On Thursday afternoon the conference offers a range of workshops, excursions, and other activities that participants can sign up for. Each activity is capped at 30 participants, allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Please scroll down to read the descriptions of the different options. All are free or charge. Click here to register.
1. The Weather Has Been Cancelled
Location: JK2–3, 2.18
Presenter: Jasmijn Visser (studio.jasmijnvisser@gmail.com)
In ‘The Weather Has Been Cancelled’ (TWHBC) Jasmijn Visser offers an immersive performance lecture based on the interactive-fiction videogame developed at the Rachel Carson Center. In TWHBC, the player wakes up and discovers that the weather has been ‘cancelled’. Then, the quest is revealed: “The world needs you! Discover who cancelled the weather and get it back! If you fail to restore the weather by midnight, all life on Earth will begin to perish. Good luck.”
The weather’s disappearance leaves a stunned world. Global speculation arises on who took the weather and what the possible relationship with climate change could be. Notably, now that the weather has disappeared, climate change has been ‘solved’… In a heated debate, the hard and soft sciences battle over what the weather is, different cultures question the disappearance of the weather as a mystical, supernatural event, philosophers debate the concept of nature in its Platonic form, while various countries blame geo-engineering and colonialism. Meanwhile, people mourn the weather: through cultural expressions such as songs, poems and films.
During the performance sounds, texts and excerpts from TWHBC will be used to create and immersive, atmospheric experience. This will be followed by a critical link to the concept of cultural modelling, and an exploration of how artistic techniques complement humanities research.
Rather than being a workshop, per se, this event functions as an investigation into climate modelling, with a focus on how artistic techniques can be used in creating a ‘cultural climate model’. The event combines performance with theoretical inquiry.
Duration: 40 minutes
2. Becoming in the Bog
Location: JK2–3, 1.15
Facilitators: Het Potgrond Collectief (Ronja Kops and Nina Litsios)
(hetpotgrondcollectief@gmail.com)
Do you hear the water seeping through the muddy soil? Do you feel your feet sticking to the ground with every step, squelching as your rubber boot breaks loose from the bog? During this workshop, we (Nina Litsios, Ronja Kops and Cecile Haanstra) welcome you in what seems like a room in Utrecht, but which will quickly change into a lively landscape of peat and water. Over time, the water that carries you is swept away from your feet and you are in turn absorbed by the soil: historical peatlands have looped through time and reappropriated space! With the rewetting of the peatland comes a vast array of more-than-human creatures—sphagnum moss, pirate spiders, cranes, mole crickets—you will be surprised to find yourselves transformed. You are invited to learn about your peat alter ego, reconnecting with your transformed selves. From inhabiting and slowly understanding your creatures’ lifeworld, we will also be able to engage with peat extraction and reclamation in different ways: through poems, storytelling and sharing.
How can we find ourselves in symbiosis with the soil and critters around us? Let’s find out together!
Duration: approx. 2 hours
3. Warm Data Lab Exploring Resistances
Location: JK2–3, 1.16
Facilitator: Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri (vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com)
Join our Warm Data Lab, in which we will be tending together to the art of multispecies care across multiple contexts (economy, education, art, technology, science, media, ecology, family, and others). It is a space for simple, meaningful conversations that flow. These experiences have been described as a “kaleidoscope of conversations”, containing enriching stories, laughter, and insight. They nourish the soul, transform the way we approach each other, plant worlds, work, life, and our communities, and ultimately, create space for new relationships to flourish. They can even plant new seeds for community projects to renew and revitalise community life.
Our conversations will include participants across diverse multispecies (re)search fields to discuss what is present for us as we explore our various questions we are carrying.
Warm Data is contextual and relational living information about complex systems. It doesn’t isolate variables or seek answers in one domain, but holds the complexity of many contexts simultaneously. Warm Data Lab (WDL) invites us to share stories and memories from our lives helping us notice inter-dependencies and generate understandings of systemic patterns, even for those with no previous exposure to systems theory. WDL help us widen our vision of the many relationships that coexist in any living context, increasing our capacity to respond with care, new awareness and relational insight.
The space will be held by hosts trained in Warm Data Lab processes, developed by Nora Bateson and stewarded by the International Bateson Institute. This two-hour session is participatory, offering possibilities to converse in big groups and small groups. In each group you will converse with a new set of people guided by different context. Whatever is alive in you in the moment, this space invites you to share that which wants to emerge.
Duration: 2 hours
4. Writing(with)Plants: Nonhuman Resistance as Practice
Location: Groenkapel by the Griftpark, Utrecht
(See below for directions)
Facilitator: Wendy Wuyts (w.wuyts@tue.nl)
You are invited to a creative workshop, Writing(with)Plants, which combines performance, storytelling, collective reflection, and experimental writing to explore vegetal modes of nonhuman resistance. The workshop invites you to rethink entrenched human–nature binaries not through imaginaries of retribution, but by cultivating practices of interspecies solidarity, attention, and care.
The workshop will be situated outdoors in Utrecht, engaging directly with the local environment and a “guest plant” that serves as focal point and interlocutor. Drawing on ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and posthumanist theories of multispecies justice and care ethics (cfr Marder, Puig de la Bellacasa, Haraway, Mol, Bateson), the session foregrounds the agency of plants as more than symbolic figures. Instead, plants are encountered as co-participants who embody subtle yet profound forms of resistance: persistence, adaptation, rootedness, toxicity, and slowness.
The workshop will include forest-bathing-attunement, a storytelling circle, and creative writing prompts inspiring writing not about but with plants. By situating writing as a multispecies practice, the workshop fosters forms of conviviality and resistance that move beyond the logics of domination or revenge. It contributes to ongoing conversations in the environmental humanities by asking how we might write—and resist—otherwise, in collaboration with the vegetal world.
