Session: 1g
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.17
Chair: Laura op de Beke
Sevda Ayva (Iğdır University), “More-Than-Human Minds: Extended Cognition and Nonhuman Resistance in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse”
Abstract: In the wake of escalating ecological crises, speculative narratives of “Nature’s revenge” often reinforce rather than dismantle the human-nature binary. Even as they dramatize humanity’s extinction or displacement, such imaginaries frequently reaffirm human exceptionalism. Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962), however, offers a striking alternative. The narrative envisions a far-future Earth where humans, on the verge of extinction, struggle to survive in an alien world dominated by carnivorous, predatory plants. In this transformed ecosystem, plants are no longer inert matter, but possess cognitive capacity that challenge anthropocentric paradigms.
Drawing on the extended mind theory and critical plant studies, this paper argues that Hothouse challenges human-nonhuman binary by imagining cognition as a distributed, relational process that surpasses the traditional, anthropocentric boundaries of the skin and skull. The figure of the Morel—”a brain-like fungus”—extends its cognitive capacities through both human and more-than-human hosts, particularly Gren (human) and Sodal-Ye (an intelligent dolphin); thereby, gaining access to their memories and boosting their decision-making processes. This complementarity system— that is made up of Gren and Sodal-Ye—becomes integrated into the Morel’s mind, thus forming a distributed neural network that enables them to navigate this predatory vegetal world. To put it differently, the integrated cognitive system demonstrates that cognition is not a solitary, brain-bound phenomenon, but a shared, interspecies process that rethinks traditional notions of autonomy and agency. By foregrounding plant cognition and the porousness of cognitive boundaries, Aldiss’s narrative conceptualizes modes of nonhuman resistance and retribution that do not simply resist entrenched dualisms but propose alternative alliances and co-configurations. Instead of reproducing fantasies of a “world without us,” Hothouse models more entangled and multispecies forms of survival in which resistance emerges through the emphasis on interrelatedness rather than antagonism.
Bio: Sevda Ayva is an Assistant Professor at Iğdır University. She received her PhD in English Language and Literature from Hacettepe University in 2022. In addition to her academic work, she is actively involved in social responsibility projects that advocate for nonhuman and dishuman lives.
Her current research interests include cognitive neuroscience, critical plant studies, blue humanities, econarratology, graphic and multimedia narratives, posthumanism, animal studies, and disability studies.
Yi Jen Chang (National Taipei University), “The World-without-Us: Hidden Worlds and Nonhuman Sovereignty in Vegetal Science Fiction”
Abstract: Isaac Asimov’s “Green Patches” (1950) and Ursula le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971) both imagine alien ecologies —a sentient planetary biosphere and a unifying parasitic lifeform—as nonhuman agents that resist human epistemologies of life, thought, and sovereignty, embodying what Eugene Thacker terms the “hiddenness of the world.” Drawing on Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet (2011), this paper reads the planetary organism of Asimov and the forest-planet of Le Guin through Thacker’s theorization of “magic site,” and a “political theology of the hiddenness of the world” to explore how these stories articulate nonhuman resistance and multiple (in)justice through cosmic/eco horror. For Thacker, magic sites are thresholds where the “world-for-us” recedes and the “world-without-us” emerges in its opaque, resistant alterity; political theology, traditionally concerned with sovereignty and decision, becomes displaced onto the hidden, immanent forces of the world itself. In Le Guin, the planet’s vast vegetal consciousness overwhelms human explorers with psychic fear, functioning as Thacker’s “magic site” where the unhuman erupts without boundaries, undermining anthropocentric sovereignty. Similarly, Asimov’s parasitic “green patches” dissolve individuality into a cosmic unity, subverting human attempts at containment and revealing a world indifferent to human politics. Extending Carl Schmitt’s political theology, Thacker’s framework reimagines sovereignty as nonhuman, where the vegetal life or plant intelligences in both narratives assume a kind of botanical sovereignty, deciding when and how to reveal themselves to human knowledge while remaining fundamentally withdrawn from complete comprehension. This hiddenness is not merely epistemological but ontological — these forms of life exist in what Thacker calls the “unhuman” register that negates human control and unsettle anthropocentric political theologies. This analysis positions both stories as speculative critiques of anthropocentric injustice, envisioning more-than-human ecologies that resist through their concealed agency. By foregrounding the horror of cosmic indifference, Le Guin and Asimov challenge human exceptionalism, offering insights into feral ecologies and prefigure philosophical attempts to think multispecies justice as an encounter with the opaque, recalcitrant, and resistant agency of the world-without-us.
