For commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, where insurance companies sell weather derivatives to poor farmers, key financial practices depend less on healthy sesame and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. Parametric insurance is triggered by certain weather conditions, raising questions about the limits of survivability for human-crop relations. In this seminar, I use weeds as an entry point and heuristic for overlapping kinds of speculation in a multispecies, capitalist, and troubled landscape. By gridding the world to a limited set of expedient parameters, what generative social and human grounds do we lose in the process?

Time: 3:00-4:00pm

Zoom: https://bit.ly/2OEVSFr

Meeting ID: 937 9210 4939

Passcode: 800615