Pre-Conference Workshops

These workshops are aimed primarily at graduate students and early-career researchers. To help give us a sense of how many people to expect, please indicate here which of the three workshops you would like to attend.

Getting Your (First) Book Published

When: 14.00–15.00
Where: JK2-3, room 1.16
With: Dr. Myrto Aspioti (De Gruyter Brill)

Are you wondering how a monograph differs from a dissertation? Do you have questions about how to select a publisher and develop a convincing book proposal? This workshop with Dr. Myrto Aspioti, acquisitions editor at De Gruyter Brill, one of Europe’s biggest independent academic publishers, will treat the process of developing a strong book proposal, selecting an appropriate publication venue, and editing your own writing to reach a broader audience with your book. Of particular interest to PhD students as well as more experienced researchers in all Humanities and Social Sciences subjects.

Springtime in the Library: Thinking Ecocritically about the Scholarly Bookscape

When: 13.00–15.00
Where: JK2–3, room 1.17
With: Dr. Anton Bruder and Dr. Dan Rudmann (Utrecht University Library)

From some of our oldest book-words, like codex (“tree-trunk”) and folio (“leaf”), to modern library management terminology like weeding and bibliodiversity, the language of the scholarly bookscape is replete with nature imagery. If culture in its widest sense is indeed a “second nature”, what we may term ecocritical metaphors for the book take on vital significance. This session invites participants to extend these metaphors together in a group pursuit of fresh woods and pastures new from which to contemplate the world of books.

Suggested (but not required!) reading:

Laurie Morrison, “Finding Slow in Academic Libraries,” in Maggie Berg and Barbara K Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, Tenth Anniversary Edition (University of Toronto Press, 2025), pp. 170–174)
Ashley Rosener, ed. Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices (Library Juice Press, 2026)
Demmy Verbeke, “Safekeeping Diversity in Scholarly Communication: How ‘Transformative’ Are Recent Agreements?” ScholarLed blog, 24 October 2019 (https://blog.scholarled.org/safekeeping-diversity-in-scholarly-communication/)
“Bibliodiveristy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliodiversity

Monopoly Eco-Hack-a-Thon

When: 13.00–15.00
Where: JK2-3, room 1.18
With: Dr. Laura op de Beke (UU)

Remember Monopoly, the game of relentless capitalist accumulation? Want to help us reimagine the tired classic as a way to explore sustainable and just urban futures? Building on Stefan Werning’s franchise hacking provocations, and on a gameplay loop designed by Flora Roberts and Laura op de Beke, we invite you to join us in re-imagining the game of Monopoly for the current moment. What if we made it collaborative, rather than competitive? What if, in addition to moving our pawns around the board, we also told their stories of environmentalist radicalization? How about bonus points for solving the housing crisis, adding wildlife corridors, or greening the grid? Anything’s possible.
During the workshop, we will play a game of Monopoly using a specially designed ‘hacking deck,’ that allows us to modify the game as we play it. Add some components here, redraw parts of the board there, change the rules, change the game—until we are left with a more equitable, more sustainable world.

Listing Lives: Cultural Analysis and Conservation Policy

OSL Masterclass with Greg Garrard
14 April 10:00–12:00

Janskerkhof 2–3, room 1.16

How do cultural narratives, legal frameworks, and political geographies shape which species we care about—and how? This masterclass examines the emerging field of conservation humanities through two case studies in North American endangered species governance. Drawing on Ursula Heise’s argument in Imagining Extinction that biodiversity loss is as much a crisis of cultural imagination as of ecology, we ask how literary and rhetorical analysis can illuminate the assumptions embedded in conservation law and practice. The first case study is co-authored by me and two biologists, examining transboundary mammal species listings under Canada’s Species at Risk Act (2002). We demonstrate how the 49th parallel (the line of latitude that defines most of the US-Canada border) functions, not merely as a political boundary, but as a biological one. I am also the author of a later ecocritical study of Co-Existence, a Canadian documentary about killer whales, which shows how taxonomic levels are confused and conflated in the interest of conservation.

The session invites participants to consider what humanistic methods can contribute to conservation policy debates, and what obligations that contribution entails.

Readings

Required

Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Introduction + chapters 1 and 3 (pp. 1–54, 87–126).

Sarah Raymond, Sarah Perkins, and Greg Garrard, “The Species at Risk Act (2002) and Transboundary Species Listings along the US–Canada Border,” Humanities 13.1 (2024): 38. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010038.

Greg Garrard, “Endangered by the 49th Parallel: How Political Boundaries Inhibit Effective Conservation,” The Conversation, 7 February 2024. https://doi.org/10.64628/AAM.j54x553kr.

Greg Garrard, “Co-Extinction? The Southern Resident Killer Whales in Culture and Science,” (unpublished manuscript)

EASLCE 2026

Utrecht University