Bio: Yi Jen Chang is a doctoral researcher in literary studies with a focus on ecocriticism, science fiction, technological ecology, and the environmental humanities. Her work explores intersections of narrative, ecological systems theory, and posthuman philosophy, with particular attention to how speculative fiction reimagines human-nonhuman relations under the Anthropocene. Her recent publication, “Commodifying Consciousness: Digital Immortality and the Politics of Techno-capitalist Afterlife” (Review of English and American Literature), examines digital immortality and the politics of techno-capitalist afterlife.
Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University), “Information Overload as Resistance: A Creative and Critical Paper”
Abstract: The creative part of this twenty-minute paper will be a reading from a new speculative short story that imagines an app-drone package able to detect and identify all the wildlife present in the operator’s immediate surroundings. This system is imagined as an upgraded version of the real ‘Merlin’ app used by birdwatchers. ‘Merlin’ ‘hears’ birdsong and identifies the bird. In the story, the imaginary app-drone uses technology that imitates the organs with which snakes and lepidoptera receive chemical signals from the air. As the reader might guess, there are unexpected consequences. What starts, for the user of the device, as a reassuring and enriching experience of wild abundance becomes something else, and the story offers a re-examination of the complex mixture of delights and anxieties involved in the love of wild nature.
To introduce this reading, I will offer a brief analysis of the paradoxical construction of natural abundance as both delightful sensation and threatening sensory overload in the weird fiction of Jeff Vandermeer, Samanta Schweblin, and Martin MacInnes, whose novel Infinite Ground (2016) imagines a world in which it is possible for forensic experts to deduce the intimate personal life story of an individual from a swab taken from their laptop keyboard. This conflict between the desire to know and the desire for mystery and privacy – for things to remain unknown or only possible – is at the heart of the Anthropocene love of nature as explored in these works and my story. I will connect this conflict with the biosemiotics of Wendy Wheeler, and with the paradox identified by Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn, who argue that the Anthropocene idea casts humanity as both more and less powerful than previously imagined. The more the power is revealed, the more the helplessness emerges. These stories explore that queasily sliding perception.
Bio: Richard leads BSU’s Creative Writing MA and has published many ecocritical essays. His nature-memoir Cold Blood (‘minor classic’ – Sunday Times) was dramatized for BBC national radio. Fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Speculative Nature Writing, BBC Wildlife (winning two awards), Poetry Review and Granta. Richard received the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize. He reviews nature writing for The Guardian, was founding Chair of ASLE-UKI, has served on the ASLE Executive Council and is co-editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘Environmental Cultures’ series.
Jacqueline Barner-Bauer (TU Braunschweig), “Nonhuman Player Avatars and Choices of Multispecies Solidarity in Worlds Abandoned by Humans”
Abstract: In games such as Stray or Tokyo Jungle, the player takes on the role of a nonhuman avatar and experiences a world where humans themselves may be absent, but the environment and its nonhuman inhabitants have nonetheless been shaped by their influence. I argue that it is within these game worlds that players receive a unique opportunity to explore, experience, and make choices between resistance and solidarity between species.
Video game players’ avatars can be seen as a “reflexive extension” (Günzel et al.) of the player, presenting them with a tool which functions as a diegetic part of the game world itself while also acting as an interlink between player and game. Concepts of cyborgian consciousness as Donna Haraway has brought forward are often extended to this special relationship between the player and their avatar, which “encourages players to think themselves differently through nonhuman characters, and in this way, offers experiences that may subvert or challenge ideas about humans and nonhumans” (Bianchi). In Stray, the player’s avatar is a stray cat trying to escape a walled-in city built by humans but inhabited by robots which help the player along. Meanwhile, in Tokyo Jungle, the player instead follows a series of animals which have to fend their ways around a Tokyo which has been abandoned by humans. Where species mainly work together on a set path towards the common goal of escaping in Stray, Tokyo Jungle focuses on the fight for and against the top of the food chain – until the final story chapter introduces a choice between anti-human resistance and animals prevailing, or multispecies solidarity which leads to a return of the anthropocene. Yet, in both games cooperation and what Kunkel refers to as solidary sympoiesis become important parts of the players’ experience and engagement with a posthuman world.
Bio: Jacqueline Barner-Bauer is a research assistant and PhD candidate at English and American Studies, Technische Universität Braunschweig. While her Master’s thesis focused on pastiche and parody in postmodern fantasy novels, she is expanding her understanding of the pastiche concept towards a metamodern setting of video game studies for her PhD.