Mingcan Rong
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mingcan-rong.bsky.social
Mingcan Rong
@mingcan-rong.bsky.social
97 followers 110 following 14 posts
PhDing at the University of Bristol, interested in vegetal geography, plant humanities, botanic garden, rhododendron 🌺 (she/her)
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mingcan-rong.bsky.social
Mingcan Rong @mingcan-rong.bsky.social · Nov 21
Excited to share my first PhD paper which was based on my fieldwork at @thebotanics.bsky.social and just published on @geoopenaccess.bsky.social yesterday! 🌺
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
jamesrpalmer.bsky.social
An unexpected advent surprise - my book is available to pre-order with @manchesterup.bsky.social

For those interested in biofuels & the bioeconomy, vegetal geographies, climate politics, or relationships between energy & "human progress" more broadly!

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526192127/
Manchester University Press - Power plants
Power plants - Browse and buy the Hardcover edition of Power plants by James Palmer
manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
December 11, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
theplantinitiative.bsky.social
The article "Plant Humanities Pedagogy: teaching at the intersection of feminist economics and economic botany" from the journal Endeavour by Frederica Bowcutt & Savvina Chowdhury is available free, open-access until Jan 14, 2026. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mA7AabuHw0bl
December 4, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
svendupre.bsky.social
Just published! I am so glad to see this in print after more than five years in the making. The Invention of Scientific Conservation @degruyterbrill.bsky.social , edited by Esther van Duijn @rijksmuseum.bsky.social and myself @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social brill.com/display/titl...
December 3, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
annamlawrence.bsky.social
🚨 Job opportunity🚨

We are looking for an editorial assistant to work with me on the RGS journals (TIBG, The GJ, Area & Geo) as we move online systems.

🗓6 months fixed term
🕑0.4 FTE
📍Remote working option
❗️Closing date 11th Dec

Please share & apply! Happy to answer Qs.
www.rgs.org/about-us/wor...
Editorial Assistant for RGS-IBG Journals | Job vacancy
An exciting opportunity to develop a greater understanding of the academic peer review and publishing process. Part time, six-month fixed term contract.
www.rgs.org
December 1, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
austinread.bsky.social
amazingly produced zine from queer patch - group of sinophone queer / feminist researchers. look out for launches in various cities across 2026
November 28, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
geoopenaccess.bsky.social
🌺New in Geo🌺

'Cultivating scientific authority: A vegetal geography of Chinese rhododendrons at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh' by @mingcan-rong.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1002/geo2... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Geo: Geography and Environment by Mingcan Rong (2025) entitled: 'Cultivating Scientific Authority: A Vegetal Geography of Chinese Rhododendrons at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh' with an orange banner at the top. This paper presents a vegetal geography of Chinese rhododendrons at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), examining the mechanisms through which RBGE's scientific authority is established in the field of Rhododendron research and conservation. Building on the geographical conceptualisation of relational plant agency, this paper extends it by illustrating that attending to the rhododendron–people–environment relationship sheds light on the ecological–political nature of the Rhododendron species at RBGE, the broader historical contexts that stimulate the accumulation, and the environmental conditions that encourage the maintenance. Drawing on interviews, observation and document analysis, I illustrate the contribution and labour of the underappreciated Chinese collectors in the historical botanical exploration, discuss rhododendron's ‘plantiness’ and examine RBGE's contemporary activities that aim to accumulate and sustain the ex situ rhododendrons both materially and epistemically. I argue that the scientific authority of RBGE has been shaped by the semi-colonial history of China after the First Opium War ending in 1842, the encounters between British botanists and local collectors, as well as RBGE's intentional accumulation and maintenance of rhododendrons and related knowledge, all of which are mediated by rhododendrons' agency and continue to influence today's conservation dynamics.
November 27, 2025 at 3:56 PM
mingcan-rong.bsky.social
Excited to share my first PhD paper which was based on my fieldwork at @thebotanics.bsky.social and just published on @geoopenaccess.bsky.social yesterday! 🌺
November 21, 2025 at 2:09 PM
mingcan-rong.bsky.social
My first time organising a session at @rgsibg.bsky.social! Huge thanks to my amazing co-organisers Matthew Beach and Franklin Ginn, all the brilliant speakers across three panels, and everyone coming to our HPGRG-sponsored ‘Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond’ session!💚🪴🌺 #RGS
September 1, 2025 at 8:54 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
tibg.bsky.social
#OpenAccess in TIBG:

'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' by @austinread.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky #geo
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Austin Read (2025) entitled 'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' with a red banner at the top. Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn.
August 29, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
ihchistory.bsky.social
📗 Luís Mendonça de Carvalho edited the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’ (Springer), which provides us with a 'unique re-evaluation of the Victorian Age and presents a new historiography based on plants'.
👉 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
Cover of the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’, edited by Luís Manuel Mendonça de Carvalho and published by Springer.
July 30, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
uobrisceh.bsky.social
This week we've been descending into mines, scaling coal-spoil tips, and swimming under waterfalls. Read about our recent CEH field trip in our latest blog post: environmentalhumanities.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2025/06/20/t... #envhum
The Centre that swims together… CEH Field Trip 2025
On the 17-18th of June 2025, members of the Centre gathered for our annual field trip, which took place in South Wales in glorious sunshine.  Our first stop was the Big Pit National Coal Museum in …
environmentalhumanities.blogs.bristol.ac.uk
June 20, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
planthums-uk.bsky.social
#GARDENS & #EMPIRES - booking open! International conference @britishlibrary.bsky.social 27-28 June Convened by #BL, @rbgkew.bsky.social & @englishheritage.bsky.social Speakers include
@advollyr.bsky.social @sathnam.bsky.social & @corinnefowler.bsky.social
Booking: events.bl.uk/events/garde...
Gardens and Empires | British Library
The histories of plants and gardens are deeply entangled with the histories of empires. This conference investigates the impacts of these global connection
events.bl.uk
April 18, 2025 at 11:05 AM
mingcan-rong.bsky.social
Excited to be organising a session with Matthew Beach on ‘Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond’ for the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Birmingham, 26-29th August 2025. Please take a look at our CFP if you are interested in plants, creativities, more-than-human geography! 🌱
planthums-uk.bsky.social planthums-uk.bsky.social @planthums-uk.bsky.social · Jan 22
CfP: PRACTISING #VEGETAL #GEOGRAPHIES: #CREATIVITIES & BEYOND @rgsibg.bsky.social Annual Conference 2025 Abstracts to mingcan.rong@bristol.ac.uk & m.j.beach@qmul.ac.uk by Feb 24 2025 More: rgs.org/research/ann... @kewgardens.bsky.social @bristoluni.bsky.social @qmul.ac.uk
January 22, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
claudiaeberger.bsky.social
I am so glad to finally have this piece published with the wonderful Heather Rogers. Open access, so no excuse to not check it out.

Digital Plant Encounters: Integrating Critical Plant Studies with Digital Environmental Humanities sciendo.com/article/10.2...
Digital Plant Encounters: Integrating Critical Plant...
The distinction between nature and technology is a western dichotomy that is slowly being eroded. As we are continuously confronted with humanity’s...
sciendo.com
November 25, 2024 at 8:28 PM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
uobrisceh.bsky.social
🥳 Behold! The CEH Termcard has landed and it's packed full of exciting events -- from workshops to walkshops, lectures to moth expeditions. We're so pleased to have @chrisjpearson.bsky.social back to deliver our annual lecture on the 26 February, along with many other brilliant speakers!
January 13, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
jaredmargulies.bsky.social
@ahubschle.bsky.social and I have a new article out in @theconversation.com about how to approach the illegal succulent trade in South Africa through the lens of conservation justice.
theconversation.com/south-africa...
South Africa’s rare succulent plants are threatened by illegal trade – how to stop it
Over 1 million of South Africa’s rare succulents have been illegally harvested since 2019.
theconversation.com
January 7, 2025 at 2:05 PM
mingcan-rong.bsky.social
Our workshop ‘From Archives to AI: Researching and Imagining Socioenvironmental Relations’ will be held at Bristol on 12 Feb 2025, which includes talks by @oliviamason.bsky.social @mattinbiglari.bsky.social @jwyg.bsky.social & a panel discussion chaired by Mark Jackson! 🤩

Please find details below!
December 6, 2024 at 1:36 PM
mingcan-rong.bsky.social
One more reading for next term’s Plants and Geographies reading group 🤩🍃🌳
jamesrpalmer.bsky.social James Palmer @jamesrpalmer.bsky.social · Dec 4
I've written a piece on biofuels and the potential for plants to help us rethink relationships between energy, growth and productivity – just out in Environmental Humanities 🌿🌳🌾

Thanks to @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social & Franklin Ginn for making space for this!

read.dukeupress.edu/environmenta...
December 4, 2024 at 6:51 PM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
jamesrpalmer.bsky.social
I've written a piece on biofuels and the potential for plants to help us rethink relationships between energy, growth and productivity – just out in Environmental Humanities 🌿🌳🌾

Thanks to @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social & Franklin Ginn for making space for this!

read.dukeupress.edu/environmenta...
December 4, 2024 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Mingcan Rong
jamesrpalmer.bsky.social
Marion Ernwein and I have a new paper out in EPE: Nature & Space:

"Making the mos(s)t of nature? Cleantech, smart nature-based solutions, and the ‘rendering investable’ of urban moss"

Hopefully of interest to vegetal geographers and critical NBS scholars 🌿🌱🌳🌍

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
November 25, 2024 at 10:59 AM