Faculty book chats from the Institute for African Development (IAD) showcase the breadth and depth of research by Cornell faculty on African development. At our inaugural book chat, Wendy Wolford (global development) and Stacey Langwick (anthropology) will share their work that highlights the interconnectedness of land, sustainability, and development.

Wolford's latest book, The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique, explores “how plantation production has shaped agricultural science, government rule, life on the land, and community development in Mozambique.”

Using plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Medicine that Feeds Us, Langwick’s latest book, “describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together.”

The Plantation Ideal Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique

by Wendy WolfordPlantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal offers new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes. Wendy Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of plantation production has shaped agricultural science, government rule, life on the land, and community development in Mozambique from the harshest years of Portuguese colonization to the present.

Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World

by Stacey LangwickMedicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026  2:00pm  Uris Hall, G-08