Session: 2d
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 1.10
Chair: Kylie Crane
Isabel Pérez-Ramos (University of Oviedo), “Narrative Strategies and Multispecies (In)justice: Performative Rasquachismo and Double Dialectic”
Abstract: When power goes out of hand, we need to rethink our social, political, economic and environmental circumstances. That is the main argument in the novel Luz at Midnight (2020), written by Chicanx author Marisol Cortez. Power in her novel is understood not just as political strength (and abuse) and the act of having control over others, but as electrical energy produced from fossil fuels. Cortez raises those questions through a series of accidents (an explosion at a closed-down refinery resulting in a fuel spill, and a blackout caused by a storm and coinciding with a planned electric rate hike). These accidents in turn expose socio-environmental struggles such as energy poverty and health issues derived from or worsened by environmental pollution and climate change.
Her argument is supported by her narrative structure. Cortez achieves this by presenting the perspective of energy itself, as well as the perspective of other more-than-human actants through a double dialectic and what I would call performative rasquachismo (inspired by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s work). Through embedded narratives and an omniscient narrator that communicates the thoughts and even feelings of an electric storm and the local river, the reader is moreover invited to experience the world from an alternative perspective.
Luz at Midnight is a formally innovative novel that expands the often human-centered focus of socio-environmental justice struggles. A decolonial & eco-narratological study analyzes and dissects the narrative strategies put to use in this unusual and complex narrative.
Bio: Isabel Pérez-Ramos is a “Ramón y Cajal” research fellow at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Her research focuses on cultural representations of environmental injustices in Chicanx, Southwestern, and border literature, as well as in cli-fi narratives. She is a member of the multidisciplinary research groups GIECO- Instituto Franklin (UAH) and Intersections: Contemporary Literatures, Cultures and Theories (University of Oviedo). She is Book Review Editor of Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment.
Katharina Karcher (University of Birmingham), “Living and Dying with Ammonium Nitrate”
Abstract: In 1913, the world’s first synthetic nitrogen factory began producing ammonium sulphate near the small town of Oppau in Southwest Germany using the newly developed Haber-Bosch process. The Haber-Bosch method made it possible to combine nitrogen from the atmosphere with hydrogen on an industrial scale. The process is now used worldwide, and it is estimated that the life of billions of people depends on synthetic fertilizers. At the same time, it has become impossible to ignore that there is a dark side to the rise of synthetic fertilizers. The devastating impact of their extensive use in agriculture on entire ecosystems is well documented. The same can be said about the use of ammonium in the production of bombs, and the move from ‘from farming to arming’ in the German Chemical industry in the advent of WWI (Hager 2008: 146). In this paper, I zoom in on another aspect of this dark history: accidental explosions. Using the example of three unintended ammonium nitrate explosions, I show how the complex interplay of human and nonhuman agencies caused explosions with disastrous consequences. I will start with an analysis of the first documented industrial accident caused by ammonium nitrate in Oppau in 1921, then discuss two of the world’s largest non-nuclear explosions: the 1947 Texas City disaster and the 2020 Beirut port blast. All three events were violent explosions with devastating consequences, yet there was no individual human perpetrator ‘behind’ them. How has this impacted the allocation of blame and responsibility? And can and should these explosions be understood as a form of nonhuman resistance?
Bio: Katharina Karcher is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK. Katharina’s research focuses on political protest and violence in the 20th and 21st centuries. In this context, she is particularly interested in questions of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and political ideology. Katharina has published widely on feminist activism, the global 1968, and urban terrorism in contemporary Europe. Her new book, The Terror of Things: Rethinking Security through the Agency of Everyday Objects, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Emrys Liam Karlas (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “Rehabilitation through the Rewilding of the Mine? Human–Nonhuman Coexistence in the Kiruna and TECMINE Post-industrial Landscapes”
Abstract: If the European Union successfully stimulates an increase in raw material extraction from European soil as it states as its goal in the 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act, the continent will boast a wide variety of post-industrial landscapes related to mineral and metal extraction in the near future. In raw material mining, the closure phase of a mine presents an opportunity to rehabilitate the post-industrial landscape through environmental remediation measures. These remediation activities in turn, open up the possibility to reconfigure and rehabilitate the relationship between humans and the landscape. The European focus on sustainability goals, including net biodiversity gain, means the intentional and active rewilding of former mine-sites is becoming commonplace. Geomorphological and ecological remediation practices centre the mimicry of so-called “natural end-forms” and local ecosystems by harnessing geological, vegetal, hydrological, and faunal powers in its rehabilitation of former mine-sites. In this paper I examine this form of active rewilding by analysing the (planned) closure phase of two European raw material mines – one in Spain, one in Sweden. I look at the creation of an intentional industrial nature, and the praxis of palliative care in a conservation context in a highly politicized and complex landscape type. I compare the TECMINE and Kiruna post-industrial landscapes to provide insight into the potential for human and more-than-human coexistence in rewilded former mines where geology and nonhuman life are key political actors. The first part of the paper explicates the political agency of geology and nonhuman life in post-industrial mining landscapes. In the second part, I provide an overview of the rewilding actions shaping the landscapes before using the concepts of industrial nature and palliative care to critique the hyperculturality of landscapes often perceived as natural, and to discuss the potential and limitations of this subcategory of rewilding.
Bio: Emrys Karlas recently graduated cum laude from the ReMA Environmental Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In his transdisciplinary master’s thesis “Rewilding the Mine: The Geology and Politics of the TECMINE and Kiruna (Post-)Industrial Landscapes” he explores the past, present and future of Europe’s raw material mines through the methodological tools obtained during his bachelor’s degrees in literary studies and geology. His main research interests are mining, human-landscape relations in times of climate change, science communication, and (eco)narratology.