Session: 3i
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Andrea Casals-Hill
Panel description: This panel brings together research that explores the metaphoric and material reality of entangled lives and territories that have been sacrificed in the name of modernity. Viewed from an ecological perspective, these imposed sacrifices delineate systems burdened with environmental injustice and anthropocentrism. However, the human and more-than-human populations explored in this panel demonstrate that communities may strike back in entanglements of collaboration: wolves in European landscapes, South Pacific marine habitat in Rapa Nui, Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazone and Mapuche territories, and the Tocopilla critters in Northern Chile.
The European wolf come back is an opportunity for understanding how cultural narratives and emotional responses shape the acceptance—or rejection—of coexistence strategies. At the same time, the wolf functions as a litmus test for sustainability transitions: if coexistence with a native predator proves difficult, what does this suggest about our readiness for broader ecological transformations? Amazonian and Mapuche food systems as sites of multispecies injustice and resistance in sacrifice zones, tell us stories of human and nonhuman entanglements in imposed extractivist economies, merged pollution, and climate crisis. The Rapa Nui marine protected area demonstrates that urgency requires action, and action can bring about a cultural change of a community where the colonial past eroded their oceanic identity for a de facto terrestrial mindset of the West. Lastly, industrial activity sacrificed Tocopilla’s life entanglements; Madre del Viento negro shows that urgency also requires art, and art can bring about a cultural change in a community where the modernist matrix was never meant to ensure any good in the territory.
Ingrid Molderez (KU Leuven) and Pascale Maas (KU Leuven), “Reintegrating the Wolf: What a Predator Teaches Us about Sustainability and Co-living with Nature”
Abstract: The return of the wolf to European landscapes has sparked polarized debates that extend far beyond questions of wildlife management. More than a biological species, the wolf is a powerful cultural symbol, deeply embedded in myths, fears, and emotional narratives. Its reintegration compels societies to confront long-standing attitudes toward nature and our
capacity to share space with non-human others. This contribution examines the wolf’s return as a case for understanding how cultural narratives and emotional responses shape the acceptance—or rejection—of coexistence strategies. At the same time, the wolf functions as a litmus test for sustainability transitions: if coexistence with a native predator proves difficult, what does this suggest about our readiness for broader ecological transformations? Drawing on perspectives from human–wildlife coexistence, actor-network theory, sustainability studies, and the environmental humanities, this presentation argues that the reintegration of the wolf is less a matter of ecological feasibility than of cultural readiness, social imagination, and the narratives that shape our visions of sustainable futures. During the presentation, the audience will be invited to co-create alternative narratives that challenge dominant fears and open new imaginaries of how the wolf might belong in our shared landscapes.
Bios: Ingrid Molderez is associate professor at KU Leuven’s Faculty of Economics and Business, with a background in applied economics (PhD, Hasselt University, Belgium) and social theory (MA, Keele University, UK). Her research and teaching focus on sustainable management, service learning, social entrepreneurship, and art-based pedagogies in higher education. With a background in applied economics and social theory, she embraces a multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from organization theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and the arts to explore how education can contribute to a more just and sustainable society.
Pascale Maas is a young researcher with a transdisciplinary background and holds a master’s degree in Environment, Health and Safety Management. She is interested in research about doing standard things in a new and improved way such as transformative learning, art-based methodologies and nature-based solutions. She is now pursuing a PhD in Business Economics at KU Leuven and explores what the role of art is in sustainable transitions, particularly within organizations and educational settings.
Caterina Rondoni (University of Ferrara), “Food Systems as Sites of Multispecies Injustice and Resistance”
Abstract: This contribution explores food systems as sites of multispecies injustice and resistance, particularly in sacrifice zones where human and nonhuman lives are entangled in extractivism, pollution, and climate crisis. Drawing on fieldwork with Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and Mapuche territories, I reflect on how cosmologies, food sovereignty, and agroecology inspire practices of care and alternative imaginaries of more-than-human coexistence.
Bio: Caterina Rondoni is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ferrara with a dual PhD in Environmental Sustainability (Italy) and Agricultural Sciences (Chile). Her research focuses on food systems, territorial governance, and socio-ecological justice across Latin America and Europe. She has conducted fieldwork with Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and Mapuche territories in Chile.
Maria Alessandra Woolson (University of Vermont), “The Rapa Nui Multiple Use Marine Protected Area: An Interspecies Community Triumph”
Abstract: The “orca uprising” is reminiscent of the events portrayed in Luis Sepúlveda’s 1988 novel when a group of pilot whales strikes a Japanese whaling factory ship, reminding readers that respect and multispecies coexistence was the way of the land and its people in continental South Pacific. Today, migratory species like the grey whale are dying off and starving in alarming numbers, due, in part, to their feeding grounds warming up and changing. An estimated 4 million fishing boats overfish the oceans internationally, without proper restrictions and controls. In this presentation I discuss the arduous and persistent community process behind establishing the Rapa Nui Multiple Use Marine Protected Area, now part of the Marine National Park Motu Motiro Hiva, a large-scale 740,00 square km “fully no-take” marine protected area, and the first to be managed by a council with an indigenous majority. I will argue that urgency requires action, and action can bring about a cultural change of a community where the colonial past eroded their oceanic identity for a de facto terrestrial mindset of the West.
Bio: Maria Alessandra Woolson teaches interdisciplinary courses in English and Spanish, for the Honors College and the School of World Languages & Cultures, at the University of Vermont. She is also an affiliate of the university’s GUND Institute for Environment, graduate studies. Initially trained in biology and entomology, she holds a PhD in ecocriticism and contemporary Latin American literature, having since cultivated broad transdisciplinary and interconnected views of the environmental humanities, which are the focus of her courses. Her publications range from topics in Ecocriticism and Sustainability to Eco-pedagogy, often exploring the relationship between people, place, and identity. Two years ago, she began working with story-tellers and members of the Rapa Nui community, Rapa Nui, South Pacific, to contribute to current efforts in revitalizing their indigenous language and preserving their ancestral heritage.
Andrea Casals-Hill (Universidad Finis Terrae), “Madre del viento negro (2021): More-than-Human Entanglements”
Abstract: The academic community engaged in environmental humanities is aware of the “urgent need to imagine modes of interspecies solidarity and collective action, in pursuit of alternative forms of more-than-human coexistence…”, however narratives seem to linger on the apocalyptic trope rather than imagine possible futures. Studying the narratives about and from “sacrifice zones” in Chile, the picturebook Madre del viento negro (created for a pedagogical intervention in Tocopilla) stands out as an artivistic effort that portrays the community’s feelings of loss, grief, fury, but also their identities entangled with the coastal habitat, and their generative acts of care, as the growth of a gumtree, against all odds in the polluted area, represents hope and resilience.
Bio: Andrea Casals-Hill holds an MA in Environmental Studies and a PhD in Literature. Her research interests are environmental humanities and young humans’ literature. At Universidad Finis Terrae, she teaches Literature (undergraduate program), and Methodology in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Humanities. In 2019 we published Futuro esplendor: ecocrítica desde Chile (Orjikh), co-authored with Pablo Chiuminatto.