The Dose: Plant Vitality, Toxicity and Practice

What is The Dose? 

The Dose is a three-day online symposium presented by Queen Mary University of London and the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design in Sydney. It builds on recent academic and artistic research in the Plant Humanities (the nexus of plant science and the arts) and aims to highlight and celebrate the boundary workings and storytelling of plant knowledge. It includes panel discussions and a virtual printmaking workshop where participants will be sent a material packet ahead of time.

Why The Dose? 

From folklore and science, we learn that plants can cure or kill us—it’s a matter of dose. Folklore prefers affective approaches where plants are the protagonists of vibrant multispecies stories rooted in ancient myths and traditions. Medicine simplifies plant stories to deal with them practically in a solution-oriented manner. But how does the power of plants to kill and cure affect and shape the ways in which we, as people, have been building worlds with them? We are specifically interested in Indigenous and traditional plant knowledge, queer plant and non-academic praxes, such as apothecary plant tonic and tincture practices, to explore stories of life, death, the fragile cure-kill boundary of plant medicine and the concept of the dose. (Women with expert plant knowledge have conventionally been cast as witches.)