Episode One: Glasshouses (Featuring Colin Hoag, Anthropologist)

The glasshouse is a technology of visibility and control. Everything inside is made legible, classifiable, available for the scientific gaze. It creates a kind of perpetual tropics, an artificial climate zone that dislocates organisms from their seasonal and ecological temporalities. The Victorian glass house, the Wardian case and also the Botanical Garden Greenhouse are living archives of colonial acquisition. In the following episode, Colin Hoag, a professor of anthropology at Smith College, speaks to those concerns in his lecture entitled “Glasshouse: Geographies as a Transnational Theory of Botanical Phantasmagoria.” Hoag's teaching and research include Anthropocene studies and the capitalist restructuring of atmospheres. He's the co-editor in chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and the author of Fluvial Imagination: on Lesotho's Water Export Economy (2022), from The University of California Press.