Session: 3g
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 1.17
Chair: Sara Bédard-Goulet
Judith Benz-Schwarzburg (University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna), “Animal Agency, Autonomy, and Resistance in Picture Books”
Abstract: Depictions of animals are ever-present in children’s media, especially in picture books – and they are known to play a critical role in shaping children’s understanding of animals and the human-animal relation. Yet, these highly curated, sometimes first and only encounters with animals in childhood have not been recognized by animal ethicists as significant for the trajectory of human-animal relations. This is a significant gap in ethical research if we want to understand how members of our society develop their animal ethics and what contents can either make them recognize the animals’ own potential and moral significance or stir them towards anthropocentrism. This paper presents findings from a selection of picture books and interprets them in light of care- and justice-based ethical claims. The focus of analysis will be on the way the books address the animals’ own perspective, their interests and desires, agency, autonomy and resistance. The aim is to show how child-animal encounters on the pages of picture books are ethically relevant and how they can, in fact, help to overcome the human-animal divide.
Bio: Judith Benz-Schwarzburg is an animal ethicist, working at the intersection of animal cognition and philosophy. Since 2011 she is a Senior Postdoc at the Messerli Research Institute of the Messerli Research Institute at Vetmeduni Vienna. Applying a critical and interdisciplinary approach she addresses topics like culture, language, theory of mind and morality in animals, the ethics of animal representations (in picture books, contemporary art, or advertisement), species conservation, wildlife tourism and zoos.
Hanne Bolze (University of Rostock), “‘We can’t tame the Forest – it’ll hate us forever’: Vicious Vines and Scary Water in Contemporary Children’s Literature”
Abstract: My presentation examines the representation of nonhuman retribution in contemporary children’s literature, with a focus on the agency of plants, forests, and water. In environmental children’s literature, forests and the sea are often portrayed as victims who must be protected from human actions and restored to idyllic pastoral harmony. Conversely, the texts I am looking at construe forest and sea as active antagonist rather than passive setting. Here, the human (and animal) protagonists learn to respect the nonhuman by literally and metaphorically abandoning their anthropocentric position, as their bodies and lives are reconfigured as hybrid and entangled. Nadine Kaadan’s picturebook The Jasmin Sneeze (2016) and Frances Hardinge’s children’s book The Forest of a Thousand Eyes (2024) depict plants as protective and hostile actants punishing the protagonist for past misdeeds; the sea in Oliver Jeffers’ picturebook The Fate of Fausto (2019) and Sylvia Bishop’s YA novel On Silver Tides (2024) is a powerful entity that human characters cross at their peril. Each of these texts challenges the idea of human exceptionalism, as the nonhuman environment is imbued with anthropomorphised ideas of revenge and retribution, and portrayed as powerful, dangerous, and beyond human control.
These texts do not situate nonhuman resistance in a plot of tragic struggle with ultimate success or defeat. Here, the human characters must learn to adapt to and live with the nonhuman environment rather than save, restore, or change it. While plants and sea may stay as they are, the protagonists must embrace compromise in order to experience them as less hostile. As such, these texts stress adaptation and accommodation instead of struggle and hierarchies as necessary strategies to face the challenges of environmental crisis.
Bio: Hanne Bolze is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer for British literature at the University of Rostock, Germany. Her PhD dissertation titled “Something to do with polar bears”: Climate Crisis in 21st-Century British Fiction is located in the fields of ecocriticism and econarratology and examines narratives of deferral in British climate change novels. Her current research focuses on picturebooks as tools for fostering critical literacies, as well as the literary representation of power hierarchies in gardens, doomsteads, and hybrid landscapes.
