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Xan Chacko

Brown University, Science, Technology, and Society, Faculty Member

University of California, Davis, Cultural Studies, Graduate Student

The University of Queensland, Australia, TC Beirne School of Law, Post-Doc

Wellesley College, Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty Member

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From 2021-23 I will be the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. I will design courses at the intersection of feminism, science, and the environment.
Supervisors: Mario Biagioli, Jim Griesemer, Joe Dumit, Natasha Myers, Emma Spary, and Helga Satzinger

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Michelle Velasquez-Potts

University of Oklahoma

Cal Poly Humboldt

San Francisco State University

Eileen Shaughnessy

Menzies School of Health Research

Gregory Asmolov

King's College London

Lafayette College

Mount Saint Vincent University

University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

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Papers by Xan Chacko

Introduction: Domestication of War

by Xan Chacko, Diana Pardo Pedraza, and Astrida Neimanis

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home... more This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: How do ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures make violence feel at home in the world? We are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. The domestic is not just a discrete, private space; it also extends into public spaces like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields. Developed within an editorial process rooted in a feminist ethos, the articles collected here provide critical and...

How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy

Configurations

Nothing comes without its story

American Anthropologist, 2023

Welcome to the (cet. i katha samāhāraṁ). My name is Njavara, and I'll be your tour guide for the ... more Welcome to the (cet. i katha samāhāraṁ). My name is Njavara, and I'll be your tour guide for the afternoon. Your entry fees go toward maintaining the collection and to pay the salary for folks like me. Yes, you in the back, in the blue kameez, what did you ask? Why yes, technically it is a seed bank, in that seeds of some plants are saved here. But it is so much more. It's a (cet. i katha samāhāraṁ)-a plant-story collection. 1 Seeds () are only made a part of the collection () when they are a part of a story

Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2022

Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply pop... more Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing ten...

Banking on the end: speculative unravellings of the frayed futures of frozen life

Propagating the Future: Seeds, Debris, and 'Diversity

Calm yourself, the world is ending

Sydney Environment Institute, The University of Sydney, 2019

Following on from her presentation at the Everyday Militarisms Collaboratory, Dr Xan Chacko explo... more

Protection or prohibition: the awkward reconciliation of intellectual property and biodiversity conservation

Seeds: Theorizing the contemporary

Data imaginaries: frictions and flattenings in the data lives of seeds

Killing with Kindness: Adapting to Crisis in Seed Banking Protocols

Resisting the lure of the elemental: is the seed bank the antithesis of a multi‐species future?

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements

Seed: Gendered Vernaculars and Relational Possibilities

Feminist Anthropology, 2021

What Should Farmers’ Rights Look Like? The Possible Substance of a Right

Agronomy, 2021

Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food... more Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) as a means of recognising the past, present, and future contributions of farmers in conserving, improving, and making available the plant genetic materials that are important for food and agriculture. Discussions have been underway under the auspices of the ITPGRFA’s Governing Body with the recent Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights (AHTEG-FR) collecting together views, experiences, and best practices to produce an inventory and options for encouraging, guiding, and promoting the realisation of Farmers’ Rights. While this is useful, this article reports on the outcomes of a workshop that applied a different methodology. Our purpose was to identify what could be and should be the substance of Farmers’ Rights so that the policy substance drives the implementation rather than the AHTEG-FR’s retro-fitting Farmers’ Rights to existing views, best practic...

The cosmopolitics of food futures: imagining nature, law, and apocalypse

Continuum, 2020

ABSTRACT The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the ... more ABSTRACT The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed: The Untold Story and Food Evolution, weave different – though sometimes similar – accounts of the past in order to present precarious futures that are best served through particular interventions. To the extent that both films render accounts of precarious futures saved by science or conservation, we argue that they provide compelling spaces, following Isabelle Stengers’s ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’, to slow down: to pause and consider the types of worlds that are brought into being – and those that are foreclosed – in their portrayal of the crises of climate and food. We follow this worlding practice through four threads developed in each film: the momentum of apocalypse, the boundaries of the natural, the politics of law, and the cures for precarity. Focusing on the politics of representation mobilized in each film, we enact a feminist praxis of slowing down.

Seed: Gendered Vernaculars and Relational Possibilties

by Susannah Chapman and Xan Chacko

Feminist Anthropology, 2021

This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed. We both work on p... more This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed. We both work on practices of care and control related to seeds, from seed banking and agricultural development projects to everyday practices of keeping, saving, and tinkering with seeds. As a term, seed evokes gendered ideas about human reproduction that center masculinity and virility, even though the
botanical seeds are in fact already-fertilized embryos. This entry takes up the gendered dimension of seeds (and the elisions it produces) as a lens to interrogate ideas of use, usefulness, and uselessness (Ahmed 2019) in the world of biodiversity banking and plant genetic resources. With examples from seed banking and farming in West Africa, and with inspiration from feminist philosophers and anthropologists Sylvia Wynter, Marilyn Strathern, and Sara Ahmed, this provocation contributes to
the vocabularies of feminist anthropology and science studies. Since the stories we tell about the world are filled with metaphor, why not complicate the vernacular understanding and usage of seed to reflect the queer and matrilineal possibilities that we see all around us, instead of the potent patrilineality that remains as a vestigial reminder of the values we would rather leave behind?

