Session: 3h
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Celandine Fleur Seuren
Therese Lilliesköld (Södertörn University), “More-than-Human Animals as Knowledge Bearers and Meaning Makers”
Abstract: Since the “animal turn” in the humanities (Ritvo, 2007) and the growing area of cognitive ethology, other-than-human animals have more often been recognized to possess intention, intelligence and culture. However, they are less often seen as possessing knowledge, an area which still often seems to be viewed as strictly human.
I am doing the empirical research for my PhD project at the Swedish Transport administration, where I am investigating the knowledge production behind decisions affecting more-than-human animals, as well as the knowledge (and forced loss thereof) of the more-than-human world. Other-than-human animals and traffic will for most people be associated with roadkill, but to view other animals as nothing but victims sacrificed for the necessity of roads, is in a way to strip them of their agency. I am drawing from examples from my empirical research, particularly with deer and the development of deer warning signs along the roads in Scania, instances where it becomes obvious that the deer understand and make use of symbolic systems created by humans, sometimes in surprising ways. Nonhuman bodies affect human ones, not just the other way around (Despret, 2004) and co-production of knowledge can emerge from interactions between humans and other species (for example Gillespie, 2021).
What kind of different pathways might be possible, if we viewed nonhuman animals as knowledge bearers and meaning makers, interacting in their own ways with human attempts to enhance safety in a shared environment? Is it possible to find ways for humans to cooperate with other animals, so that they become active participants within transport planning?
Bio: Therese Lilliesköld is currently a doctoral student at Södertörn University, within the research school Transplace. Her project investigates the knowledge production behind decisions affecting more-than-human animals, the knowledge of more-than-human animals and whether other animals could be active participants in decisions concerning them. Therese has extensive previous experience of working with a wide range of other animals and on topics concerning them, in diverse settings and countries. She is an author and has an academic background in Ethology and Anthrozoology.
Lena Pfeifer (University of Würzburg), “Material Resistance: Energy Infrastructures and Narrative Form”
Abstract: One of the central driving forces behind the ongoing ecological crisis is modern society’s historical dependence on fossil-based forms of energy. The extraction of oil, coal, and natural gas has altered entire ecosystems as well as land- and seascapes, and the emission of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels continues to contribute extensively to the warming of the atmosphere. Both scientists and politicians have thus called for tapping into other material sources – in particular, wind, water, and the sun – for generating more sustainable forms of energy. However, mobilizing such alternatives also means facing new forms of elemental resistance to humanity’s extractive endeavors and its thirst for widely-available, stable, and affordable energy.
This paper examines the representation of such material forces as both enabling and resisting agencies in contemporary energy narratives (such as Jennifer Haigh’s Heat & Light, 2016, or Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, 2023). Waterscapes, for instance, figure both as infrastructures for transporting fossil-based energy (such as liquid gas) and as spaces for generating renewable energy (such as through hydropower). At the same time, waterscapes are not only energy infrastructures that sustain existent and enable new forms of energy but also infrastructures of material resistance, since water – as an unruly force – resists human control and extraction. By reading material forces as energy infrastructures and infrastructures of resistance, I show how energy narratives articulate the shifting energy politics of the Anthropocene while simultaneously questioning the human desire to subsume natural elements into extractive logics. Material forces, as portrayed in the selected energy narratives, possesses an ambivalent agency and the capacity to both enable and unsettle visions of sustainable futures.
Bio: Lena Pfeifer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on Anthropocene narratives in 2024. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of American Studies and the Environmental Humanities and include fictional and non-fictional environmental writing of the 20th and 21st centuries, New Formalism, climate fiction, scale, and energy narratives. Her first monograph, Anthropocene Affordances: Scale, Narrative Form, and the Human in US-American Literature, was published with transcript in 2025.
Thyase Madella (Universidade Federal de Sergipe), “The Borderlands as a Decolonial Multispecies Locale”
Abstract: This work analyzes how Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the Borderlands (1987) functions as a decolonial multispecies perspective that counteracts humanistic rationality. The investigation focuses on the Borderlands as a geographically located material performativity that takes into consideration the knowledge and experience of marginalized multispecies subjects. Anzaldúa’s decolonial thinking develops from the dehumanization, violence, and exploitation inflicted upon the land, peoples, and all beings constituting this space she calls “Borderlands”. Consequently, her theorizations are grounded in the material reality and complex entanglements of Borderlands life. Within this framework, Anzaldúa forges kin companionships that are illegible within Enlightenment-based individualism. In doing so, she envisions new archetypes by drawing on Indigenous and non-human knowledge to imagine possibilities for existence outside the constraints of Western, white, colonial, and Anglo-European society. The onto-epistemology of the Borderlands thus counters the humanist discourse that relegates nonhuman existence, including humans who are marginalized or do not fit into a normative expectation, to inferiority. The rationality embedded in the coloniality of knowledge is dismantled by a theorization that values knowledge and beings from a marginalized space, which unfolds into the dismantling of binary constructions such as us/them, superior/inferior, human/nature, West/rest. Ultimately, this work argues that the Borderlands are constituted by the lands, territory, history, ancestors, spirituality, and the constant articulation between the human and nonhuman in creating these psychological and geographical spaces. The very concept of Borderlands, discussing the space in the multiplicity of the whole in which it is formed, is by itself a human and nonhuman articulation. The non-normative constitution of this kind of space is exactly what allows different possibilities of beings. This analysis is informed by the material and decolonial theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, Jasbir Puar, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and AnaLouise Keating.
Bio: Thayse Madella is a Professor of English at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, where her dissertation, Cartography of Chicana Desire, explored the intersections of subjectivity, space, and desire in Chicana literature. Her academic journey also includes research conducted at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, as a Fulbright grant recipient.