Session: 1a
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 2.19
Chair: Deborah Schrijvers
Anisha Gamblin (University of Leeds), “Storytelling Wars: Authoritarian Regimes and the Language of Extinction in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013)”
Abstract: Set against a speculative, eco-dystopian world of climate refugees, Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) brings together concerns of ongoing settler colonialism, the practices of storytelling, and inter-creaturely coexistence in an eclectic exploration of extinction. In its depictions of ecosystem breakdown, authoritarian politics, and creaturely migrations, the novel can be read, in one sense at least, as a meditation on the multiple crises unfolding around us. But, as I will argue in this paper, its most compelling conviction has to do with narrative agency: where storytelling, from both human and more-than-human agents, stimulates a rethinking of the ways in which crises are told and understood in the Anthropocene.
Influenced by recent developments in extinction studies, I will position the novel as a “near-extinction” narrative – one which shifts its discourse of ecological crisis from loss and endings to renewal and regeneration. Examining the creaturely migrations of human and more-than-human characters alike, this paper will frame The Swan Book as a novel that elevates solidarity-oriented alternatives to the exploitative, authoritarian regimes depicted in Australia’s Northern Territory. Ultimately, this paper will conclude by suggesting how a “storytelling sovereignty” might help facilitate human/more-than-human coexistence and thus survival in the context of global ecological crises.
Bio: Anisha Gamblin is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds, working in Postcolonial Studies and the Environmental Humanities. She is based in the School of English, but her research navigates multiple subject areas, including philosophy, Indigenous Studies, and human-animal relations. Her PhD project, which examines near-extinction narratives in Indigenous literatures of the Pacific region, is part of the Leverhulme-funded Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme at Leeds.
Alice Sundman (Stockholm University), “Resisting Extinction: Sea Birds, Fish, and Seeds in Climate Change Novels by Charlotte McConaghy”
Abstract: Charlotte McConaghy’s novels Migrations (2020) and Wild Dark Shore (2025) both display ways of responding to the threat of extinction of species in a world facing large-scale changes of the climate. In Migrations, responses include human efforts such as scientific experiments aiming to breed “more resistance into some … creatures” (207), thus intending to adapt the behaviour of chosen species to a climate-changed world. Such active attempts to transform and control nature are contrasted with a view proposing a more open-ended study of animal behaviour based on respect for the creatures’ innate nature and suggesting a potential for coexistence between humans and nonhumans. In Wild Dark Shore, a seed vault on a subantarctic island is threatened by warming temperatures and rising sea levels. Efforts to move the seeds to a safer place save only a fraction of the stored variants. Yet some seeds hold an inherent capacity to resist destruction and spread despite harsh conditions. Here, too, the novel suggests a conflict between active control exerted by humans and nature’s inherent capacity to survive. Inspired by and building on Edmund Husserl’s (2001) notions of activity—involving “the accomplishment of the ego who in the strict sense makes judgments, makes decisions, and who actively appropriates and establishes its acquisition of knowledge” (106)— and passivity—a pre-reflective state in which “[the ego] simply perceives, when it is merely aware, apprehending what is there and what, of itself, is presented in experience by itself” (93)—I explore the novels’ portrayals of resistance to extinction in the form of human actions as well as animal behaviour and vegetal capacity. I will argue that both novels point to the significance of a kind of resistance that refutes human control and domination, and—instead—holds an openness to, an acceptance of, and a confidence in nature’s intrinsic life and capacities.
Bio: Alice Sundman holds a PhD in English literature from Stockholm University. Her research interests include ecocriticism, Blue Humanities, place and space studies, genetic criticism, phenomenology, and the intersections between literature and philosophy. Her current research focuses on literary imaginings of water in climate-changed future worlds. She recently completed a postdoctoral project in which she explored literary portrayals of places of and between water and land in relation to the Anthropocene. Her monograph Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022), which is based on her doctoral dissertation, explores the creation and presentation of Toni Morrison’s literary places.
Linda Williams (RMIT University), “Animals and Extinction: Reassessing Theoretical Concepts of the Lifeworld”
Abstract: As the sixth global extinction event unfolds, this paper gauges the extent to which the changing theoretical concept of the lifeworld provides an effective means of understanding the current crisis in human-animal relations. The paper traces the history of the idea of the lifeworld in three main theoretical domains: philosophy, biology and social theory. Husserl’s humanist philosophy of intersubjective perceptions of the world is considered in contrast with the model of the lifeworld as it was conceived in early 20th century biology, particularly in von Uexkull’s biosemiotics. The paper then turns to considering the concept’s development in later 20th century theory, not only in the philosophical anthropology of Merleau-Ponty, but also in how it was recalibrated as political thought in the social theory of Schütz and Habermas. This historiographical approach to the concept reveals the conceptual flaws in how the idea of the lifeworld developed in distinct theoretical fields and its consequences for understanding human-animal relations. By turning to a selective recombination of the relative strengths of each of the three domains, the paper concludes with how a politicised multispecies model of the lifeworld could provide a more robust approach germane to the crisis in human relations with nonhuman animals.
Bio: Linda Williams is a Professor Emerita of cultural history at RMIT University, where she leads a research project Extinction Imaginaries: Mapping affective visual cultures in Australasia, funded by the Australia Research Council, Saffron Aid and Greenpeace Australia Pacific <https://circlesofextinction.org>. Forthcoming publications include a co-edited book The Anthropocene and Visual Culture in Australia (Routledge, 2026) and a chapter: ‘Animal domestication, genealogies of exile, and the Long Anthropocene’ in Unsettling Extinction, edited by Kate Rigby, Ursula Heise & Roman Bartosh, London: Bloomsbury (2026).