Dr. Kathleen "Kat" Cruz Gutierrez (Ph.D. Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian history and the history of science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes on the history of botany, botanical taxonomies, and the recent scholarly "plant turn." Her research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous affiliations include De La Salle University, Manila, the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She presently serves as co-Principal Investigator for a community-engaged research initiative on Filipino agrarian labor and migration titled "Watsonville is in the Heart." For her work, she was awarded in 2024 the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California, a biannual honor that recognizes a single individual in higher education evidencing steadfast commitment to community engagement in their early careers.

In today’s conversation we discuss her latest monograph Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines where she traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices.

Dr. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University.

In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Pierce’s latest monograph, Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (2025, Duke University Press) where he analyzes a range of materials—from photography, literature, and sculpture to film and ethnography—revealing how speculation, as a form of situated knowledge production, can repair and reimagine the worlds that colonialism sought to destroy.

Dr. Deborah A. Thomas is Chair and the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds secondary appointments with the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Africana Studies, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Comparative Literature, and the School of Social Policy and Practice. She is also a Research Associate with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she spent two years as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University, and four years teaching in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Thomas’ latest monograph, Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, where she calls for new approaches to political sovereignty grounded in the embodied forms of autonomy and relation created in daily life.