Session: 4d
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Sara Bédard-Goulet
Axel Goodbody (University of Bath), “Kin in the Anthropocene? Weeds in Gardening Narratives”
Abstract: Weeds are, as Richard Mabey writes, plants ‘in the wrong place’: a plant becomes a weed where and when it isn’t welcome. The very category presupposes plants are viewed from a human perspective, and what constitutes a weed is dictated by social values and practices, usually in relation to agriculture, gardening or medicinal use. Today, plants traditionally regarded as weeds are experiencing a re-evaluation as ‘companion plants’, in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change. Our lives are entangled with weeds in many ways. Weeds are a product of human activity: thriving in disturbed ground, they have accompanied agriculture and horticulture and shaped the evolution of societies. The longevity and adaptability which allow native weeds to out-compete crops, or permit them to disrupt carefully curated aesthetics and steal water, light and nutrients from a favourite herbaceous ornamental, and which enable introduced species to become invasive, are reminders of nature’s resilience, and that we must learn to live with it rather than wage war against it. Agriculturalists, garden designers and theorists have developed conceptions and practices of mutually beneficial co-existence with weeds, and garden writers have depicted scenarios of co-creation with them. In this paper, I consider gardening in collaboration with weeds as an aspect of Anthropocene gardening, a sustainable form of cultivation which seeks to overcome antagonistic human-nature dualism and facilitate mutual flourishing. I ask what Anthropocene discourse, posthumanism, Ludwig Fischer’s theory of ‘nature alliance’ and Donna Haraway’s notion of companion species might contribute to its theoretical underpinning. And I examine examples of English and German garden writing exploring gardening as a field of experimentation in living with nature. Possible texts are Michael Pollan’s essay, ‘Weeds Are Us’ (1991) and more recent narrative/ essayistic garden writing including Richard Mabey’s The Accidental Garden (2024) and Lola Randl’s Der große Garten (2019).
Bio: Axel Goodbody is Professor Emeritus of German and European Culture at the University of Bath, England, and Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Centre for Environmental Humanities. His principal research fields are representations of nature and environment in German and English literature, and ecocritical theory. He served as first President of EASLCE (2004-6), and was Associate Editor of its journal Ecozon@ from 2010 to 2020. He has published on climate fiction, climate scepticism, energy narratives, and human/ animal relations, and he is currently working on a collection of essays on garden writing in the Anthropocene. He is a series editor of the Brill book series ‘Nature, Culture and Literature: Readings in Environmental Humanities’.
Brussels Health Gardens: Heide Maria Baden (Ornö university), Viktorija Baltušienė (Ornö university), Justina Maslauskaitė, Jonas Vytautas Petri (Ornö university), Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri (University of Mons) Lisa Sattell (The Source School), Peter Yeo, and Wendy Wuyts (Nordic Summer University), “Co-creating Relationships with Resisting Hogweeds”
Abstract:
This paper explores the “resistance of hogweeds” through an ecocritical lens, bringing together biological, ethnographic, and artistic approaches to rethink multispecies entanglements. Building on Wheeler’s (2011) notion of life as semiosis, and Kohn’s critique of Western thought’s isolation of humans from other life-forms, we foreground Giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), Persian hogweed (H. persicum), and Sosnowsky’s hogweed (H. sosnowskyi) as pharmakonic figures, at once poison, medicine, and scapegoat (Derrida).
Official strategies frame hogweeds as invasive threats to ecosystems, economies, and human health, emphasizing eradication. Indeed, the plants’ furanocoumarins can cause severe phototoxic reactions, and they are widely demonized in media and policy discourse. Yet, as ecofeminist critique (Plumwood) reminds us, such framing backgrounds alternative ways of knowing. Herbalist Stephen Buhner suggests that so-called “invasives” may embody ecological intelligence, offering qualities that support homeodynamic balance, while biologist Ken Thompson warns against “killing the messenger” when eradicating species whose impacts may be neutral or beneficial. Recent findings, for example, point to giant hogweed’s role in nourishing soil microbiomes.
