with Dr. Giselle Anatol

In this knowledge share, Anatol will focus on the folk figure known as a “soucouyant” in Trinidad, and, in other parts of the African diaspora, as Old Hige or Old Hag, boo hag, azeman, volant, loogaroo, obayifo, and a host of other names. This creature appears in the community as an old woman during the day, but at night she sheds her skin, transforms into a ball of fire, and flies from house to house to suck the blood or life-force of her neighbors. It is said that rice, salt, or sorghum sprinkled on front stoops, doorways, windowsills, and village crossroads can protect sleepers from a soucouyant’s attack. 

with Michelle Nazzal

In this knowledge share, we will examine ancestral plants and the role they play in Palestinian food and land-based culture. Together we’ll move through the history of foraging and generations-old culinary traditions, while discussing the devastating effects that genocide, forced famine and mass displacement can have on these practices. We will learn about how Palestinians on the land are preserving these traditions, and ways of remembering in the diaspora.

Join Herban Cura founder and herbalist Antonia Estela Pérez for a plant identification walk along the Mahicantuck River (Hudson River) in Washington Heights, NY, where will be meeting edible and medicinal plants and trees growing along the river.

This walk is for anyone looking to start their journey with plants or curious to learn more about them!

with alma valdez-garcia

Join us for an uplifting & activating vinegar infusion workshop! We will learn how to make infused vinegar with dandelion, talk tea infusions, reflect on spring awakening & wake our bodies. Come ready to read some poems, build spring intentions, & take home your very own jar of infused vinegar. 

with kale mays

This time travel container will hold participants through a journey into the stories held by the soil, the waters, and the sky stretching over Brower Park and the neighborhood we now refer to as Crown Heights. 

with Wafa Ghnaim

This knowledge share will explore the deep cultural significance of Palestinian women’s traditional dress, focusing on the thobe and the art of tatreez (embroidery). We will learn about the role of tatreez as a unique form of storytelling, where patterns, colors, and stitching techniques convey personal and collective histories, embodying the land, community, and the effects of occupation and exile. Participants will learn how this centuries-old craft has served as both a personal expression and a form of resistance.

with Dr. Jayson Maurice Porter

In this knowledge share we will be discussing the role of plants in diaspora with a focus on coconuts and other oilseed in coastal Guerrero, Mexico. These plants have served as important conduits of liberation for Afro-Indigenous communities through Mexican Independence, the Mexican Revolution, and the agrarian reforms that followed.

with Shabina Lafleur-Gangji

This knowledge share will explore traditional knowledge around opium poppies rooted in South Asian, North African and West Asian traditions, history of imperialist drug wars, and the use of the plant as a tool of resistance against imperialism, the war on drugs and slavery.

with Alysia Mazzella

In this knowledge share, we look to the remarkable intelligence of nature by studying how rewilded honey bees survive and thrive without human intervention. This exploration will delve into the fascinating history of how honey bees arrived in the Americas and how the industrial practices of modern beekeeping have become unsustainable—both for the bees and for the ecosystems they support.

with Leila

This knowledge share will provide an introduction to bioremediation — the practice of allying with living organisms to detoxify and regenerate contaminated soils and water. Participants will learn how to work with plants, fungi, beneficial microorganisms, and other regenerative remedies to remove, neutralize, or break down the toxic contaminants left by war. We will explore how bioremediation can help restore contaminated and damaged farmlands, heal ecosystems, protect water resources, and support healthy food systems in war-impacted areas.

with Dr. Sha'Mira Covington

When the Anthropocene meets decoloniality and critical race theory, we collide at the critical intersection of fashion, food, and water. These are the few necessities that an individual needs to survive and a material and temporal solidarity exists between them.

The “Anthropocene” is used to explain how human actions shape the environment in all its physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. Chattel slavery and European colonization define the Anthropocene, followed by decades of the establishment of plantations, the introduction of cash crops, massive clearings of forests, the pollution of waterways, and other economic exploitation. So, what can a Black perspective on the Anthropocene teach us about our relationships to our basic necessities?

with Joshua Kwaku Asiedu

This knowledge share will provide a deeper understanding of how plants, both indigenous and introduced from regions like the Americas and Southeast Asia, have become woven into the cultural fabric of Ghana. You’ll learn how these plants are not just used for physical ailments, but also as tools for spiritual cleansing, personal healing, and connecting with the land.

with Teju Adisa-Farrar

This knowledge share delves into the heritage and resilience of plant fibers and dyes integral to Indigenous Black African geographies and the Black diaspora in the Caribbean. While most plant fibers and dyes are used primarily for textiles, this knowledge share will explore how these plants embody cultural identity, spirituality, ecological awareness, and medicinal properties

with Serpentina

Abortion is an ancient practice that has coexisted with birth throughout history. Despite colonial narratives framing abortion as a "sin," it has always been a part of the human experience. This knowledge share is designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge necessary to support your loved ones during their abortion journeys.

with Dr. Samuel Bautista Lazo

In this knowledge share, Dr. Samuel Bautista Lazo will guide us through the history of his people, the Benzaa (Cloud People), known to the western world as the Zapotecs. He will share indigenous perspectives and stories passed down from his grandparents that trace back to the last ice age. The Benzaa have been stewards of the central valley of Oaxaca for centuries, adapting to the natural and cosmic cycles they have experienced.

