“Join the Orca Uprising!”
Nonhuman Resistance and
Multispecies (In)Justice

11th Biennial EASLCE Conference
Utrecht University, Netherlands
14–17 April, 2026

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson describes the development and use of lethal pesticides and herbicides as the latest, deadliest, episode in what she calls “man’s war against nature.” Indeed, this war has a long history; at least in the West, the relationship between humanity and the natural world has been framed in terms of conflict and antagonism since Antiquity. But while “official modernity” has defined itself as Man’s final victory over Nature, beneath the surface, and in the margins of the discourse, the struggle rages on. Ecological thought, which in essence runs counter to the modern narrative of progress, has long harboured implicit or explicit anti-human sentiments, which often find expression in imaginaries of nonhuman resistance and retribution. Recently, in the context of the Anthropocene and the COVID-19 pandemic, just as the war against nature appears to be entering another critical phase, mis- and disanthropic imaginaries have become increasingly prominent, not least in literature, film, and popular culture: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, for instance, or Hollywood franchises such as Planet of the Apes or Jurassic World, invite readers and viewers to cheer as Nature rises up to take revenge on humanity. Meanwhile, on social media, orcas attacking yachts in the Strait of Gibraltar are hailed as allies in a multispecies struggle against predatory extractive capitalism and global inequality. And in scholarship across the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and the broader posthumanities, these developments are joined by a growing interest in animal revolution and nonhuman resistance. In many cases, however, cultural and critical conceptions of Nature’s revenge, including fantasies of a “world without us”, tend to reify a human–nature binary and thus reaffirm a form of human exceptionalism. How can we imagine nonhuman resistance in ways that not only resist entrenched dualisms but leave space for alternative alliances and configurations? As the widespread enthusiasm for the “orca uprising” reveals, there is an urgent need to imagine modes of interspecies solidarity and collective action, in pursuit of alternative forms of more-than-human coexistence based on practices and principles of care, respect, and multispecies justice.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

Genres, tropes, and forms of nonhuman resistance

• “Nature bites back”: animal vengeance narratives
• Afterlives of the pastoral: post-, anti-, necro-, etc.
• Varieties of ecohorror: carnivorous plants, malevolent mushrooms, toxic landscapes, etc.
• Microbial resistance and “complex intimacy”
• Representing / reimagining pests, parasites, plagues (including humanity as such)
• Media-specificity: representations of nonhuman resistance in text, sound, and image, etc.
• Elemental resistance: fire, water, air and environmental resistance as locality.

Multispecies (in)justice

• Intersectional / “multidimensional” approaches to justice and liberation
• (De)colonial ecologies and multispecies resilience
• Solidarity through implication
• Indigenous and non-Western approaches to more-than-human coexistence
• Conceptions of nonhuman agency and personhood in politics, philosophy, law, and literature

Imagining More-than-Human Communities

• Urban ecologies and the more-than-human city
• The poetics and politics of invasive species
• Caring for “unloved others”
• Feral ecologies
• Rewilding and/as the new primitivism
• The “Anthropause” and imaginaries of a world with and without “us”

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