Collecting Seeds, Assembling Worlds: An Inquiry into Agrobiodiversity Conservation Through the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Science Studies)

How has the world lost three quarters of its crop diversity in less than a century? How does a collection of seeds frozen in the Arctic help face this loss and ensure future food security? And how can Indigenous knowledges and artistic interventions inspire modes of dealing with agrobiodiversity loss that respond to contemporary socio-ecological transformations with care rather than techno-salvationism? Franziska von Verschuer traces these questions from the world's stronghold against agrobiodiversity loss, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to divergent worlds and modes of world-making it assembles along with seeds. This study shows that the future is more open than the popular story of the ›doomsday vault‹ suggests.

Franziska von Verschuer is a sociologist in the Biotechnology, Nature and Society Research Group at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, where she received her PhD in 2024. She studied sociology and psychology in Freiburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin. Her research and teaching focus on environmental and post-anthropocentric sociology, science and technology studies, as well as feminist and decolonial theory and epistemology.