Helene Strauss

Helene Strauss is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa, and has previously held faculty positions in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and the Department of English at Western University, Canada. Her research areas include South African literature and audio-visual culture, feminist and queer aesthetic activisms, the environmental humanities, and embodied pedagogy. She is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Canadian Governor General’s Gold Medal, a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, two consecutive ratings from the South African National Research Foundation, and an upcoming fellowship with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies.

Her publications include the book Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa(University of Toronto Press); co-edited special issues of the journals Interventions, Critical Arts, and Studies in Social Justice; and a co-edited book (with Sarah Olutola, Jessie Forsyth) titled Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge).

This project follows the symbiotic atmospheric pathways that connect plant and human breath. By expanding the concept of the phytosphere to include the atmospheric terrain where plant chemistry and other elemental life-forces intersect, the research aims to develop methods for reading regenerative phytochemical relationships that exceed carbon capitalism’s proprietary and destructive relationship with air. Drawing on recent work on the aesthetics of air and the ostensibly cooperative capacities of plants, this part of a larger book project on Phytospheric Justice considers human-plant mutualisms specifically through the prism of non-scalability and the question of plant time.

The unchecked scale and speed at which carbon captured in deep time continues to be released into our atmospheres demands forms of reckoning attentive not only to social and biological diversity, but also to chronodiversity, and to differences in scale in the regenerative capacities of ancient, contemporary and future vegetal life. Phytospheric injustice, one might say, is a direct consequence of messing with plant time. In an effort to honour plant time, then, this project aims to re-embed multispecies relationality in timescales that outstrip capitalist and colonial time.