues—from climate change and food security to the loss of biodiversity and plant-based cultural heritage. PH is exceptionally well-placed to articulate ethical concerns including the social repercussions of genetically modified flora and the moral implications of plant intelligence for practices of cultivation.

Accordingly, PH aims to promote dialogue and exchange between disciplines to engender new approaches to plants. In North America and Europe, research to date has emphasized cross-sector partnerships between universities, botanical gardens, herbaria, and other institutions. Plant humanists have focused, in particular, on the ways in which artworks, texts, archives, seeds, and preserved specimens narrate complex human-plant relations.

We invite paper including, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

1. Art, literature, performance, music, and plant life

2. Gender, sexuality, and flora

3. Creative practices engaging plants as partners, collaborators, and agents

4. Botanical film, media, and popular culture

5. Phytopoetics, phytocriticism, and phytosemiotics

6. Plants, posthumanism, and the posthumanities

7. Plants, postcolonialism, and globalization

8. Spiritualities and religious traditions centralizing plants

9. Plants, nostalgia, solastalgia, mourning, and memorialization

10. Interactions between flora, fauna, and fungi in literature, film, and performance

11. Traditional and folk botanical knowledge systems

12. Indigenous people’s relations to plants and ecosystems

13. Plant agency, sensing, behavior, learning, and cognition

14. Plant temporality, memory, and communication

15. Plant pedagogies including concerns of 'plant blindness' and 'plant awareness disparity'

16. Citizen science and botanical conservation

17. Social implications of scientific advances in plant cognition

18. Development of the Plant Humanities in the Global South

19. South and Southeast Asian interventions in the field 

Submission Process:

1. Author details: All authors of a manuscript should include their full names and affiliations on the cover page. Where available, please also include ORCiDs. One author must be designated as the corresponding author, and their email address will typically appear in the article PDF. Authors' affiliations should reflect the institutions where the research was conducted. If any co-author changes affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation may be included as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliations are allowed after the paper has been accepted. Author lists must be carefully considered before submission, as no changes to the author list will be permitted after acceptance.

2. Abstract: The abstract must not exceed 250 words with 5-6 keywords

3. Full Paper: 5000-6000 words

3. The submission file is in PDF format.

4. To submit your paper, you need to create a user account and submit the paper through the user homepage. To create an account, click on Submission. Or you can directly send your manuscript to submission@amkrpub.com.  

5. Deadline for submission: August 1, 2025

6. Reference style: Chicago Author-Date style (Latest version)

7. All submissions will go through a double-blind peer-review process.

Contact for assistance : goutam.majhi@amkrpub.com