Seed Scenius: Reinventing the History of Crop Innovation

Call for Proposals

Seed Scenius: Reinventing the History of Crop Innovation

This Call for Papers has now closed! Check back in Spring 2025 for further updates on the collection in progress.

Overview. Crop plant innovation—the genesis of novelty in the plants used to furnish grains, tubers, fruits, vegetables, and other produce—is essential to the success of contemporary agricultural systems. This is true of smallholder production in economically and environmentally marginalized spaces, where farmers continuously exchange, adopt, and adapt diverse seeds of an equally diverse array of species. It is also true of vast industrial monocrops of maize or soy whose origins lie in part in transgenic manipulation undertaken by transnational firms. In a world where pests, diseases, climate, and markets all shift and change, crops must too, and successful farmers are, by and large, those best positioned to take advantage of crop innovation. This innovation might arrive as an off-type rice in their field, a distinct potato tuber at the market, a maize import distributed by the government, or a bag of trademarked soybeans whose use as seed is subject to a strict contract.

For all its centrality to diets and economies, histories of crop innovation have yet to capture most of the knowledge, tools, and labor mobilized in this work. Seed Scenius: Reinventing the History of Crop Innovation, will do exactly that, illuminating what the composer Brian Eno calls a “scenius” around the making of crop varieties. The proposed collected work will bring the seed scenius into view via dozens of short, illustrative essays (250–2000 words) based on recent and emerging scholarship on crop innovation from across a range of disciplines or authors’ personal experiences in crop development.

Further motivation. For decades, scholars in a range of disciplines have focused on plants’ genetic manipulation as the lynchpin of crop variety development (for historians’ contributions, see Berry 2021). Following the arguments of scientists and seedsmen who positioned genetic expertise as essential to effective plant breeding from the late nineteenth-century onwards, the event of genetic recombination has generally been understood as the moment when a new crop variety is made. It may occur when a farmer mixes types in her field and selects the seeds for next year’s crop at harvest or from the granary. Or it can occur at an agricultural experiment station or commercial seed company when an individual who is a breeder by profession undertakes more or less the same tasks.

This perspective has given rise to two dominant narratives about crop innovation. One sees the agricultural productivity and the vast genetic diversity of global crops as largely attributable to past and present farmer experimentation. This account privileges genetic reshuffling over the longue durée and understands innovation as both collective and cumulative. A second narrative identifies professional breeders, thanks especially to their genetic expertise and presumed greater ability to plan and predict the direction of their experiments, as the only innovators whose authorship can truly be traced and therefore acknowledged. Here the emphasis is on recent genetic events (including some that a critical view might characterize as noticing or re-labeling, rather than recombining). This second narrative, accepted by states and encoded in regulations and treaties, underpins breeders’ and seed companies’ claims to ownership over plant varieties through formal intellectual property regimes (Fowler 1994; Kloppenburg 2004). Meanwhile, the first narrative substantiates activists’ and farmers’ claims that professional breeders’ work consists in exploiting the past inventive labor of millions of farmers rather than truly innovating (e.g., Brush 2011). Historians and anthropologists have provided strong evidence to support the first narrative, and with it the more general account of crop varieties as the product of collective and cumulative effort, rather than singular moments of precisely attributable invention (e.g., Fullilove 2017; Bray et al. 2023). They have done so chiefly by highlighting the dependence of “modern” crop innovations on bioprospecting and, relatedly, on local, peasant, or Indigenous expertise; or they have shown how often crop varietal innovation depended on renaming, repackaging, or inventively marketing plant products, rather than introducing biological novelty.

