Grit City Think & Drink | April 2025

Seeds are Portals: Witnessing, Learning & World-Making in Apocalyptic Times with Ilā Ravichandran, UW Tacoma

Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
6:30PM – 7:30PM

As we witness the horrors of late-stage capitalism unwinding before us at varying frequencies, we have also gotten fleeting glimpses into seed-keepers, who have not had enough staying power in our memories, cultures, or knowledges, yet quietly engaged in a world making process for our collectivities. We might know of seed keepers — from Indigenous peoples of the Turtle Island to enslaved peoples from Africa to those made into stateless refugees from Palestine — who resisted, survived, and carried the hope of life and seeds with them. Re-centering these moments through history, my talk offers meditations on seeds as portals of the past, present and future. By encountering seed epistemologies and seed keeping praxis as bridges of resistance and world-making, I attempt to bring seeds back into our consciousness, to highlight the importance of pausing, witnessing, and learning about them and their ability to teach us survival, resilience, resistance, birth, death, destruction, and renewal.

Dr. Ilā Ravichandran is an Assistant Professor of legal studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist-artist, studying and practicing abolition as a global and local project of taking down carceral systems and simultaneously building up spaces for liberatory world building.

Grit City Think & Drink brings scholars and experts from various disciplines face-to-face with the public in a comfortable, lively atmosphere, either virtually or in person. The evening begins with a presentation or lecture (often interactive) followed by giveaways and a moderated Q&A. Grit City Think & Drink is free to the public and open to all ages.

Grit City Think & Drink presented by UWT in our Tacoma event space every 2nd Tuesday of the month. Open and free to the public!