This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a small, interdisciplinary community of researchers working to field the controversial sciences of Plant Neurobiology, Cognition, and Behavior (PNCB). Building upon the analytical techniques of decolonial theory, feminist science studies and more-than-human anthropologies, my research situates PNCB not as a coherent epistemic aspiration but as an ongoing experimental dissensus: a creative rupturing in, rather than a re-distribution of, the scientifically sensible. By decentering the debates over who or what plants truly are, and whether or not they are “cognizant” or equipped with “neuronal-like capacities,” I focus on the practical, sensorial struggles of scientists risking their careers on the possibility that plants can think, learn, remember, and communicate with human and non-human others. The stories that emerge from this ethnographic attention document the uncertainties and the generative ethical and worldly potentials of scientists who no longer know from where the source of their knowing stems. These are stories of scientists actively struggling to think creatively about plants, to dishabituate from their prior trainings and familiar categories of thought, agency and sensation. My research suggests that it is within these experiences of “not-knowing”—mired in feelings of uncertainty, surprise, agitation, etc. —that it becomes possible to feel the many strange and unexpected plant configurations that embolden a re-imagination of a scientist’s “knowing.” Immanent to these encounters are phenomena I am calling “phyto-innervations,” in which my capacity to know and make sense as an ethnographer is also made susceptible to creative, more-than-human constellations.

This dissertation centers the Strait of Gibraltar as a space of “material imagination” (Bachelard 1983) through which to examine the political ecologies and oceanographic science of the region. Rather than depict the Strait as a setting in which politics and economy occur, this dissertation asks how the particular seawater of the Strait and of the Mediterranean informs the Strait’s political and scientific importance. To make sure that the specific seawaters of the Strait and Mediterranean “matter,” I draw on the concepts, histories, and images of oceanographic science. This dissertation is based on a year of multi-sited and remote fieldwork that followed alongside the waters of the Strait, including research from such sites as Gibraltar, Cádiz, and Málaga. Throughout the chapters in this dissertation, I ask not only how the Strait functions as an important site of scientific knowledge about oceans and seas, but also how this knowledge about seas and oceans can form a kind of “seawater thinking” that can be used to think through ocean sensing, Mediterranean migration, the role of oceans and seas in climate change, and the political and environmental effects of living alongside seawater.