Fridays weeks 2,4,6, 8 HT and TT 2026, 10am - 12 midday
Seminar Room, St John's College
All welcome
Tree planting has become one of the most popular and ubiquitous nature-based solutions. Responding to three injunctions of mitigation, adaptation and restoration (pursued either jointly or independently), tree planting campaigns have blossomed over the past decades.
Reading foundational literature on trees and forests, and bridging burgeoning literature on afforestation across disciplines, this working group brings environmental humanists and social scientists together every two weeks to think more carefully about the human and more-than-human histories, anthropologies, geographies and political aesthetics of planting trees.
The small group will work towards either a paper and/or special issue in the Environmental Humanities journal that take stocks of existing literature and sketches a research agenda.
If your research interests intersect and you wish to join and commit for the two terms, please email envhums@torch.ox.ac.uk.
Hilary and Trinity term 2026
10am-12pm
Friday, weeks 2, 4, 6, 8
St John’s College
(15 St Giles Seminar Room)
Convenors: Yasmeen Arif (Anthropology), Wallerand Bazin (Geography), Abdul Wahid Khan (Geography), Madeleine Rose (English)
Introduction* (30/01)
Robert Harrison, Forest: The Shadow of Civilisation (University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Laura Rival (ed), The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, (London: Berg, 1998)
*For this first session, by means of introductions, we will start with a collective brainstorming session. Come with your examples of the representations of trees, and particularly planting of trees, from your field sites or wider readings (fiction, films, advertisements, paintings etc).
Planting Nature (13/02)
Shaul Cohen, Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America (University of California Press, 2004)
Rosetta Elkin, Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (2022)
Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, Tree cultures: the place of trees and trees in their place (Berg, 2002)
Arboreal imaginaries (27/02)
Solvejg Nitzke & Helga G. Braunbeck, “Arboreal Imaginaries. An Introduction to the Shared Cultures of Trees and Humans”, Green Letters, Volume 25, Issue 4 (2021)
Anna Burton, Trees in Nineteenth-century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel (Routledge, 2021)
Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione (eds), Trees in Literatures and the Arts: Human–Arboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Planted flags (13/03)
Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Aike P Rots, “Trees of Tension: Re-Making Nature in Post-Disaster Tohoku”, Japan forum, 2021, 33(1): 1–24.
Tsypylma Darieva, “Rethinking Homecoming: Diasporic Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet Armenia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (3): 490–508.
Michael Ekers and Michael Farnan, “Planting the Nation: Tree Planting Art and the Endurance of Canadian Nationalism”, Space and Culture, 2010, 13 (1): 95–120.
John Knight, “A Tale of Two Forests: Reforestation Discourse in Japan and Beyond”, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1997, 3 (4): 711–730.
Emily McKee, “Performing Rootedness in the Negev/Naqab: Possibilities and Perils of Competitive Planting”, Antipode, 2014, 46 (5): 1172–1189.
Finola O’Kane, “Educating a Sapling Nation: The Irish Nationalist Arboretum.” Garden History, 2007, 35: 185–195.
Gill Tavner and Katrin Prager, “Is it really about the trees? Exploring the roots of resistance to tree-planting on the Welsh commons”, Scottish Geographical Journal, 2025.
Trinity term
Please note that the following themes and readings are tentative and may change following the discussions in Hilary term and new readings prompted by participants.
Arboreal agency (22/05)
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013)
Andrew Matthews, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2022)
Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, “Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time” in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, edited by Carl Knappett, and Lambros Malafouris (Springer, 2008)
Plantation worlds (8/05)
Maan Barua, Plantation Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024)
Janae Davis et al. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises.” Geography compass, 2019, 13(5).
Kristen Lyons and Peter Westoby,“Carbon colonialism and the new land grab: Plantation forestry in Uganda and its livelihood impacts”, Journal of Rural Studies, 2014, 36:13-21.
The labour of trees: carbon, remediation, cooling etc (05/06)
James Palmer, Power Plants: Bioenergy, Vegetal Labour and the Politics of Productivity (Manchester University Press, 2026)
James Palmer, “Putting Forests to Work? Enrolling Vegetal Labor in the Socioecological Fix of Bioenergy Resource Making”, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021, 111(1), 141-156.
Conclusion (19/06)
*This final session will weave together the different avenues discussed in the previous sessions.
Environmental Humanities, TORCH Hubs
