Session: 4f
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 2.18
Chair: Merve Tabur
Amanda Wang (Durham University), “‘Who Benefits’: Materiality of Language and Injustice in Indigenous Poetry”
Abstract: To realise the promise of multispecies justice, it is necessary to return to the question, “Who benefits?” The answer that might appeal to everyone is: all of us. Alliances among diverse human and nonhuman actors enable the generation of multiple visions. Indigenous studies often stand at the forefront of critiquing rigid binaries to pursue multispecies collaboration, highlighting the ecological vulnerabilities of indigenous (feminist) groups and providing a framework in which the autonomous self can be situated within larger relational networks. Poetry with indigenous language can serve as a powerful tool of resistance, fostering an understanding of interspecies solidarity and collective action across multiple perspectives. In terms of poetic language, it can carry, mimic, and perform the materiality of what it describes. Each element of a poem can be involved in the play of its separate energies. Poetry can navigate the complexities of lived experience while also articulating assemblages between human and nonhuman beings. Focusing on an Inupiat-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik’s poetry, I plan to explore how poetry enacts indigenous epistemologies concerning multispecies injustice. I will argue that embodying an “union of living” through word arrangement engenders new ways of imagining and being in relation to others, while opening up possibilities for rethinking the forms of collaboration we need today.
Bio: Amanda Wang is an English Literature PhD candidate at Durham University, specialising in Anthropocene poetry, Blue Humanities, and New Materialisms. Her project emphasises how the materiality of water and toxicity can be expressed metaphorically in Anthropocene poetry. She is a member of the Centre for Culture and Ecology at Durham University and convenes a reading group on environmental humanities.
Meliz Ergin (Koç University), “Interspecies Poetics and Humanimal Embodiment in Contemporary Turkish Poetry”
Abstract: This presentation examines a constellation of contemporary Turkish poets who foreground interspecies justice by critiquing both the physical and discursive violence inflicted on more-than-human beings. Through an analysis of the works of İlhan Berk, Birhan Keskin, and Elif Sofya, I investigate how poetry can serve as a critical medium not only for confronting animal cruelty and exploitation, but also for exposing the complicity of language in sustaining speciesist ideologies.
Each poet articulates a distinct poetic strategy in response to animal oppression. Berk’s entomo-poetics centers on insects to develop a reading practice grounded in radical attention and care, while playfully revealing our linguistic and epistemological limits in understanding more-than-human life. Keskin’s interspecies poeisis cultivates relational intimacy and shared vulnerability between humans and animals through the transfiguration and doubling of the poetic voice. Sofya’s poetics of humanimal embodiment dissolves corporeal boundaries to conjure unnameable bodies that disrupt speciesist language. Across their works, motifs of liminality, transformation, and resistance emerge as vital tools for reimagining the ontological boundaries between humans and nonhumans, and for acknowledging the deeply entangled nature of multispecies life.
By engaging closely with their innovative poetics, I pose a set of interrelated questions: How might we invent a resilient grammar that fosters affective bonds between human and more-than-human beings? Can poetry function as a medium for engaging with animals without erasing their irreducible alterity? And how might poetic inquiry challenge anthropocentric thought, thereby reconfiguring dominant ideological constructs surrounding both the human and the animal? Ultimately, I argue that these poets mobilize the aesthetic and ethical possibilities of poetry to create a space for cross-species kinship and critical reflection.
Bio: Meliz Ergin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University, İstanbul. She is the author of The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures (Palgrave 2017) and Ecocriticism and Turkey (Bloomsbury 2024). Her research interests include environmental humanities, comparative ecocriticism, critical theory, literature and philosophy, and contemporary (eco)poetics.
Elizabeth Smith (University of Warwick), “The Bacterium Ate My Poem”
Abstract: Spanning 25 years and two volumes, Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment involves encoding a poem into the DNA of a bacterium: first E. coli, then the extremophile D. radiodurans. At first, the experiment may appear collaborative. However, Bök describes the bacterium as an archive and a machine for writing poetry, preserving a universalised ‘civilisation’ beyond a projected apocalypse. As a result, critics like Andrea Callanan and Isabel Waidner have pointed out the uneven power dynamics that structure any apparent ‘collaboration.’ This archival model runs counter to the collaborative world-making of the organisms themselves, infecting and shaping others through acts of ‘bacterial innovation.’ Although the experiment was reported as a ‘success’ in July of 2025, much of the life of the experiment has been characterised by the deferral of this ‘success,’ first when E. coli broke down the poem rather than reproducing it, and then when the extremophile refused to express the poem. I therefore read Bök’s experiment against the grain, analysing moments of bacterial resistance through the absorption and metabolisation of the poem: eating the poet’s words. I argue that this is where the real collaboration of the experiment lies, not in the passive reproduction of the text, but in the bacterial tendency to metabolise and mutate, disrupting the stability of the text and of the human author. In “Fingereyes: Impressions of Cup Corals,” Eva Hayward introduces the possibility for haptic surfaces of encounter with more-than-human life, but also the “unmetabolizable” tensions and failures inherent in this (585). Similarly, Ada Smailbegović calls attention to the importance of failure as a way to make space for more-than-human alterity. My paper asks how the “unmetabolizable” friction and metabolic resistance of bacterial poetics can unlock alternative forms of collaboration with other-than-human life, despite the upheavals of the text—and the human—that result.
Bio: Lizzie Smith is an Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, having recently submitted a PhD in the multispecies encounter in contemporary ecopoetics. With chapters on ocean invertebrates, insects, bacteria, and fungi, her research explores the potential of poetic encounters with “weird” or uncharismatic organisms to reconfigure the narratives that structure our encounters with other-than-human life. She is keen to explore interdisciplinary perspectives, especially from the sciences, and is open to conversations about unconventional creatures or perspectives.
Kennedy Dragt (UCLouvain), “Books and Being: Buddhist Practice in Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness”
Abstract: Japanese-American Author and Zen-Buddhist Priest, Ruth Ozeki has come to be recognized as one of the most creative contemporary writers engaging directly with the climate crisis and its more-than-human consequences. Her 2022 novel The Book of Form and Emptiness engages with similar concerns. The Book follows the tale of a young teen who begins hearing the voices of non-human things following the death of his father. One such voice is that of The Book itself, who calls out to Benny, the aforementioned boy in the basement of a library. The Book comes into being as both a unique narrative entity and as the process of “dependent co-arising” between and The Book. In this paper I argue that the unique posthuman metafictional form of the novel and its suggested animacy is born of Buddhist Philosophy and practice. Examining the Buddhist influence on the ‘form and emptiness’ of text, I argue that spiritual mattering in literary texts urgently challenges the ways in which we perceive the acts of reading, writing, and listening in a more-than-human world.
Bio: Kennedy is a PhD Candidate and FNRS ASPIRANTE Research fellow at UCLouvain in Belgium. Her research focuses on religion and spirituality in contemporary climate poetry and fiction. Her work can be read in Green Letters, the Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture, as well as TRANSPOSITIONES.