Mingcan Rong

Photo of a lecture slide, with an image of a small pink ox-tongue fungus protruding from the dark crack between two tree roots. The text reads “Loving oneself and/or multiple others offers viable arrangements for living and dying in community with wider ecologies. The power and the pleasure of such a mycelial love lie in the simultaneity, the coextension, of decay and abundance”

This was a lot of fun!
Thanks @mingcan-rong.bsky.social, @samlebutt.bsky.social and colleagues for an enjoyable evening

Really enjoyed reading this non-fiction graphic book on queer/trans ecologies by @sagebrice.bsky.social! Definitely recommend! 🐧

Thank you for bringing so much to the symposium and being part of the imaginative evening! We’re really glad you enjoyed it!

A joint Political Ecologies and Centre for Environmental Humanities symposium, joined by 3 excellent speakers! @uobrisceh.bsky.social

A moment many years in the making – it's time to check proofs of my forthcoming book, Power Plants, due out in June with @manchesterup.bsky.social!
Somehow, this has snuck on to the AAG's Winter 2025 books list – which looks great (www.aag.org/new-books-fo...).
Preorder by end of Jan for 40% off 🌿🌲🌳

New paper just published in Synthese: Instrumental Understanding link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In this paper I start developing an account of pragmatic understanding fit for an epistemology of scientific instruments, drawing especially on Davis Baird's Thing Knowledge. #philsci #philsky

Check out our @planthums-uk.bsky.social web pages at kew.org/science/inte...
Learn who we are, what we do, and how you can work with us on #PlantHumanities #research @rbgkew.bsky.social @rhulgeography.bsky.social

Manchester University Press - Power plants Power plants - Browse and buy the Hardcover edition of Power plants by James Palmer

An unexpected advent surprise - my book is available to pre-order with @manchesterup.bsky.social

For those interested in biofuels & the bioeconomy, vegetal geographies, climate politics, or relationships between energy & "human progress" more broadly!

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526192127/

@theplantinitiative.bsky.social

The article "Plant Humanities Pedagogy: teaching at the intersection of feminist economics and economic botany" from the journal Endeavour by Frederica Bowcutt & Savvina Chowdhury is available free, open-access until Jan 14, 2026. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mA7AabuHw0bl

Just published! I am so glad to see this in print after more than five years in the making. The Invention of Scientific Conservation @degruyterbrill.bsky.social , edited by Esther van Duijn @rijksmuseum.bsky.social and myself @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social brill.com/display/titl...

Editorial Assistant for RGS-IBG Journals | Job vacancy An exciting opportunity to develop a greater understanding of the academic peer review and publishing process. Part time, six-month fixed term contract.

🚨 Job opportunity🚨

We are looking for an editorial assistant to work with me on the RGS journals (TIBG, The GJ, Area & Geo) as we move online systems.

🗓6 months fixed term
🕑0.4 FTE
📍Remote working option
❗️Closing date 11th Dec

Please share & apply! Happy to answer Qs.
www.rgs.org/about-us/wor...

amazingly produced zine from queer patch - group of sinophone queer / feminist researchers. look out for launches in various cities across 2026

Thanks so much Jenny!

@uobrisceh.bsky.social @planthums-uk.bsky.social @theplantinitiative.bsky.social

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Geo: Geography and Environment by Mingcan Rong (2025) entitled: 'Cultivating Scientific Authority: A Vegetal Geography of Chinese Rhododendrons at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh' with an orange banner at the top. This paper presents a vegetal geography of Chinese rhododendrons at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), examining the mechanisms through which RBGE's scientific authority is established in the field of Rhododendron research and conservation. Building on the geographical conceptualisation of relational plant agency, this paper extends it by illustrating that attending to the rhododendron–people–environment relationship sheds light on the ecological–political nature of the Rhododendron species at RBGE, the broader historical contexts that stimulate the accumulation, and the environmental conditions that encourage the maintenance. Drawing on interviews, observation and document analysis, I illustrate the contribution and labour of the underappreciated Chinese collectors in the historical botanical exploration, discuss rhododendron's ‘plantiness’ and examine RBGE's contemporary activities that aim to accumulate and sustain the ex situ rhododendrons both materially and epistemically. I argue that the scientific authority of RBGE has been shaped by the semi-colonial history of China after the First Opium War ending in 1842, the encounters between British botanists and local collectors, as well as RBGE's intentional accumulation and maintenance of rhododendrons and related knowledge, all of which are mediated by rhododendrons' agency and continue to influence today's conservation dynamics.

