Session: 3j
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 2.18
Chair: Joep Christenhusz
Wendy Wuyts, “How to Write Nonhuman Characters in Healing Fiction”
Abstract: This paper examines the aesthetic and ethical challenges of writing nonhuman characters—particularly plants—in the context of healing fiction. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and posthumanist plant studies, it reflects on my own creative practice, including my ecofeminist retelling of the French/Flemish fairytale The Nettle Spinner (English, published in 2024 by Ecozon@) and the Flemish ecofiction novel Tussenland, as well as the experience of facilitating over twenty international online and live writing(with) plants workshops.
A central tension concerns anthropomorphism: how can writers acknowledge vegetal agency without collapsing it into human categories of thought and feeling? As Michael Marder has argued in his work, plants invite us to rethink cognition, temporality, and resistance. Yet literary traditions, ranging from fairytales populated by speaking animals and enchanted forests to contemporary works such as Naomi Novik’s Rooted or Hannah Whitten’s Wilderwood, often frame plants either as decorative backdrop or as agents of vengeance. These tropes reproduce what Val Plumwood critiqued as a logic of dualism, positioning the nonhuman either as a passive resource or threatening Other.
The presentation explores alternative strategies: vegetalizing fairytales as a way to decenter human protagonists; employing metaphor not to instrumentalize but to invite readers into modes of relational thinking; and cultivating narrative practices that write with rather than merely about plants. Drawing also on Donna Haraway’s notion of “sympoiesis” and María Puig de la Bellacasa’s ethics of care, I consider how nonhuman characters might contribute to stories of repair, alliance, and more-than-human healing.
At the same time, I reflect critically on the traps of these practices, particularly from my positionality as a relational designer and thinker. How do we avoid appropriating nonhuman voices while still imagining interspecies storytelling? Ultimately, the paper proposes healing fiction as a fertile space for experimenting with aesthetics and ethics of coexistence, where writing itself becomes a practice of multispecies solidarity and resistance.
Bio: Wendy Wuyts (PhD Environmental Studies, Nagoya University) is a socio-environmental systems researcher and writer exploring kinship with the more-than-human world. A certified forest therapy guide, she curates woodwidewebstories.com, gathering plant–human narratives across geographies. Her fiction experiments with nonhuman characters, blending ecofeminism, solarpunk, and posthumanist thought. Published in Ecozon@, Uneven Earth, MO Magazine, and Educational Fabulations, she also co-organizes Nordic Summer University symposia on transformative learning practices with and within more-than-human communities.
Rosanne van der Voet (Leiden University), “Eiland van Brienenoord: More-than-Human Communities in the Urban Delta”
Abstract: In the river Meuse in Rotterdam lies the ‘Eiland van Brienenoord’. This presentation and creative reading reflects on the island as a polyphonic, intimately trans-corporeal landscape that offers opportunities for shaping a multispecies urban delta community.
Due to widespread urbanization and infrastructuralisation of the Rhine and Meuse estuary, its identity as delta is not always obvious. Yet at the island, which lies outside of surrounding dykes and is therefore exposed to the tides, the delta becomes tangible. Having been employed for industry and fisheries in the past, the island has recently been rewilded. Natural riverbanks have been created to redevelop tidal ecosystems, inviting tide-dependent species, such as marsh marigolds, sea bass and freshwater mussels, back into the city. After its redevelopment, ‘nature was given the initiative to reclaim the island’. The island is home to allotments and a cultural centre that functions as a ‘rehearsal space for the future.’
I will present and read the first text that I have written as part of a creative-critical writing project that explores the potential of an urban multispecies community at the island. Applying theoretical insights to read and narrate place, I imagine the island as an assemblage of ‘delta voices’. My reading begins with a creative application of the concept of ‘ghosts’ through an imagination of the locally nearly extinct salmon population. I then imagine the perspective of many current voices, including algae, a heron, invasive parakeets, a boulder, a human artist and a plastic chair. The literary representation of the various voices is a creative enactment of Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s call to engage more-than-human models of history and a hermeneutics that shifts the attention from spectacular to nonspectacular, systemic ecological decline. Through writing the delta community, I explore the potential of ‘fabulation’, a multispecies writing practice theorized by Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze.
Bio: Rosanne van der Voet is Assistant Professor in environmental humanities and urban studies at Leiden University. Her research spans across various interdisciplinary strands of the blue humanities, with particular focus on more-than-human experience of environmental issues, creative-critical approaches and applied ecocritical analysis of new nature-based water management projects in urban and industrial environments in the Netherlands. Her first book, Literary Storytelling and the Environmental Crisis of the Oceans: Jellyfish Poetics is forthcoming in the Routledge environmental humanities series.