Our research is collective and processual, combining analogue fieldwork, experimental practices, and online exchanges. We situate hogweeds not only as toxic hazards but also as teachers, allies, collaborators, and provocateurs. Drawing on folklore, ethnobotany, art practices (e.g. Ingela Ihrman), songs (e.g. Genesis’ 1971 song Invasion of the Giant Hogweed) and lived encounters, we ask: what might hogweeds be communicating to human societies about medicine, poison, and power? Can their phytochemistry and persistence be read as resistance, or as a demand for respect and humility?
By engaging with Derrida’s pharmakon and multispecies practices of learning, we propose hogweeds as agents of more-than-human critique. Rather than eliminating plantae non gratae, we explore how attention to their ambivalent vitality can foster resilience, joy, and wonder, opening paths toward more reciprocal, less domineering relations with the more-than-human world.
Bios:
Brussels Health Gardens (BHG) is a collective of caring citizen researchers and their kin, with links to Brussels, interested in exploring human-nature relationships. By acknowledging BHG as author, we want to stress out the importance of caring and learning in a collaboration with others, humans and nonhumans. The first activities of BHG were organised early 2019.
Viktorija Baltušienė is preschool teacher based in North of Lithuania, specialised in systemic transdisciplinary learning, especially Reggio Emilia pedagogy. In her work she is exploring how ecology of communication rooted in research of Gregory Bateson and Nora Bateson can be applied locally by combining traditional ecological and global knowledge, focusing on transgenerational mutual learning.
Dr. Heide Maria Baden is a western-trained botanist, geographer, and biodiversity researcher working to inform illusions of separation between nature and culture. Her focus on holistic pedagogy and humans’ integral role in ecological interactions in a living climate rebalancing process led her to design a cross-continental community-university partnership for water cycle regeneration.
Justina Maslauskaitė is a consulting psychologist, massage professional applying different self-healing systems. She is a teacher of Sauna ceremony and sacred touch wisdom outside Sauna. She mostly practices and applies traditional elements in Baltic Sauna, integrating the ceremonial approach to celebrating life and healing human’s body, mind, spirit. For years, she has been interested in the cultures and practices of indigenous people, and transmits the Baltic cultural heritage and wisdom. Justina spends a lot of time in Nature and explores different plant behavior. These observations she apply and integrate into the work of Sauna and helping people find their own connections with Mother nature.
Jonas Vytautas Petri is citizen researcher interested in cocreation research which explores human-plant relationships and becoming resilient with plants. He is interested in natural science’s connections to humanities and STS, sustainability, culture, history, philosophy, economy, technology, political and legal systems, education and other fields.
Dr. Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri is a pharmacist, transdisciplinary researcher, kin gardener and co-creator in urban communities focusing on therapeutic and artistic nature-based health practices for resilience and personal exploration in possible becoming. In her work she is focusing on relational lived experiences shared between humans and plants.
Lisa Sattell is an experienced K-12 and adult educator, workshop facilitator, healer, and community organizer, currently serving as meditation and self-awareness leadership facilitator for advanced systems living, eco-literacy, eco-design, and healing-centered education. Interests focus on the creative process and its major role as catalyst for systems awareness and transformation in the collective field. A consultant and researcher, Lisa facilitates think tanks for organizational development and compassionate leadership in for profit and nonprofit sectors using intergenerational qualitative research and ethnography.
Peter Yeo is a plant writer, nature mentor and broadcaster based in Devon, UK. You can find out more about him at www.futureflora.co.uk. Particular areas of interest are the climate impacts on floras, novel ecosystems, the reframing of ‘bad/unwelcome’ plants, and holistic perspectives on vegetation (ie, as Gaian tissue).
Dr. Wendy Wuyts is a writer, entrepreneur and a feminist political-industrial ecologist. She curates www.woodwidewebstories.com and writes eco(healing)fiction. Two short stories are published in Ecozon@. As a scientist she is interested in questions around belonging, homecoming, healing and re-enchantment with/in wounded landscapes.