Ida Marie Olsen (University of Agder), “Child-Animal Alliances in Times of Extinction: Rethinking Pedagogy, Environmental Futurism, and Ethics of Resistance through Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible”
Abstract: This paper explores the cultural construct of the child-animal bond as a site of resistance against corporate, industrial, and adult forces of environmental destruction. While recent developments might suggest that the Fridays for Future movement has lost its initial momentum, children and young adults continue to symbolize the future in environmental rhetoric. This “child-as-future” environmentalism has mainly revolved around issues like climate change, and less around species extinction, biodiversity loss, and practices of nonhuman exploitation. This exclusion is strange considering the deep-rooted idea of child-animal affinity in Western culture, where both children and nonhuman animals are perceived as vulnerable, inferior, and not-quite-human. In their own separate ways, however, children and nonhumans have become agents and activists of resistance in ecological discourse.
Using Lydia Millet’s allegorical novel A Children’s Bible (2022) as a case study, I examine how literature about children’s relations with nonhuman animals can unsettle categories like “natural” and “eco-hero”. In its allegorical complexity and its treatment of child-animal interactions, Millet’s novel explores what it means when children take on the role of educators rather than educands, and at the same time complicates the stereotype of children as saviours of the environmental future. I argue that the idea of a child/animal alliance offers a productive framework for simultaneously advancing and interrogating the concept of resistance against forces of ecological destruction. In doing so, my paper also reflects on the implications for pedagogy and pedagogical relationships in the Anthropocene. What does it mean, moreover, when child-animal relationships are severed and disrupted by ongoing anthropogenic species extinction and biodiversity loss? And how might literature in itself be read as a form of resistance against extinction and the disappearance of nonhuman species?
Bio: Ida M. Olsen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Agder’s Centre for Education Research. Situated at the intersection of literary studies and pedagogy, her research explores the pedagogical potential of environmental narratives in education for sustainable development. She holds a PhD from Ghent University, where her dissertation explored species extinction and biodiversity loss narratives in contemporary literature. Her work has appeared in journals such as ISLE, Green Letters, Ecozon@, and Studies in the Novel.
Sabina Magagnoli (University of Ferrara), “Visualising Nonhuman Resistance: A Multimodal Approach to Multispecies Resilience in the EFL Classroom”
Abstract: This presentation analyses a multimodal educational project with upper secondary school students learning English as a foreign language. It analyses how the visual representation of multispecies (in)justice in Steve McCurry’s “Animals” exhibition can be used as a pedagogical tool. The project aimed to decenter students’ anthropocentric perspectives by engaging them in a semiotic reflection on the human animal relationship and the challenges faced by animals in environments impacted by war and climate crises. The students read passages from John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” (1980) and used his insights to question how humans perceive and represent other species. They then visited the exhibition and created multimedia works, a fusion of selected photographs, their own spoken thoughts and chosen background music, to embody the animals’ positions of resistance and resilience.
Focusing on nonhuman resistance, this project demonstrates how art and language can be used to re-imagine multispecies alliances. The students’ creations offer a form of “complex intimacy” with the subjects (Hopf et al., 2019), that challenges binary thinking and promotes empathy. The project is in line with Arjun Appadurai’s (2004) concept of the “capacity to aspire” extending this right beyond the human realm and using artistic creation to explore themes of coexistence and survival. It also serves as a critical response to the “knowledge making crises” (Morgan & Wise, 2017) and the challenges of climate change denial by fostering a more nuanced understanding of our shared world. Ultimately, this educational approach seeks to use the humanities to promote a more inclusive and just worldview by reflecting on how narratives shape our understanding of interconnected crises (Caracciolo, 2019) and encouraging an active, empathetic engagement with nonhuman lives.
Bio: Sabina Magagnoli is a PhD student of the Italian National Doctoral Programme on Sustainable Development and Climate Change coordinated by IUSS Pavia and works at the affiliated Faculty of Human Sciences of the University of Ferrara. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches and her experience as a teacher and trainer of English as a foreign language in upper secondary schools, she is committed to promoting environmental awareness in educational contexts through the contribution of environmental humanities and ecocriticism.