Leo Chu

This article investigates how the materiality of plant specimens influenced scientists’ practice, network-building, and the imagination of professional identity through Asa Gray’s encounter with a fragmented specimen. We highlight how the incomplete specimen prompted Gray to create the genus Shortia and mobilize his network of collectors to locate the plant in its natural habitat. We then turn to a parallel network emerging in Tokugawa Japan among scholars of honzōgaku (Japan’s materia medica), who were similarly amazed by the materiality of specimens. Plant fragments thus gained a central role in the collaboration between honzō scholars and European botanists, leading to the naming of a new genus, Schizocodon. Finally, as specimens of Schizocodon traveled to the United States, Gray used them to corroborate his classification of Shortia and his biogeographical theory of disjunct distribution. This article delineates how the materiality of specimens inspired, connected, and frustrated the scientists, while simultaneously being modified, translated, and redefined. Putting together these fragments allows us to rediscover the contested yet entangled relation between the two genera, between the multiple transpacific networks, and ultimately between scientists and specimens.

In the past decade, agroecology has been promoted as a potential way to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and overcome the uneven socio-ecological impacts of agricultural development, yet agroecologists also warn the danger of co-option by dominant agri-food systems. This paper seeks to understand the history of such tension through the development of agroecosystem analysis—a research method related to but different from contemporary agroecology—in Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, between 1970 and 1990. The paper adopts the concepts of boundary work and boundary object to scrutinize how agroecosystem analysis was theorized: on the one hand, scientists’ emphasis on the interdisciplinary of agroecosystem analysis could be read as a boundary work differing the method from the narrow focus on rice production in the Green Revolution; on the other hand, agroecosystems could be analyzed as boundary objects deployed by scientists to facilitate collaboration across diverse actors within the network. However, the downplaying of public participation in agroecosystem analysis made it vulnerable to the co-option by authoritarian regimes, which primarily used the method to attract international funds and sacrificed its interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the rise and fall of agroecosystem analysis in Southeast Asia, the paper interprets contemporary agroecologists’ alliance with peasants’ struggle as a new round of boundary work seeking to resist the persistent threat of co-option while realizing the transformative potential of interdisciplinary research in food and agriculture.

Abstractabstract:This article investigates the presentation of state power and affective life in the anime series Yuki Yuna Is a Hero. Juxtaposing the portrayal of the recruitment of female bodies and affects into the defense of the sovereign with the historical context of Imperial Japan, this article elaborates how the series captures the sovereign violence that creates biopolitical subjects in everyday life. It then illustrates how the series appropriates and subverts the genre conventions of the magical girl (mahō shōjo) anime through Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life and the state of exception. This subversion offers an opportunity to rethink the politics of disaster in contemporary Japan. Finally, this article probes into the utopian potential of the series by elucidating its affirmation of the relationality of life in an enchanted world.