Duration: 2 hours
The location of the workshop is the Groenkapel in the ‘Griftpark’, about a 20-minute walk from the location of the conference (Janskerkhof). To give you ample time for lunch (13.00–14.00) we will meet at the Groenkapel at 14.30.
The weather forecast is looking good, but in case of rain (a constant worry here), the workshop will take place at Stadsboerderij Griftsteede instead, which is also located in the Griftpark. The Stadsboerderij offers tea, coffee, and other drinks for you to warm up with in case of bad weather.
It would be wonderful if you could bring a pen/pencil, as well as some paper for you to write on. We expect to be back at the conference location at around 17.00–17.30, in time for the reception.
5. Amelisweerd: Toward Multispecies Justice
Location: Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd, Bunnik
(See below for directions)
Facilitators: Elmo Vermijs (elmo@elmovermijs.com) and Marieke Nooren (mariekenooren@gmail.com)
Join artist Elmo Vermijs and dramaturge Marieke Nooren for an excursion to Amelisweerd, a historic wooded estate on the outskirts of Utrecht and one of the most contested ecological sites in the Netherlands. Amelisweerd has been at the centre of environmental activism for over fifty years: its old trees and biodiverse landscapes have repeatedly been threatened by plans to widen the A27 highway, sparking long-standing campaigns of civic protest, civil disobedience, and tree-sitting.
Participants will travel by bus to Amelisweerd, where they will be invited to walk through the estate, explore its ecological and cultural histories, and learn about the current pressures it faces. The excursion is connected to the ongoing art and research project Amelisweerd: Towards Multispecies Justice, which brings together artists, activists, ecologists, lawyers, and scholars to imagine new ways of recognising and representing the interests of more-than-human beings.
The afternoon will conclude with a hands-on workshop led by Vermijs and Nooren, introducing participants to the project’s artistic and conceptual methods and opening a discussion on what multispecies justice might look like in practice.
Duration: approx. 3 hours (including travel to and from Amelisweerd)
- Departure
- Time: 13.30
- Location: bus stop “Janskerkhof”
- Bus: 73 or 77 to bus stop “CS Jaarbeurszijde” & 341 to bus stop “Oud-Amelisweerd”
- Arrival: 14.00 at bus stop “Oud-Amelisweerd”
- Return
- Time: 17.00
- Location: bus stop “Oud-Amelisweerd”
- Bus: 341 to bus stop “CS Jaarbeurszijde” & bus 77, 350, or 8 to bus stop “Janskerkhof”
- Arrival: 17.30 at bus stop “Janskerkhof”
6. Textures of Resistance
Location: JK2–3, 1.17
Facilitators: Off the Menu Research Group (philine.schiller@uni-a.de)
Is resistance as hard as a diamond or as soft as a feather? Or is it perhaps both all at once, refusing to adhere to an either/or binary? And beyond texture alone, how does resistance taste?
Focusing on water and its plethora of forms, this performative workshop invites participants to collectively “bite” into different watery bodies by blending tactile, visual, and gustatory elements. Departing from and translating the work of our research group, “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” based at the University of Augsburg, we will share salty and sweet and icy tastes, reflecting on liquids and solids and the worlds in between. How does texture shape more-than-human agency and resistance?
Our contribution to the 2026 EASLCE Conference takes its inspiration from the sensory research of food studies scholar Daniel Bender and furthers his belief that taste, which is to say the tongue and the teeth and the nose, is a form of ecocriticism. In short, our participatory workshop spotlights the intersections between materiality and agency and taste, asking how melting, cracking, or shifting ice refracts different textures of resistance within more-than-human worlds.
Duration: approx. 2 hours
7. Narrative Games and Multispecies Storytelling
Location: JK2–3, 2.19
Facilitator: Laura op de Beke (l.h.opdebeke@uu.nl)
Sign up for this session to spend a cozy 2 hours playing multispecies storytelling games, featuring a selection curated (and run) by Laura op de Beke, Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at the UU (and seasoned DM). For a peek at the selection check out this link.
Duration: approx. 2 hours
8. To Whom It May Concern
Location: Sonnenborgh Museum and Observatory
(See below for directions)
Facilitator: Tanja Koning (t.koning@sonnenborgh.nl)
Join us for an excursion to the Sonnenborgh Museum and Observatory, an astronomical observatory founded in 1853 by C. H. D. Buys Ballot and located on the only surviving bastion of Utrecht’s city walls.
You will get to explore the observatory as well as their current exhibition, “Op Aarde” (On Earth). This immersive exhibition offers a multi-sensory journey through image, sound, and touch, inviting visitors to reflect on our relationship with the Earth and the role of storytelling in a time of environmental crisis.
After the visit, you are invited to take part in a guided creative writing workshop led by exhibition curator Tanja Koning. Participants will be invited to write a letter to the Earth, reflecting on the themes and experiences of the exhibition. Those who wish will have the opportunity to share and discuss their letters with the group. The letters produced during the workshop will become part of a growing participatory archive of letters to the Earth, collected as part of an ongoing collaboration between Utrecht University and the Sonnenborgh Museum exploring the role of narrative and emotion in climate communication. (Contributing a letter to the archive is entirely optional.)
Duration: 3 hours
The excursion will take place at Sonnenborgh Museum & Sterrenwacht, which is about a 15-minute walk from the location of the conference (Janskerkhof). The visit to the exhibition will start at 14.00, so please start making your way from Janskerkhof no later than 13.45.
We expect the creative writing workshop to end at around 17.00, so that we will be back in time for the reception!