Filtering by
- Member of: MBL History Audio Visual
- Member of: MLFC Learning Futures Collaborative Collection
Katsuma Dan reflects on his first meeting with Dr. Victor Heilbrunn at the University of Pennsylvania in December 1930. Recorded at the University of Washington, Friday Harbor group in 1978.
By the 1930s, the MBL had become "the" place to go during the summer for biological research and training. Luminaries such as Frank Lillie, Edmund Beecher Wilson, Edwin Grant Conklin, and Thomas Hunt Morgan took their students, packed up their families and research labs, and headed to the MBL. They worked in labs, ate together in the Mess, and they often lived in the limited on-campus housing. Life at the MBL was a life where fun, family, and science intertwined. This film, taken in 1935 by B. R. Coonfield of Brooklyn College, captures snippets of life at the MBL. Though the science and equipment are considerably updated and the faces and families have changed, many features remain the same today.
Drawing on collective biography, memory work, and diffractive analysis, this chapter examines childhood memories of our entanglements with plants. By approaching research as a ceremony, our goal is to reanimate the relationships we have shared with plants and places, illuminating multiple intra-actions and weaving different worlds together. Our collective ceremony of re-membering brings into focus how plants called us forward, evoked our gratitude and reciprocity, shared knowledge, and offered comfort, companionship, love, belongingness, and understanding throughout life. The process of our collective re-membering and writing has turned into a series of ceremonial gatherings and practices, bringing forth vivid memories, poetic expressions, and creative drawings. As humans, we have often (re)acted to plants’ generous gifts in meaningful gestures and communications that have co-created and made visible our deeply felt inter-species love and care.
This article combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together
the authors’ childhood memories of “common worlding.” Our collective biography brings into focus how we
engaged in common worlding in our childhoods through dreaming, metamorphosis, and play by tactfully
moving across different worlds and learning with the human and more-than-human others we encountered. As
we foreground childhood memory and its potential to reimagine pasts, presents, and futures, we explore what
kind of conditions are necessary to (re)attune ourselves to the multiple worlds around us in order to maintain
and nurture children’s—and our own—other-worldly connections.