Session: 5g
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK2–3 2.19
Chair: Chloë Taylor
Renata Dalmaso and Júlia Zen Dariva (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), “On Human and Non-Human Entanglements: The Double Slit Experiment of Live Nature Cams”
Abstract: We are interested in the phenomena of live nature cams as constitutive of reality, borrowing from Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. Live nature feeds that follow a specific animal, species, or habitat–such as the bald eagle nest at Big Bear Valley or the brown bears of Katmai National Park, to name just a couple–mediate a relationship between humans and non-humans in ways that approximate these subjects at the same time that build a community of like-minded onlookers. These cameras work as material-discursive practices, enacting agency across those multiple relationships. The nature (pun intended) of this phenomena can be read paradoxically, though. The connection of non-humans to humans can be read as one of voyeurism, in which nature is then constructed as a product to be consumed from the comfort of home. At the same time, the entanglement between non-humans and humans can be seen as mutually constitutive, as an interpellation that occurs through a shared relationship of time that produces I/you/we into being. In the first perspective, the relationship of non-humans and humans is unilateral, and the sense of community being established is only among other humans who join the activity. In the second perspective, the relationship is seen as reciprocal, as all subjects, human and non-human, come into being through this discursively material making of space-time. Borrowing from the double slit experiment in physics, which spookly demonstrates how matter can have both particle and wave-like characteristics, across time and space, our hypothesis is that the relationship between humans and non-humans within the system of live nature cams can be read through both perspectives at the same time: they are both unilateral and reciprocal in their constitutive properties. The system of cameras that enables the live feeds can be seen as the apparatus through which the connections are formed. Communities are entangled in this meaning-making process as well: they can be seen as exclusive to humans, who see cultural value in this consumption of nature, and they can be read as the whole of the relationship within the network of the apparatuses.
Bios:
Renata Lucena Dalmaso is a professor and permanent member of the postgraduate program in English at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. A two-time Fulbright awardee, she held a Fulbright Dissertation Award at the University of Michigan (2012-13) and a Junior Faculty Award at George Washington University (2018-19). Her scholarly work focuses on life writing, with specific interests in graphic memoirs, representations of disability, queer theory, and feminisms.
Júlia Zen Dariva is a Ph.D candidate at the post-graduate program of English at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Her research interest lie in looking at the affective relationship between fans and their selected objects through a cultural materialist lens.
Diana M. Natermann (Utrecht University), “Conquest and Counterforce: Masculine Gazes, German Colonial Photography”
Abstract: In 1910–11, Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg led a major German expedition to Central Africa, producing an extensive photographic record of landscapes, peoples, and animals. These images – crafted through both a colonial and a distinctly male gaze – rehearse the narrative of “man’s war against nature” that Rachel Carson later diagnosed. Colonial photography staged nonhumans as trophies, specimens, or picturesque scenery, legitimising extractive violence and dispossession. At the same time, the act of photographing itself performed a masculine script of mastery, projecting ideals of virility, control, and domination over both humans and nonhumans. When revisited in light of contemporary imaginaries of nonhuman insurgency – most prominently the so-called “orca uprising” in the Strait of Gibraltar – these photographs reveal silenced counter-histories of multispecies entanglement. Hunting scenes, depictions of dead animals, and orchestrated landscapes capture not only imperial desires to master life itself, but also a specifically gendered performance of colonial authority. Paying attention to detail – the gestures of animals resisting capture, the unpredictability of terrain, the strain visible in coerced labour – opens space to reimagine these photographs as records not solely of domination but of fragile masculinities and unruly ecologies. This paper argues for a decolonial ecocritical lens that connects colonial ecocide, cultural genocide, and today’s crises of multispecies justice, while also interrogating the gendered structures that underpinned imperial visual regimes. By situating the Mecklenburg expedition’s archive within current debates on nonhuman defiance, the analysis highlights how visual culture sustained fantasies of conquest and virility, yet also destabilised them. In dialogue with the environmental humanities, the paper explores how rereading colonial photographs through postcolonial and masculinity studies might foster interspecies solidarities and alternative alliances that resist entrenched binaries, contributing to broader imaginaries of care, coexistence, and more-than-human justice.
Bio: Dr Diana Miryong Natermann is a historian of modern European and African history with a focus on colonialism, postcolonial theory, and visual culture. She earned her Ph.D. at the European University Institute in Florence and has held positions at Leiden University and Universität Hamburg and, since 2024, is Lecturer in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University. Her research addresses colonial photography, whiteness studies, gender, restitution debates, and cultural genocide. Natermann also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of LawArt and on the Dutch Afrikamuseum reopening committee, connecting scholarship with public debate on colonial legacies.
Alexandra Böhm (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), “Rewilding and Imaginations of the Primitive: Towards Convivial Communities with the More-than-Human World”
Abstract: Over the past years, the notion of ‘rewilding’ seems to have become one of the main guides to salvation from our contemporary ecological crises. This is true for whole ecosystems but also for the civilized self that seeks to escape from the stained, degraded and denaturalized life of urban consumer society. Returning to an innate, natural and often primitive condition promises the recovery of a new balance between human and nature as well as an intimate connection of the ‘rewilded’ self to nature.
By doing so, it takes up the wilderness idea, a specific American concept of untouched and unspoiled nature dating back to John Muir’s first preservation endeavours at the end of the 19th century. Wilderness or a primitive pre-human condition is often seen as the proper target of conservation or restoration efforts. However, it is also an extremely controversial notion, which – as critics claim – has significant gendered and racial overtones (e.g. Marti Kheel). For William Cronon, in turn, notions of untouched, pristine nature reproduce the dangerous dualism between culture and nature, setting humans apart from nonhuman nature, while neglecting the historical and geopolitical aspects of the concept.
In my talk, I will focus on the history and theory of the concept of ‘rewilding’ and will then turn to recent literary, philosophical and media treatments of rewilding – to Lisa Eder’s film Der wilde Wald (2021) on the Bavarian National Park, Charlotte McConaghy’s Once there were Wolves (2021), Nastassja Martin’s Croire aux fauves (2020) and Baptiste Morizot’s Sur la Piste Animale (2018). My readings will focus on how these representations of rewilding and primitive nature treat the complex relationship between culture and nature. I will then oppose the problems and conflicts that arise in these texts by restoring wilderness to ecosystems and to the self to alternative conceptions that argue for convivial communities with the more-than-human world instead of returning to troubled concepts of wilderness that reaffirm anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism.
Bio: PD Dr. Alexandra Böhm is currently working at the German National Museum in Nuremberg, Leibniz Research Museum for cultural history. She is also a senior lecturer at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where she teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities. She recently curated the special exhibition „Hello Nature – how best to live with you?“ at the GNM (books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/arthistoricum/catalog/book/1478) and is now starting a new project on biodiversity and notions of the wild in art and literature since 1600. She has published widely on topics of Cultural and Literary Animal Studies and Ecocriticism.