Dr Matilda Arvidsson

This workshop, organized by Dr Julia Dehm, Dr Kathleen Birell (both at La Trobe Law School, Melbourne) and Dr Erin Fitz-Henry (Melbourne University), is dedicated to thinking through settler ecologies as legal scholars, and more. Keynote is Professor Irus Braverman, and the event is hosted ad Melbourne University.

I will give a presentation, based on the research I do together with Dr Simon Larsson, and Dr Britta Sjöstedt, and with research assistance by Maxim Buchet, in the ongoing research project The Past as Present: Contemporary Legal Fragmentation and The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden as a Rule of Law Actor in Congo 1881–1961, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).

Title: Gardens, Genders, and the Botany of Colonial Legal
Ecologies: Botanical Swedish-Kongolese Legal Encounters 1881-1961

Abstract: In my current research I interrogate the lesser known Nordic colonial legal histories and practices, focusing on both formal and informal colonial structures and actors. As part of this, I trace the common legal and etymological roots of occupation, colonialism and gardens, thus bringing settler colonial ecologies into relations with how gardens and gardening as well as agricultural norms and practices have been part of how colonial norms literally take root, but also how the flora of the ’colonial peripheries’ have travelled to the ’metropoles’ through a frenzy for cataloguing, showcasing and ‘saving’ plants for research, irreversibly changing global ecological relations. My research is based on archival work on Swedish Missionaries working in pre-colonial and colonial Congo (1881-1908). It considers how colonial ecological relations are nurtured through lesser researched places, such as the common garden, through silent (blossoming and beautiful) violence.