Seeds of Resurgence
About the Cluster
A seed, able to fit on the small expanse of a fingertip, can hold incalculable intergenerational knowledge. Heirlooms are a medium of transmission of ancestral inheritance—both the living expression of what elders have selected to bequest to the future and the record of (agri)cultural practices that have sustained the past, often against the odds. Vivien Sansour, the keeper of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, also understands the seed as a “subversive rebel, of and for the people, traveling across borders and checkpoints to defy the violence of the landscape while reclaiming life and presence.” This research cluster aims to join her in that work of reclamation—and celebration of the persistence of living that seeds embody, in spite of colonial cultures that selectively administer famine and death. The cluster devotes itself to the cultural memory and the decolonial futures for which seeds potentially act as nourishing emissaries.
Connection to Nourishment
Against the grain of colonial paradigms of research that seek to extract knowledge from their objects of study, this cluster pursues practices of knowing that instead offer sustenance to communities within the university and beyond its walls.
Understanding that the targeted elimination of social diversity and biodiversity are intimately linked, this research cluster seeks to counter histories of erasure—through practices of remembrance and by making space for “doing our own thing.” Drawing from Leanne Betasomosake’s reflections on “resurgence” as an ever-renewing repertoire of place-based practices that spring from indigenous knowledge and move toward making a liberated world, the cluster seeks to create communities of learning that break away from the imperative to seek recognition and legibility within colonial frameworks of miseducation—and instead gather knowledge from the earth up, as it were.
The cluster does this first, by bringing forward submerged stories of fugitive seeds, closeted or underground ancestral inheritances, seed smugglers who defy borders, guerrilla gardens, grandmother land-epistemologies, and stories of place and kin for which seeds are both the metonymic kernel and expression; second, by creating space for living legacies of nourishment to cross-pollinate. So much can flower from the simple questions: where did this seed come from?; who are its relatives?; how do its relations entrench or destabilize asymmetries of power? Second, with the hope of animating forms of solidarity that are not merely abstract or notional, this seed undercommons will build cross-cultural alliances among indigenous, diasporic, and queer & trans communities of subsistence. One of the cluster’s most vibrant hypotheses is that seeds can ground new forms of belonging that exceed identitarian logics.
The cluster aims to feed people in a way they will remember—and, in doing so, to reimagine what it means to provide and receive nourishment beyond the (neo)colonial parameters of extractive conquest and forced dependence.
Co-Principal Investigators
Maywa Montenegro, Associate Professor, Environmental Studies
M. Ty, Assistant Professor, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Affiliated Scholars
Jorge Mascarenhas Menna Baretta, Assistant Professor, Art
micha cárdenas, Associate Professor, Performance, Play and Design, and CRES
Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, Assistant Professor, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
L Gilbert, farmer at Pie Ranch, UCSC MFA alum in Environmental Arts and Social Practice
Kat Gutierrez, Assistant Professor, History
Dima Mabsout, MFA candidate
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Assistant Professor, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Eric Porter, Professor, History of Consciousness
Tyler Rai, MFA candidate, Environmental Arts and Social Practice
Nicole Sarimento, MFA candidate, Environmental Arts and Social Practice
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Professor, Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Jacob Sirhan, doctoral candidate, History of Art and Visual Culture
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Events
Mark your calendar – more information forthcoming
November 1st, 1-4 | seed commons build, getting to know one another.
Wednesday, November 5th, 5-7 pm | study session, heirloom seed keepers
Saturday, November 22, 2025, Evening | community seed dinner with TGP
Wednesday, December 3, 2025, 5-7 pm | study session on Hebron seed bank
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Banner Image: olam ha-ba (the world to come) by Tyler Rai at the Amending Worlds: Speculative Futures exhibition. Photo by Daris Jasper.