Andrea Volken, “Mutualistic Narration: A Non-Hierarchical Framework for Writing with the More-than-Human”
Abstract: One of the most urgent concerns in contemporary nature writing is a predicament of narrative. When we write about the more-than-human, we often fall into modes of domination—projecting our own aims, assumptions, and interpretations onto non-human entities. Even when our intention is to resist domination, conventional narrative structures can perpetuate anthropocentric hierarchies, rendering nature inert or passive. Influential writers have highlighted this difficulty: Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates a ‘grammar of animacy’, exposing limitations in English and other Western languages; Robert Macfarlane challenges the common tendency to treat rivers as inanimate in Is a River Alive?; and, in a recent interview, Amitav Ghosh emphasizes restoring non-human voices to our stories as crucial. These interventions illuminate the urgency of the issue but leave open a question of literary theory: how can we understand and produce narratives that present nature as animate, agentive, and non-hierarchical?
I propose mutualistic narration as a conceptual framework to address this question. Drawing from the (often ecological) concept of mutualism, this describes a mode of storytelling in which narrative itself enacts reciprocity rather than domination. It is not limited to narrators or focalization but encompasses the broader structuring of narrative: how perspectives, events, and textual rhythms create space for the more-than-human to act, affect, and co-shape the story.
To operationalize mutualistic narration, I reformulate the features of feminist communication scholars Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s theory of invitational rhetoric for literary practice. Foss and Griffin define, first, equality, where all participants are considered equal in the dialogue. Second, immanent value, asserting that all living beings have intrinsic worth—an ecocentrist principle, which Foss and Griffin illustrate through the work of ecofeminist author Starhawk. Third, self-determination, grounded in respect for others and recognizing that all beings have agency. I will recalibrate and exemplify these features using existing literature, showing how we can recognize presentations of mutualistic narration and how writers can craft narratives in which the more-than-human is neither appropriated nor silenced, but fully present as participant and co-creator.
Bio: Andrea Volken is an educator, writer, and researcher with an MA in English Literatures (HU-Berlin) and a BA in Creative Writing (Western Washington University). She directed the Berlin University Alliance research team Applying Ecofeminism: A Collective and Interdisciplinary Approach, curating their publication, The Mesh. Her recent work includes a chapter on ecofeminist grief and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Forever Again (Distanz Verlag) and the presentation of her concept of the ecofeminist sublime at the international conference Gender, Nature, and Ecology (Université Paris 8).
Matthias de Groof (University of Antwerp), “The Animals’ Lawsuit against Humanity”
Abstract: The Animals Lawsuit Against Humanity is a 10th-century Islamic tale, part of an encyclopedia written by members of a Sufi order, the Islamic Brethren of Purity or Ikhwan al-Safa, in Basra, Iraq. Our current film adaptation of the story, in collaboration with the Zoönomic Institute (see below), brings this text into the urgent debates on speciesism, and the rights of the more-than-human. In this fable, eloquent representatives of all parts of the Animal Kingdom – from horses to bees – appear before the king of the jinn to complain about the terrible treatment they must endure at the hands of humanity. During the ensuing trial, the non-human animals ingeniously illustrate and argue their case.
The story rejects human self-understanding based on arrogance and pride, which allows man to use, dominate, enslave and destroy other species under the pretense of fulfilling so-called human needs, while denying the rights of other beings. Needless to say, this arrogance has been most forcefully advanced in the West through humanist/naturalist ontologies since modernity and the idealization of the Promethean human.
What is remarkable about the Sufi text is that, unlike fables such as Reynard the Fox or those of La Fontaine, the animals in The Lawsuit… do not metaphorically stand for a particular type of human, but speak as animals (though they rely on human language). Moreover, the text does not create a universalizing amalgam of “the human,” but differentiates between those who are in solidarity with non-human animals and those who oppose solidarity.
In the context of the conference, I address three challenges raised by our film adaptation:
- What forms of storytelling can do justice to the voices of the more-than-human?
- How can we avoid falling into anthropomorphism while simultaneously acknowledging our own inevitable anthropocentrisms?
- How can the film integrate non-human animals into productional, artistic, and narrative decisions—from development to distribution?
A crucial strand here is our collaboration with Zoöp, an organizational model for cooperation between human and non-human life that represents the interests of all zoë. The model incorporates voices and interests of non-human life into decision-making processes. Our film will be the first film as Zoöp.
While the conference will provide critical feedback for the development of the film, this contribution also aims to bring 10th-century perspectives into the debates from film-historical and philosophical viewpoints.
Bio: Matthias De Groof is a Belgian filmmaker and assistant professor in Film Studies and Visual Cultures. He holds MA’s in philosophy (KULeuven), international relations (UCLouvain), and cinema studies (UAntwerp). After his PhD, Matthias has held fellowships at NYU (Fulbright), UWaseda in Tokyo, UAntwerp (FWO), the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the UvA and the Rachel Carson center for Environmental Humanities (MSCA). Beyond academia, he is frequently invited to speak in cultural settings, curate film programs, and write for magazines. As a filmmaker, Matthias’s works—produced by Cobra Films—include Under The White Mask (2020), Palimpsest of the Africa Museum (2019) and Lobi Kuna (2018). His award-winning films have screened internationally, including at the Berlinale and IFFR, and have been curated by outlets like The New York Times’ Op-Docs Channel.