There exists an immense opportunity, and need, to expand and extend this narrative of longue durée, collective, cumulative innovative effort by documenting the vast array of knowledge, tools, and labor that have sustained professional plant breeding (narrowly conceived as an enterprise of genetic recombination) since the turn of the twentieth century. This array must include contributions by growers beyond seed saving and exchange, since farmers are tasked with the not-insignificant challenge of (re)producing in the field named varieties that are by their very nature changeable and changing. It must include cooks and eaters, whose culinary skills or tools and pursuit of flavors, aromas, and textures have historically defined much of what is good and valuable about the crops used for food. Importantly, this array of knowledge, tools, and labour must also include many activities underwritten by states as explicit contributions to the work of professional breeders (both public and private), including plant exploration and classification, phytosanitary inspection and enforcement, maintenance of seed and other germplasm collections, data creation and curation, “pre-breeding” of difficult plant populations, and more. Accounts of “modern” crop development that neglect breeders’ dependence on these additional domains of expertise miss out on the importance of various kinds of knowledge, technology, and labor in crop innovation and, in so doing, fail to register immense historical and contemporary public investments in crop development. These are taxpayer investments whose rewards have since the 1970s largely been captured by the private seed industry (Howard 2015).

Seed Scenius aims to present a new, more inclusive account of how distinct varieties of grains, tubers, fruits, vegetables, and other crops arrive at farms, markets, and kitchens across the globe. Taking inspiration from longstanding scholarly traditions in the history of technology that restore credit for innovations to collectives and communities (e.g., Bijker, Hughes and Pinch 1987; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003) and related efforts in the history of science to make visible hidden labor and local knowledge (e.g., Shapin 1989; Raj 2007; Bangham, Chacko and Kaplan 2022), the project will illuminate what the composer Brian Eno calls a “scenius” around the making of crop varieties. The scenius, which Eno described as the “intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene” and the “ecology of talent” that gives rise to pathbreaking work often recognized solely as individual output, is a concept that redistributes credit among a far wider range of actors (Eno 1996). In its application here, it is also capacious enough to encompass non-human agents and forces whose influence on the shape and scale of crop plants cannot easily be set aside in accounting for their perceived novelty.

Language. Proposals for papers should be in English. However, we hope to provide the possibility for contributions to be published in other languages, followed by an English translation. If you would like to propose a contribution in a language other than English, please note this in your proposal submission.

Timeline. The 150-word proposals are due by 30 September 2024 to hacurry@gatech.edu. The deadline for a first draft of the 250–2000 word essays (inclusive of reference material) will be 15 March 2025. Drafts will receive editorial feedback in early Summer 2025 for final submission by 15 September 2025. Events featuring contributors to the volume will be held in Spring 2026 in Cambridge, UK and Atlanta, GA.

Further information. This CFP emanates from the work of the project “From Collection to Cultivation: Historical Perspectives on Crop Diversity and Food Security,” which has based at the University of Cambridge since 2020 (https://www.cultivation.hps.cam.ac.uk/). Editing of the volume will be led by the project PI, Helen Anne Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Selected references

Bangham J, X Chacko, and J Kaplan, eds. 2022. Invisible Labour in Modern Science. Rowman and Littlefield.

Berry, DJ. 2021. Historiography of plant breeding and agriculture. In MR Dietrich, ME Borrello, and O Harman, eds, Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Springer.

Bijker, WE, TP Hughes, and T Pinch, eds. 1987. The Social Construction of Technological Systems. MIT Press.

Bray, F et al., eds. 2023. Moving Crops and the Scales of History. Yale University Press.

Brush, SB. 2011. Whose knowledge, whose genes, whose rights? In S Harding, ed., The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader. Duke University Press.

Eno, B. 1996. A Year with Swollen Appendices. Faber & Faber.

Fowler, C. 1994. Unnatural Selection: Technology, Politics, and Plant Evolution. Gordon and Breach. 

Fullilove, C. 2017. The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture. University of Chicago Press.

Kloppenburg, JR. 2004. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000. Second Edition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Howard, PH. 2015. Intellectual property and consolidation in the seed industry. Crop Science 55.

Oudshoorn, N and T Pinch, eds. 2003. How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies. MIT Press..

Raj,K. 2007. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan.

Shapin, S. 1989. The invisible technician. American Scientist 77.