What can be learned from the plants represented in museum collections?
Plants are represented in art either with a symbolic purpose within a narrative or simply as a decorative element. A considerable degree of subjectivity is acceptable since artists can favour creativity rather than realism and their main goal is not to convey precise...
The everyday challenges of Portuguese semi-industrial confectionery
In 2005 Rita João, Pedro Ferreira and I began researching the design of semi-industrial Portuguese confectionery, a term we coined to characterise the kind of one-portion, sweet pastries and cakes sold across Portugal as “Fabrico Próprio.” Meaning “Own Production,”...
Epic narratives of the Green Revolution: perspectives from Brazil, China and India
The Green Revolution (GR) is often portrayed as the advent of scientific and technological modernity in agriculture, which helped countries to avert famines and revert food deficits. Unfolding between the late 1940s and 1980s, the GR was a state-led process that...
Plants, dunes and people: coasts as entangled environments
In May, ReSEED project published a tweet about a conference on seeds and travelling plants. The tweet said and I quote: “European navigators didn´t travel empty-handed. They took & brought back different plants”. When I read this, I knew it was the best way to...
“Plantations are back”: palm oil in São Tomé
Driving south through São Tomé’s national road n. 2 we are welcomed by “the flourishing palm groves of Agripalma”. Oil palms reign supreme over that territory, creating a green pattern of staggering geometric regularity. When the fog lifts, it is possible to see the...
The revival of taxonomy: the importance of historical data and multidisciplinary approaches
Taxonomy is the science entrusted to understand, document, and describe biodiversity. In the last few years, taxonomy started receiving renewed attention by the scientific community, mainly due to the fact that 1) much of the world’s biodiversity is disappearing even...
More than words: conservation of documents and cultural heritage
It’s unquestionable the importance of conserving books and other types of documents. They are a narrated testimony of our human lives and can give us specific information to better understand our past existence. And the research developed by RESEED project is proof of...
Looking at the Architecture of Need: Reappropriating Community Facilities in Portugal (1945-1985)
The Architecture of Need: Community Facilities in Portugal 1945-1985 is the title of a new transdisciplinary research project that looks at the commission, design and production processes of essential local community civic and farming facilities in south Portugal...
The path of two separated sisters: botany and agriculture
Botany is the science that studies the plant world from all points of view and in all its different aspects. Currently encompasses a series of disciplines that study the metabolism, reproduction, growth and development of plants, but for a long time, botany was used...
History and crop science converge through genomics and ancient DNA
Plant science, and particularly crop science, always benefited from the historical contextualization of their scientific findings. This cross-disciplinary interchange has been important to trace back the parallel evolution of man and plants, particularly with regards...
