Black and Indigenous Collectors in the Material and Digital Archive at the Linnean Society of London

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To an ethnobotanist, conducting research across botanical collections offers an opportunity to reflect on and analyse human-plant relationships through a historical lens, and to situate plant collecting practices within the particular sociopolitical and socioeconomic context that framed early British botanical science, as well as the types of discourse by which plants came to be stored and exhibited as museum artefacts. The late 18th century, when botanical collections came into being, is part of a period of Europeans navigation across the globe in search of new trades, material and symbolic wealth and dominance, and the context in which Africans and other Indigenous people were forcefully displaced, enslaved,entangled and made inter-dependent to and within the British Empire.My research practice embraces the tandem of permanence and flexibility that collections research sanctions; the summoning of past materialities including living beings, and re-framing of the kinds of "truths" attached to, and projected via the epistemologies of their colonial pasts. Botanical collections, seen through Jane Bennett's radical lens on materiality, are not simply sites for knowledge production (as they were somehow considered in the past), but also affective assemblages and "vital materialities" with agency in their possession (Jane Bennett 2010, p.21). Considering the agency of the collection is an interesting idea that can perhaps aid in subverting museum practice, in providing the necessary opening from which to examine the kinds of human-plant relationships that come to define it as such. For example, addressing gatekeeping and other accessibility issues existing across collections research, challenging the rigid nature of scientific classifications themselves, or creating the space or possibilities for a less extractive and more multiverse context-there are many ways by which museum practices might be subverted. Researching Black and Ingenious people's contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British botanical scientific practices is as much about unearthing evidence pertaining to such collaborations, as it is about reassessing the ways in which evidence becomes defined within the Linnean collections. My aim is both to identify and scrutinise the subjectivities evidenced by and in definitions of scientific knowledge, and practices, and to engage in dialogue with (and make a record of) the ways other researchers, particularly those of BPOC heritage negotiate, challenge and produce knowledge across collections. Guiding this research will be Donna Haraway's concept of critical proximity which encourages the creation of situated knowledge as a way of identifying the subjectivities particular to my research approach (Donna Haraway, 1991). Aside from presenting and analysing my findings from working with and through the archival resources available at the Linnean Society of London, I will produce a sensory ethnography-a body of work that will combine visual and sound-based research findings, as the practice best suited to accessing the critical proximity mentioned above, and facilitating the production of the type of situated knowledge necessary for decolonising botanical collections.