Farm for Change - Plenary Speeches and Speakers

Plenary Speeches and Speakers

Plenary 1: Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability

Speaker: Abby Goode｜Associate Professor of English and Sustainability Studies at Plymouth State University
Date: 9:10 am, June 12 (Friday)
Venue: 1F Conference Room, Institute of European and America Studies, Academia Sinica

Abstract

This talk will discuss the lesser-known origins of sustainability thinking and the entanglement of racism, eugenics, and agrarianism in American literary history. It will ask us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought and some long-cherished agrarian ideals.

Abby Goode

Dr. Abby Goode is Associate Professor of English and Sustainability Studies at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She is the author of Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability (UNC Press, 2022). Currently, she is writing a book about racist and antiracist climate thinking in American literature.

Plenary 2: Seeds of Relation: Planting as World-Making from Braiding Sweetgrass to Tayal Millet Ark and Pangcah Foraging Ecologies

Speaker: Hsinya Huang｜Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan
Date: 5:00 pm, June 12 (Friday)
Venue: 1F Conference Room, Institute of European and America Studies, Academia Sinica

Abstract

This lecture examines how seeds function as material condensations of relation across transpacific Indigenous worlds. I argue that seeds are not merely biological units of reproduction, but epistemic and ethical forms through which collective life is organized, remembered, and projected forward. Through three cases—Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, the Tayal Millet Ark Action led by Tomi Pagung, and Dongi Kacaw’s account of Pangcah ethnobotanical knowledge—I show how cultivation, gathering, and tending are forms of relation before they are forms of production. These cases reveal planting as a mode of world-making grounded in reciprocity, intergenerational continuity, and ecological accountability. By juxtaposing Potawatomi, Tayal, and Pangcah plant practices, the lecture identifies a convergent agrarian humanism that challenges extractive agricultural paradigms and proposes a transpacific framework for “planting otherwise”: cultivating land, community, and futurity through humility, care, and multispecies reciprocity.

Hsinya Huang

Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. She is former Dean of Arts and Humanities and Provost of Academic Affairs and Faculty Advancement, NSYSU, and served as Director General of International Cooperation and Science Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, 2018-19. She is the author or editor of books and articles on transnational and transpacific studies, Native American and Pacific Islander literatures, Indigenous and Sinophone studies, and humanities for the environment. She serves on the Advisory Board of The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Bloomsbury World Literature Series, Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, and Routledge Series on Transnational Indigenous Perspectives and on the Editorial Board of Transmotion: A Journal of Vizenorian Indigenous Studies. Her current research project investigates first foods in the trans-Pacific Indigenous literatures.