Shannon Novak, professor of anthropology, has contributed to “Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty” (University of Arizona Press, 2024). The book was edited by Terese Gagnon ’18 M.A. (Anth)/’21 Ph.D. (Anth), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The edited volume explores everyday forms of biodiversity conservation in local practices, sensory experiences and embodied connections that sustain relationships between humans and plants. Using a range of methodologies and research sites across multiple continents, the authors follow peasant gardeners, farmers and ordinary people who engage in conservation. Novak’s chapter, “Plot-life in Flower City: Transnational Ritual Ecologies in the Wake of Plantations,” traces how indentured laborers from India carried subaltern practices first to plantations in British Guiana and later to North American cities. This work extends Novak’s interests in ruptures that occurred across the long 19th century and whose resonances are experienced in the present. 

Novak is author of “House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” (University of Utah Press, 2008) and co-editor of “An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp” (University of Oklahoma, 2011). Both books received the James Deetz Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology. She is also co-editor of two forthcoming books on archives, bodies and materiality

Novak is a senior research associate in the Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center. Her areas of expertise are body and society, new materialisms, anthropology of knowledge, historical bioarchaeology, gender, ritual, necropolitics, North America, and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. She teaches courses in biological anthropology, anthropology of death, human osteology and excavating bodies in archives. She received Maxwell’s faculty advisor of the year award in April 2024.

From the publisher:

Harnessing a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents, this volume delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.

Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, the contributors write that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism.