Session: 6f
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Tessel Janse
Leonardo Bruno Barbosa (Juiz de Fora Federal University), “The Elusive Encounter: Sound, Image, and the Media of Nonhuman Resistance in Birdwatching Ethnography”
Abstract: This paper explores how endangered birds — particularly the Columbina cyanopis, a species once believed to be extinct and recently rediscovered in a small region of Brazil — become agents of media-specific resistance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with birdwatchers and nature photographers in Botumirim (MG), I examine how sound, image, and digital circulation produce not only records of encounters but also aesthetic, political, and affective regimes of value. The bird’s partial visibility and rare vocalizations generate a multisensory experience shaped by techniques of listening, camouflage, and photographic capture — practices that, while aiming to reveal the bird, often highlight its elusiveness. I argue that this elusiveness is not mere absence, but a form of nonhuman resistance: a mode of inhabiting the world that resists full representation and becomes meaningful through media specificity. Recordings, photographs, and platforms like WikiAves are not neutral tools; they structure the very conditions of the encounter and the value attributed to it. By engaging with Isabelle Stengers’ concept of ‘intrusion’ and Anna Tsing’s notion of ‘latent commons,’ I suggest that the aesthetics of endangered life — fragile, mediated, sometimes barely perceptible — invite not just contemplation but situated responses to ecological devastation.
Bio: Leonardo Bruno Barbosa is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil) and a visiting researcher at the NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal (2024–2025), where he worked with naturalist archives at the National Museum of Natural History. His research lies at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, and visual media, focusing on multispecies relations, endangered birds, and image-making practices. He is a member of the Visual Anthropology and Documentary Lab (LAVIDOC/UFJF).
Claudia Cristalli (Tilburg University), “Christ Stopped at Eboli: A Multispecies Ethnography”
Abstract: Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945/2014) is the best-known work by Carlo Levi. The book was an important political and philosophical reference in rethinking, after World War II, the so-called “Southern Question.” My paper argues that the book is also a form of multispecies autoethnography, and that it offers interesting insights for our contemporary discussions of animal politics (Meijer 2019; Piazzesi 2023). Confined in Lucania, a historical region that included Basilicata, northern Calabria up to the Pollino mount, and parts of Apulia and Campania, Levi learns to live in an unfamiliar world whose inhabitants—the peasants—are “other” precisely in the sense of not being fully human. While animality is used to dehumanize, it is also a “double nature” and “double birth” that, explicitly lived and talked about by the peasants, contrasts the easy dichotomies of modern rational thinking: a woman was the daughter of a cow and of a human mother, and “no-one found any contradiction” in that fact (Levi 2014: 98).
Levi’s respectful attitude towards the magic world of his neighbours culminates in the hope for a democratic future that does not rely on the genetically engineered kinship of Donna Haraway’s Camilles (2016: 143-168), but rather on the liberation of the animal within the human as the first step for the institution of a self-determining society. For Levi, fascism is “petty-bourgeois statism” (222), that is, a conception of the State based on the idea of a society of isolated individuals, private citizens. What Levi learns from the more-than-human peasants is that “the individual is not a closed entity, but a relationship, the site of all relationships” (223). In the end, only a society or an organization capable of embracing the relational individuality of the individual-animal can overcome fascism.
Bio: Claudia Cristalli is post-doctoral researcher at Tilburg University. She has worked on the history of psychology and American pragmatism. Her interest in animal studies started while teaching history and philosophy of medicine. She is fascinated by how animal and literature studies allow to decentre the anthropocentric gaze of much philosophical discourse, especially when talking about epistemology and politics.
Swad Bruneel (University of Liège), “Ethnography in Farm Animal Sanctuaries”
Abstract: My ethnographic fieldwork consists in exploring how humans and animals live together in three animal farm sanctuaries. I volunteered for three months at one of them, three weeks at another, and so far only three days at the last one, so my fieldwork is still ongoing. I was surprised to find that everywhere I went, the animals were deeply dependent on humans, who control a large part of their lives. I did not immediately see how ingeniously they adapt to us and transform their habitats into living spaces. Using ethnographic vignettes, I intend to describe multi-specific interactions that account for the complex social organisation made up of each individuals’ strategies and personalities in a particular sanctuary. This leads me to propose a reflection on dependence, agency and power relations. These notions are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they form a breeding ground in which dense networks of attachments are forged : linking humans, the environment and animals.
Furthermore, within the three sanctuaries, mutual attachment is not experienced and thought of in the same way by the humans in charge. The prevailing discourse reflects a continuing distinction between humans and animals and a revisited naturalism in which humans are no longer superior beings, but immoral beings. For some, animals are pure, innocent beings, while for others they are condemned, having become too dependent on humans. These different positions are attempts to build another possible path, all while inheriting a suffocating world and history. In the sanctuaries, between debt, guilt and responsibility, humans and animals are nevertheless forging paths to live together differently.
Bio: As a second-year doctoral student at the University of Liège, I am participating in the HACAB project (Human Animal Collective Assisting the Biosphere) by conducting a multi-sited ethnography on three farm animal sanctuaries. Initiated by Bruno Frère and Véronique Servais, and in collaboration with Sam Ducourant and Andréa Petitt, this project explores the prospects for emancipation and joint solidarity between humans and animals in the Anthropocene era. In 2019, I completed a master’s degree at EHESS focusing on the artistic practices of the orangutans at the Menagerie de Paris.
Elana Neil (University of Salzburg), “Tiny 5 Safari”
Abstract: In 2018, I planned to present at to two ecocriticism related conferences in Europe, one in Spain and one in Glasgow. My goal was to travel by train. When I realized how complicated that train journey is, I decided to turn it into a summer on the rails. I had inherited money after my dad`s death and thus had the luxury to spend it on all things related to my PhD in environmental humanities which I had been working on since 2009. One of the conference lecturers was an academic who took a successful detour into arts. She inspired me: Each train station I had to change trains or wait for connections, I intuitively took pictures of insects or tiny critters. That was the summer tiny5safari started, that was the summer Northern Europe experienced an unprecedented heatwave for two months. My days at the beaches in Stockholm, Sweden felt like Spain. That was the summer Greta Thunberg emerged. That summer rail journey of 70 days, 70, that’s how old my dad a passionate organic farmer was during his last year in the Alps, turned into an exploration of more-than-human-city, reimagining pests & toxic landscapes, non-human personhood etc. My mind-boggling encounters with our tiny co-inhabitants turned into an ongoing love story: tiny5safari. Ever since I have written countless short stories, taken numerous photos, created public art performances, art shows, conducted art&science events, met Anne Tsing, lectured for scientists for future, started a podcast for scientist for future “Nebelhorn” where I interviewed Scott Slovic and Ursula Heise. Looking down teaches us so much about the grand scale of things. I have not finished my PhD yet, but I have learned a lot along my tiny5safari journey. Come and marvel with me and maybe fall in love with spiders & co as well.
Bio: Elana Neil is the artist name of a PhD student who has been exploring ecocriticism since 2005. She studied at Stellenbosh University South Africa, explored ecocriticism in India under the kind guidance of Nirmal Selvamony, completed a Fulbright FLTA, has been an on-and-off member of ASLE since 2005 and became a member of the Harvard Club Germany, after Lawrence Buell inspired her and invited her to Harvard to research “collective environmental subconsciousness” at Widner Library in 2008.