Creative Practices of Care: The Subjectivity, Agency, and Affective Labor of Preparing Seeds for Long‐term Banking

Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment

Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term sol... more Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to &quot;tech&quot; work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds for their ultimate storage at the largest seed bank of wild plants-the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in West Sussex, England. Contributing to the growing scholarship on care in technoscientific practice, I investigate how scientists summon their bodies, imagina-tions, and feelings to clean, screen, and count seeds, all the while producing knowledge that renders the seeds legible in the bank. By following the seeds through the experimental care practices espoused by scientists involved from the moment seeds arrive at the bank until they are ready for storage , I study how seemingly mundane tasks radically influence how &quot;life&quot; is being prepared for the future. [seed banking, gene banking, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership , care practice, laboratory studies, affective labor].

Digging up Colonial Roots

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the lar... more The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the largest repository of wild plant seeds in the world. According to their self-published institutional history, the MSBP was created to take on the mantle of global biodiversity conservation at a moment of ecological crisis. I study the bio-politics of the recasting of Kew’s role as arbiter of colonial botanical knowledge to keeper of botanical futures through seed banking. While the MSBP is a part of Kew’s vision to stay at the cutting edge of conservation and environmental governance, its relationship to colonial botany and political economy must also be interrogated in the light of its legacy. I revivify the origin story of the MSBP to show how Kew Gardens’ long tradition of plant extraction, accumulation, and exchange, as well as nationalist zeal motivated by the potential loss of ‘native species,’ were integral to the ‘rebranding’ of Kew as the MSBP.

Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, , 2019

If seeds are elemental to plant life, safeguarding them is tantamount to the safety of plants and... more If seeds are elemental to plant life, safeguarding them is tantamount to the safety of plants and, by extension, humanity. Saving seeds saves the planet. This logic motivates a monumental technoscientific undertaking, a response to the overwhelming loss of plant life in the wake of the Anthropocene: seed banking. This endeavor takes seeds from their lived environment and holds them in frozen vaults until the unknowable, but certainly apocalyptic, future. These banked seeds are the fertilized embryos of plants that existed in the past and, at the same time, are constructed as the elementary origins of future plants. Who does it serve to see and know seeds as elemental? What must be willfully ignored to maintain the illusion of elementality? My observations from seed bank laboratories and greenhouses leads me to suggest that framing seeds as elemental requires effacing the contexts and social relations that bring them into existence, flattening them into legible data.

Introduction: Domestication of War

by Xan Chacko, Diana Pardo Pedraza, and Astrida Neimanis

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home... more This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: How do ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures make violence feel at home in the world? We are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. The domestic is not just a discrete, private space; it also extends into public spaces like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields. Developed within an editorial process rooted in a feminist ethos, the articles collected here provide critical and...

How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy

Configurations

Nothing comes without its story

American Anthropologist, 2023

Welcome to the (cet. i katha samāhāraṁ). My name is Njavara, and I'll be your tour guide for the ... more Welcome to the (cet. i katha samāhāraṁ). My name is Njavara, and I'll be your tour guide for the afternoon. Your entry fees go toward maintaining the collection and to pay the salary for folks like me. Yes, you in the back, in the blue kameez, what did you ask? Why yes, technically it is a seed bank, in that seeds of some plants are saved here. But it is so much more. It's a (cet. i katha samāhāraṁ)-a plant-story collection. 1 Seeds () are only made a part of the collection () when they are a part of a story

Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2022

Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply pop... more Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing ten...

Banking on the end: speculative unravellings of the frayed futures of frozen life

Propagating the Future: Seeds, Debris, and 'Diversity

Calm yourself, the world is ending

Sydney Environment Institute, The University of Sydney, 2019

Following on from her presentation at the Everyday Militarisms Collaboratory, Dr Xan Chacko explo... more

Protection or prohibition: the awkward reconciliation of intellectual property and biodiversity conservation

Seeds: Theorizing the contemporary

Data imaginaries: frictions and flattenings in the data lives of seeds

Killing with Kindness: Adapting to Crisis in Seed Banking Protocols

Resisting the lure of the elemental: is the seed bank the antithesis of a multi‐species future?

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements

Seed: Gendered Vernaculars and Relational Possibilities

Feminist Anthropology, 2021

What Should Farmers’ Rights Look Like? The Possible Substance of a Right

Agronomy, 2021

Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food... more Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) as a means of recognising the past, present, and future contributions of farmers in conserving, improving, and making available the plant genetic materials that are important for food and agriculture. Discussions have been underway under the auspices of the ITPGRFA’s Governing Body with the recent Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights (AHTEG-FR) collecting together views, experiences, and best practices to produce an inventory and options for encouraging, guiding, and promoting the realisation of Farmers’ Rights. While this is useful, this article reports on the outcomes of a workshop that applied a different methodology. Our purpose was to identify what could be and should be the substance of Farmers’ Rights so that the policy substance drives the implementation rather than the AHTEG-FR’s retro-fitting Farmers’ Rights to existing views, best practic...