🌺New in Geo🌺

'Cultivating scientific authority: A vegetal geography of Chinese rhododendrons at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh' by @mingcan-rong.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1002/geo2... #geosky

Thanks so much Hayden!! Hope you enjoy reading it!

Thank you!

Thanks Eline! 🌱

Excited to share my first PhD paper which was based on my fieldwork at @thebotanics.bsky.social and just published on @geoopenaccess.bsky.social yesterday! 🌺

My first time organising a session at @rgsibg.bsky.social! Huge thanks to my amazing co-organisers Matthew Beach and Franklin Ginn, all the brilliant speakers across three panels, and everyone coming to our HPGRG-sponsored ‘Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond’ session!💚🪴🌺 #RGS

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Austin Read (2025) entitled 'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' with a red banner at the top. Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn.

#OpenAccess in TIBG:

'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' by @austinread.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky #geo

Cover of the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’, edited by Luís Manuel Mendonça de Carvalho and published by Springer.

📗 Luís Mendonça de Carvalho edited the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’ (Springer), which provides us with a 'unique re-evaluation of the Victorian Age and presents a new historiography based on plants'.
👉 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

The Centre that swims together… CEH Field Trip 2025 On the 17-18th of June 2025, members of the Centre gathered for our annual field trip, which took place in South Wales in glorious sunshine.  Our first stop was the Big Pit National Coal Museum in …

This week we've been descending into mines, scaling coal-spoil tips, and swimming under waterfalls. Read about our recent CEH field trip in our latest blog post: environmentalhumanities.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2025/06/20/t... #envhum

Gardens and Empires | British Library The histories of plants and gardens are deeply entangled with the histories of empires. This conference investigates the impacts of these global connection

#GARDENS & #EMPIRES - booking open! International conference @britishlibrary.bsky.social 27-28 June Convened by #BL, @rbgkew.bsky.social & @englishheritage.bsky.social Speakers include
@advollyr.bsky.social @sathnam.bsky.social & @corinnefowler.bsky.social
Booking: events.bl.uk/events/garde...

Excited to be organising a session with Matthew Beach on ‘Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond’ for the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Birmingham, 26-29th August 2025. Please take a look at our CFP if you are interested in plants, creativities, more-than-human geography! 🌱

Digital Plant Encounters: Integrating Critical Plant... The distinction between nature and technology is a western dichotomy that is slowly being eroded. As we are continuously confronted with humanity’s...

I am so glad to finally have this piece published with the wonderful Heather Rogers. Open access, so no excuse to not check it out.

Digital Plant Encounters: Integrating Critical Plant Studies with Digital Environmental Humanities sciendo.com/article/10.2...

🥳 Behold! The CEH Termcard has landed and it's packed full of exciting events -- from workshops to walkshops, lectures to moth expeditions. We're so pleased to have @chrisjpearson.bsky.social back to deliver our annual lecture on the 26 February, along with many other brilliant speakers!

Looking forward to meeting you in Bristol!

South Africa’s rare succulent plants are threatened by illegal trade – how to stop it Over 1 million of South Africa’s rare succulents have been illegally harvested since 2019.

@ahubschle.bsky.social and I have a new article out in @theconversation.com about how to approach the illegal succulent trade in South Africa through the lens of conservation justice.
theconversation.com/south-africa...