Eline Tabak (University of Oulu), “Tending to Small Life: On Biodiversity (Loss), Seed Saving and Storytelling”
Abstract: What is the connection between seed saving and storytelling? Both practices and imaginaries of saving and sharing seeds are important in preventing plant species loss. Storytelling gives meaning to practices of seed saving, and seed saving itself can be a way of telling a story. In this context, gardening can become more than a hobby or a way to produce food: the garden becomes a space where people tend to small life and, with that, a biodiverse future. Especially now that urban green spaces are becoming increasingly important in safeguarding biodiversity, (allotment) gardens carry the potential to cultivate and grow plant diversity. As Sandilands and Gersdorf write, gardens are ‘sites of contestation and resistance.’ In the sixth mass extinction one question naturally follows: how is biodiversity loss contested and resisted in the garden, if at all? There is a significant amount of research conducted and published on seed saving in gardens with a focus on food sovereignty and justice, heritage, and community building. However, with growing awareness of biodiversity loss and its consequences, seed conservation for biodiversity preservation in private gardening is becoming increasingly important and both practices and imaginaries of seed saving become means to resist this loss. In this presentation, I will further explore the connections between practices of seed saving and storytelling. I look at individuals’ reasons to harvest and save their seeds at the end of the season in their private gardens and allotments in Finland and the Netherlands. I will show that in these individuals’ gardens, too, practices of seed saving and storytelling are connected and thus, storytelling can play a role in preventing — or rather, resisting — further plant and biodiversity loss.
Bio: Eline Tabak is a postdoctoral researcher in the environmental humanities at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her academic work revolves around questions and possibilities of storytelling, biodiversity loss and extinction, and care. Her doctoral thesis is on the cultural side of insect decline, and she currently researches imaginaries and practices of seed saving.
Nelly Mäekivi (University of Tartu) and Riin Magnus (University of Tartu), “Semiotic Perspectives on Resistance and Care in Multispecies Urban Gardens”
Abstract: Urban gardens are semiotic landscapes where human and nonhuman lives meet in shared processes of meaning-making. Our talk examines private gardening in Tartu, Estonia, through semiotics and more-than-human studies, asking how cohabitation with other species reshapes routines, judgments, and care work in shared environments. We draw on semistructured interviews with 30 private garden owners. Findings show that multispecies encounters unsettle familiar routines and generate new interpretive frameworks. Human, animal, and plant interactions emerge through subtle cues of noticing, approach, retreat, and transformation. Nonhuman agency often becomes salient when gardeners lose practical control, for example when expected growth patterns fail, or when a species suddenly proliferates or vanishes. Such events prompt gardeners to rethink safety, care, and responsibility, but may also lead to the suppression of nonhuman agency or the removal of certain species. Everyday artefacts can act as contact zones, mediating interspecies interactions. Small adjustments accumulate into routines of who can be where and when, shaping the shared place. Gardeners practice conditional hospitality, ranging from relocation to tolerant co-presence. We conceptualize these situated negotiations as everyday practices that contribute to multispecies power relations in urban settings, linking attention, affordances, and interpretation across species to reconfigure who may do what, where, and when. Our approach offers analytic tools that make nonhuman agencies visible without reducing them to metaphor, while remaining critical of the glorification of nonhuman agency under conditions of technological superiority and suppressive social and cultural norms.
Bios:
Nelly Mäekivi is a research fellow at Tartu University, Estonia. She is currently working on hybrid spaces, where human lives intersect with the lives of other animals. Her interests lie in intra- and interspecies communication, ethology, anthropology, and human representations of other species. Her main research focus lies in analysing hybrid environments and species conservation as a multifaceted research object by applying zoosemiotic, ecosemiotic, and cultural semiotic perspectives.
Riin Magnus is a research fellow at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu. Her research focus is on ecosemiotics and human-environment relations. She has published on topics such as alien species in urban environments, visually impaired person-guide dog interactions, vocal mimicry in birding and human-non-human animal interactions during natural disasters. She has co-edited special issues of the journals Sign Systems Studies (Umwelt theory, Framing nature) and Biosemiotics (Hybrid natures).