The cosmopolitics of food futures: imagining nature, law, and apocalypse

Continuum, 2020

ABSTRACT The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the ... more ABSTRACT The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed: The Untold Story and Food Evolution, weave different – though sometimes similar – accounts of the past in order to present precarious futures that are best served through particular interventions. To the extent that both films render accounts of precarious futures saved by science or conservation, we argue that they provide compelling spaces, following Isabelle Stengers’s ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’, to slow down: to pause and consider the types of worlds that are brought into being – and those that are foreclosed – in their portrayal of the crises of climate and food. We follow this worlding practice through four threads developed in each film: the momentum of apocalypse, the boundaries of the natural, the politics of law, and the cures for precarity. Focusing on the politics of representation mobilized in each film, we enact a feminist praxis of slowing down.

Seed: Gendered Vernaculars and Relational Possibilties

by Susannah Chapman and Xan Chacko

Feminist Anthropology, 2021

This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed. We both work on p... more This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed. We both work on practices of care and control related to seeds, from seed banking and agricultural development projects to everyday practices of keeping, saving, and tinkering with seeds. As a term, seed evokes gendered ideas about human reproduction that center masculinity and virility, even though the
botanical seeds are in fact already-fertilized embryos. This entry takes up the gendered dimension of seeds (and the elisions it produces) as a lens to interrogate ideas of use, usefulness, and uselessness (Ahmed 2019) in the world of biodiversity banking and plant genetic resources. With examples from seed banking and farming in West Africa, and with inspiration from feminist philosophers and anthropologists Sylvia Wynter, Marilyn Strathern, and Sara Ahmed, this provocation contributes to
the vocabularies of feminist anthropology and science studies. Since the stories we tell about the world are filled with metaphor, why not complicate the vernacular understanding and usage of seed to reflect the queer and matrilineal possibilities that we see all around us, instead of the potent patrilineality that remains as a vestigial reminder of the values we would rather leave behind?

Creative Practices of Care: The Subjectivity, Agency, and Affective Labor of Preparing Seeds for Long‐term Banking

Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment

Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term sol... more Laying aside the question of whether saving seeds in freezers is the most promising long-term solution to prevent the loss of plant biodiversity and secure our access to food in a troubled future climate, this article draws attention to the conditions of possibility that scaffold the seed bank world. Oft relegated to &quot;tech&quot; work that is unworthy of observation, this article focuses on the labor practices of seed curators as they prepare the seeds for their ultimate storage at the largest seed bank of wild plants-the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in West Sussex, England. Contributing to the growing scholarship on care in technoscientific practice, I investigate how scientists summon their bodies, imagina-tions, and feelings to clean, screen, and count seeds, all the while producing knowledge that renders the seeds legible in the bank. By following the seeds through the experimental care practices espoused by scientists involved from the moment seeds arrive at the bank until they are ready for storage , I study how seemingly mundane tasks radically influence how &quot;life&quot; is being prepared for the future. [seed banking, gene banking, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership , care practice, laboratory studies, affective labor].

Digging up Colonial Roots

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the lar... more The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the largest repository of wild plant seeds in the world. According to their self-published institutional history, the MSBP was created to take on the mantle of global biodiversity conservation at a moment of ecological crisis. I study the bio-politics of the recasting of Kew’s role as arbiter of colonial botanical knowledge to keeper of botanical futures through seed banking. While the MSBP is a part of Kew’s vision to stay at the cutting edge of conservation and environmental governance, its relationship to colonial botany and political economy must also be interrogated in the light of its legacy. I revivify the origin story of the MSBP to show how Kew Gardens’ long tradition of plant extraction, accumulation, and exchange, as well as nationalist zeal motivated by the potential loss of ‘native species,’ were integral to the ‘rebranding’ of Kew as the MSBP.

Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, , 2019

If seeds are elemental to plant life, safeguarding them is tantamount to the safety of plants and... more If seeds are elemental to plant life, safeguarding them is tantamount to the safety of plants and, by extension, humanity. Saving seeds saves the planet. This logic motivates a monumental technoscientific undertaking, a response to the overwhelming loss of plant life in the wake of the Anthropocene: seed banking. This endeavor takes seeds from their lived environment and holds them in frozen vaults until the unknowable, but certainly apocalyptic, future. These banked seeds are the fertilized embryos of plants that existed in the past and, at the same time, are constructed as the elementary origins of future plants. Who does it serve to see and know seeds as elemental? What must be willfully ignored to maintain the illusion of elementality? My observations from seed bank laboratories and greenhouses leads me to suggest that framing seeds as elemental requires effacing the contexts and social relations that bring them into existence, flattening them into legible data.