with Dr. Sarah Nahar

In order for complex life forms to survive on planet Earth, people—especially those of us responsible for contributing to climate changes and benefiting from global inequality—must make significant transformations to how we live at a basic level. Human survival depends on access to water and food. We have rightfully given considerable attention to these essential human needs. But we have given far less consideration to the equally essential human need to release excess water and food from our system through urination and defecation. The line of research that I am proposing here seeks to address issues of disproportionate water usage, and the dearth of dignified, sustainable sanitation options and systems.

with Dr. tayla shanaye

Somatics, from the Greek root SOMA, meaning the living body in wholeness is an ancient lifeway embedded in animality. How we survive is a bodily process. It's an organic unfolding. Civilization and the project of colonial modernity has sought to dislocate us from this truth to uphold the Cartesian duality of the mind/body split that allows for systemic dominance to take hold. This knowledge share is an exploration into the body as a site and location of liberation. It is an experiential decoupling from systemic dominance in order to awaken into pockets of freedom.

with Yara Dowani

Join us for a storytelling knowledge share about farming in Palestine. Since 2016, located in Bil’in, Palestine, Om Sleiman Farm has been more than just a CSA farm; it's been a vital space for Palestinian connection to the land while reclaiming spaces of imagination through collective resistance and regeneration.

with Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

This knowledge share traces Palestinians’ experiences of waste in the West Bank, but it has ramifications for understanding all of the lands under Israeli control, including Gaza. I explore what Palestinians’ improvisations for mitigating the effects of what I call a “waste siege” can tell us about Palestinians' approaches to time and collectivity, and how thinking through the category of ecology can help us understand those approaches. My talk offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it begins with the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives. It describes a series of conditions: from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of settler colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life.

with Dr. Chris Duvall

This knowledge share moves beyond rumors to outline the plant’s documented history, which underscores the importance of African knowledge in the currently dominant uses of the plant worldwide. Pan-African experiences are complexly entwined in the plant’s past. If you know that cannabis can be a smoked drug, that is ancient African knowledge; water pipes were anciently invented in Africa; enslaved people from Central Africa carried the plant across the Atlantic, and their words for the plant survive in English; hemp industries in many countries depended upon enslaved people; commercial marijuana industries depend upon seeds taken from Africa. Historical experiences such as these have been forgotten in modern societies, despite robust evidence of the foundational importance of African knowledge in shaping global interactions with the plant.

with Vivien Sansour

Oftentimes when Palestinian farmers put seeds in the ground, they mutter a quiet prayer, “may we eat and may we feed others.” This and many other linguistically profound sayings provide a lens into a cultural design based on the idea that our survival as individuals is connected to the well-being and survival of our community.

with Dr. Lyla June Johnston

Contrary to popular belief, Indigenous Nations were active agents within the ecosystem and sculptured entire bio regions into edible landscapes. Whether it's periodically burning grassland ecosystems with low severity fires to maintain habitat for deer, buffalo, antelope, etc, or building intertidal rock walls that catch sediment and warmer waters to expand clam habitat, native people have a number of innovative strategies for scaling habitat for edible plants and animals whom they often view as relatives.

with Antonia Estela Pérez

Join Herban Cura founder and herbalist Antonia Estela Pérez for an IN PERSON plant identification walk along the Mahicantuck River (Hudson River) in Washington Heights, NY, where will be meeting edible and medicinal plants and trees growing along the river.

with Amanny Ahmad

Bread is sacred, bread is holy, bread is life. In Palestine, and in Islamic society in general, bread is treated with reverence. Throughout history though, many horrors have been linked to wheat and bread, specifically.  This has global implications as wheat fields occupy more land than any other crop.  Life or death waits for whichever population is given access to or deprived of it. In this knowledge share, we will learn about bread as a weapon, staff of life and staff of death. We will learn how people have shaped the wheat, and in turn the wheat shaped the dough, the land and the people.

with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh

The current genocide being committed on the Gaza strip is an ongoing case of the ways militaristic violence disposes of land and people. Our interests as environmentalists are the effects of war (including pre-war activities, active war, and post war impact). Here we review impacts on the Palestinian environment from activities since 1948 (establishment of the state of Israel): pre-occupation (such as training sites, military bases, military installation), during occupation (use of different munitions, pollution, altering habitats), and post-occupation (unexploded munitions, groundwater pollution, devastated landscape).

with Ria Ibrahim

While soy is an ancestral plant that humans have been in relationship to for thousands of years, with the rise of colonization, soy was commodified and became a cash crop, to this day soy continues to be exploited and abused, creating devastating impacts on ecologies such as the Amazon rainforest. How do we come back into right relationship with soy?

Join Ria as she shares her relationship and knowledge of historical and indigenous food preservation practices. Learn about tempeh preservation and fermentation from Lakawali, a village of South Sulawesi Indonesia. These traditions have been passed down through generations of Ria's family and her village, where soy has been a major protein source for thousands of years.

with Alaa Abu Asad

In this knowledge share we will start with ‘Wild Plants of Palestine’, which follows journeys of observational tours to collect photos and information about Palestinian flora, questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”. The video-essay stands on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in the West Bank. It also addresses photography as a practice and tool of distributing and restricting information at once.

Then we will move to an ongoing research called ‘The Dog Chased its Tail to Bite it Off’ on unwanted species, mainly known as invasive species. The reading in three acts traces the history of the Japanese Knotweed plant (Fallopia Japonica), actual policies, national campaigns of combat and control, social / economic / political effects, the conflation between natural and national history, and most importantly the language (whether verbal or visual) used when talking about the plant and other invasive species. It also imagines alternative ways of living with these species via raising questions about mass production ethics, exploitative forms of economy, and a common future. To be followed by a performative reading of the plant's history, and a Q&A session.