Session 1

Wednesday 15 April 11.15–13.00

Click on the panel title to see full abstracts and bios

1.a
Against Extinction

Room: JK2–3 0.17
Chair: Deborah Schrijvers

Speakers:

  • Anisha Gamblin, “Storytelling Wars: Authoritarian Regimes and the Language of Extinction in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013)”
  • Alice Sundman, “Resisting Extinction: Sea Birds, Fish, and Seeds in Climate Change Novels by Charlotte McConaghy”
  • Linda Williams, “Animals and Extinction: Reassessing Theoretical Concepts of the Lifeworld”

1.b
Archipelagic Thinking

Room: JK2–3 0.19
Chair: José Manuel Marrero Henríquez

Speakers:

  • Estelle Krewiss, “‘They can disappear just like that:’ Contact by the Shore from Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea to Eva Saulitis’ Into Great Silence”
  • Mohammed Afsal, “Archipelagic Assemblages: Decolonial Ecologies and Multispecies Resistance in Contemporary Fiction”
  • Belén González Morales, “Breathing, Poetizing, and Archipelagic Thinking”
  • Irene Pessot, “From Feminist Margins to the Ocean: Envisioning More-than-Human Solidarity with Le Nemesiache (1970–1980s)”

1.c
Violence and Resistance in the Slaughterhouse

Room: JK2–3 1.09
Chair: Robert McKay

Speakers:

  • Camilla Hougaard, “‘A pig transport is on fire on the E45 highway’: An Industrial Slaughter Pig’s Ambiguous Revolt in Nath Krause’s Trilogi (2025)”
  • Ben Lomas, “Carnotroping and Creaturely Resistance in Okja (2017)”
  • Anna Dijkstra, “Eating Brains as Food for Thought: An Argument for Ethico-Linguistic Transformation towards Cows in the Aftermath of the BSE Outbreak”
  • Wouter Capitain, “Revolutionary Song and Speciesism in George Orwell’s Animal Farm”

1.d
Elemental Resistance I

Room: JK2–3 1.10
Chair: Celandine Fleur Seuren

Speakers:

  • Lúcia Bentes, “Conflict, Domination, and Resistance: The Wind as a Nonhuman Force in Sarah Hall’s Helm”
  • Christian Schmitt-Kilb, “If It Happens, Helm Isn’t Sorry: Climate Breakdown as Transhistorical Human–Nonhuman Relationship in Sarah Hall’s Helm (2025)”
  • Hyang Jo, “The Revolt of the Four Elements in Faust”
  • Marina Messeri, “‘Looking forward from the past’: The Lament of the Elements in the 12th-Century Cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen”

1.e
Vegetal Vengeance [preformed panel]

Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair: Gabriele Dürbeck

Speakers:

  • Solvejg Nitzke, “‘The Trees Are Out to Get Us’: Arboreal Vengeance in Eco-Horror Comics”
  • Heather I. Sullivan, “Vegetal Vengeance in Cli-Fi: A Spectacle of Co-Species Collaborative Destruction”
  • Gabriele Dürbeck, “Plant Revenge, Resistance and Revenants in Contemporary Environmental Poetry”
  • Catherin Persing, “Out of Control: Unruly Plants and the Ambivalence of More-Than-Human Care in Little Joe and Little Otik”

1.f
Aquatic Animals/Imaginaries I

Room: JK2–3 1.16
Chair: Claudia Alonso Recarte

Speakers:

  • Monika Class, “Grievable Monsters: Adaptations of Melville’s Whale”
  • Candice Allmark-Kent, “Inscrutable Malice: Rewriting the White Whale through ‘Mocha Dick’, Moby Dick, and White as the Waves”
  • Miryam Bernadette Danielsson, “Orca Sinking! The Beautiful Soul’s Hollow Victory in Jaws”
  • Irene Sanz Alonso, “Tales from the Deep: Ecogothic Readings of Sharks”

1.g
Speculative Fiction I

Room: JK2–3 1.17
Chair: Laura op de Beke

Speakers:

  • Sevda Ayva, “More-Than-Human Minds: Extended Cognition and Nonhuman Resistance in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse”
  • Richard Kerridge, “Information Overload as Resistance: A Creative and Critical Paper”
  • Jacqueline Barner-Bauer, “Nonhuman Player Avatars and Choices of Multispecies Solidarity in Worlds Abandoned by Humans”
  • Gabriela Kozakiewicz, “From Orca Uprising to Vegetal Democracy: More-than-human Politics in Speculative Fiction”

1.h
Gender(ed) Resistance I

Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Mace Bielderman

Speakers:

  • Per Esben Svelstad, “The Queerness of Pig Farming: Sexuality, and Multispecies Tragedies in Anne B. Ragde’s Neshov series and Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Règne animal”
  • Clara Louise Søndergaard, “‘You probably ought to be small enough to notice’: The Potential of Transspecies Solidarity in Performing Transgender Rage (2022) by Gry Stokkendahl Dalgas”
  • Valerie Tollhopf, “Contextualizing Multispecies Struggles: Trans and Animal Bodies, Capitalism, and the State”
  • Rebecca Jordan, “Queer Resistance in the Age of Man: Animal Cyborgs in Contemporary Austrian Literature”

1.i
Nature Bites Back I

Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Sara Bédard-Goulet

Speakers:

  • Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles, “When ‘Historicized Nature’ Strikes Back: Haunted Ecohorror in the Anthropocene”
  • Dace Bula, “Sand versus People: Contested Agencies in Aberts Bels’ People in Boats”
  • Susan Meyer, “Forces of Nature versus Those of Man in Bundu (Chris Barnard)”
  • Helene E. Heuser, “‘She will take it back’: The Rise of the Revengeful Gaia in 1990s Popular Music”

1.j
Undrowned Resistance: Hydropoetics

Room: JK2–3 2.18
Chair: Merve Tabur

Speakers:

  • Deniz Gündoğan Ibrişim, “Currents of Solidarity: Black Feminist Generations and Interspecies Resistance in Undrowned”
  • Marta Werbanowska, “Undrowning, Together: Black Hydropoetics and More-Than-Human Liberation”
  • Noémie Mil-Homens Cavaco, “‘Flow’ and ‘Après nous, les animaux’: One Flood, Two Arks, and No Noah”
  • Reeta Holopainen, “The Question of Water in Nordic Climate Change Poetics”

1.k
Imagining Narratives of Struggle Against Extractivism in Human-Nonhuman Relationships [preformed panel]

Room: JK2–3 2.19
Chair: Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Speakers:

  • Gabriele D’Amato, “Material and Epistemic Extraction in Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake”
  • Shannon Lambert, “Forms of Resistance: Sea Stars, Stories, and Endless Regeneration in Loren Eiseley’s ‘Star Thrower’ (1964).”
  • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz, “Extractivist Form: Narrative Strategies and Distorted Care in Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron”
  • Chiara Xausa, “From Comparison to Coalition: Intersectional Forms of Multispecies Resistance in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon”

1.l
Myth and Magic

Room: JK2–3 2.20
Chair: Mia You

Speakers:

  • Reinhard Hennig, “The Last Troll: Fantastic Species as Threatened and Threatening Nature in Contemporary Norwegian Literature and Film”
  • Guðrun í Jákupsstovu, “Materiality and Mythology as Nonhuman Resistance in Contemporary Nordic Literature”
  • Hanna Hoorenman, “Animal Attraction: The Sticky Temptation of Omegaverse Romance”
  • Shibaji Mridha, “From Revenge to Romance: Re-visiting Ponyo and The Shape of Water in the Age of Orca Uprising”