Eva Rose Steinberg

EVA STEINBERG, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “Seeding the Future: Biodiversity, Adaptability, and Breeding Resilient Food Systems in a Changing Southeast,” supervised by Dr. Miriam Ticktin. Crop biodiversity is posed as the solution to threats to food security amid increasingly unpredictable and extreme climates. From conventional plant breeders who rely on genetic diversity to identify traits to incorporate into new varieties, to the preservation scientists who amass, organize, and regenerate germplasm, to smaller scale plant breeders working outside of agricultural institutions, everyone agrees: biodiversity is crucial if we want to feed people in the future. However, “biodiversity” is a vague term, and what these groups mean by biodiversity, the methods they employ, and the goals they are working towards differ widely. This research examines the practices surrounding crop biodiversity and their social, political, and economic entanglements. It focuses on peanut breeding, germplasm collection, and farming to deconstruct how biodiversity is mobilized in these contexts, and show what is being collaterally reproduced along with the peanuts themselves. The grantee argues that these practices are not just reproducing the crops, but that they also simultaneously maintain categories that pervade plant breeding, science, and agriculture. Through this research, the grantee examines what futures are being enacted, and which are being foreclosed, as these structures and taxonomies are reproduced. Ultimately, this project looks towards more ecological and relational conceptions of biodiversity.