shapingmeanings the and modern shaping the modern collaboratoryworkshop

Bestiary and various theological texts, MS Royal 12 xix, British Library, London, thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript, presented to the British Museum by George II in 1757. Date: 19 - 21 June 2014 Venue: Humanities Research Centre, The Australian Affective Habitus: National University New Environmental The Fifth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature, Histories of Environment & Culture, Australia & New Zealand; an Environmental Humanities Botany, Zoology collaboratory with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and Emotions (Europe 1100-1800); and a Minding Animals International partner event. program Foreword

‘Affective Habitus’ brings the environmental humanities into new focus. Its key concerns are to continue the exciting and passionate work of humanities scholars over the last three decades while disclosing new interfaces between critical animal studies, critical plant studies, affect theory and environmental history. This conference would not be possible without the innovations and integrity that the Centre has demonstrated since its inception. Beginning in 1972, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University has pioneered environmental humanities scholarship in Australia. It has been the home of many internationally renowned scholars in this field. This event is the end result of a sustained vision of a number of people, particularly the conference organizing committee. The HRC is very grateful for the support from the Australian National University, the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia-New Zealand, Australian Animals Studies Group, the Human Rights and Animals Ethics Network Research Network (University of Melbourne), the Norman MacGeorge Trust (University of Melbourne), Minding Animals International, RMIT University and Transforming Cultures Research Centre (University Technology Sydney). I should like to personally thank the efforts of the team at the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, whose dedicated and resilient staff has transformed this conference into a global event drawing from their resources and expertise in the way emotions shape individual, community and national identities. It is of the most fortunate timing that we have been able to bring this scholarship into conversation with the environmental humanities as we take brave steps towards critiquing the anthropocene. We look forward to your contribution over the next few days and to your ongoing commitment to this project.

Tom Bristow Visiting Fellow, Humanities Research Centre

Clearcut Road, British Columbia, Andrew Denton CONFERENCE PROGRAM

DAY 1: Thursday 19 June - Ecology, Affect & Emotion

TIME Sir Roland Wilson Bld, Room 202 8.30 - 8.45 Registration/Coffee Welcome to Country, Violet Sheridan. Introductory remarks, Tom Bristow & Debjani Ganguly 9.00 Keynote: Environmental Climates Will Steffen (remote participation)/ Tom Griffiths Respondents: Don Henry & Elaine Kelly 10.45 MORNING TEA 11.15 Plenary Panel: Anthropocene Contributing Chair: Kate Rigby; with Libby Robin & Kirsten Wehner 12.45 Lunch [and ASLEC-ANZ post-grad session, room 3.02] program

1.30-2.40 Room 1.02 Room 2.02 Room 2.10 Room 3.02 Room 3.04 PANEL More-Than-Human Museal Moods Plant Sentience Seeds, Soil, Settlement Imagined Futures SESSIONS Chair: Alanna Myers Chair: Kirsten Wehner Chair: Alexis Harley Chair: John Ryan Chair: Linda Williams Su Ballard: More Than Amanda Stuart: Zheljana Peric: Plants Ashraful Alam: Rural Debbie Symons: the Simple Defence of Re-imagining the Talking and What We Settlement Dynamics, VISUAL ART Making Art Nature: Artists Confront Unwanted: Re- Hear Agricultural Practices and its Role in Engaging Extinction awakening Stories and More-Than-Human Audiences to Consider Prudence Gibson: Plant Embedded in Animal Rural Resource the Impacts of Climate Anna Boswell: Eeling Sentience: Aesthetics of Objects Management Change. and Feeling Care Sarah Edwards: Call of Anne O’Brien: Evelyn Tsitas: FICTION Madeleine Boyd: Jennifer Hamilton: Bad the Wild: Re-visioning Conserving Soils Writing Alternate Justice and Atonement: Flowers: A Meditation Nature through Sound Through Convivial, Worlds and Hybrid A Performative on the Different ‘More Than Creatures – Lessons Investigation of Horse Scott Manning Stevens: Languages of Humans Instrumental’ Learned From Whipping An Enduring and Plants Assemblages Literature and Popular Connection: Native Peter Hobbins: An Culture. Americans and the Jessica White: Soil and Animal in Us: Intimate Natural History Silence: The Impact of Justine Philip: Histories of Museum Masculinity in Rural SCIENTIFIC Envenomation Environments PHOTOGRAPHY Heather Kerr: Museal Exhibiting Research: Moods and the Santos Nina Gartrell: Journeys the Dingo’s Inclusion in Museum of Economic With Seeds: Emotional Cultural Collections and Botany (Adelaide Landscapes and as an Object of Botanical Garden). Emerging Geographies Scientific Investigation. of Tourism

2.45 - 3.45 Room 1.02 Room 2.02 Room 2.10 Room 3.02 Room 3.04 PANEL Critical Plant Studies Anthropocene Policy: Cultural Archive Ecocriticism (1) Affective Atmospheres SESSIONS The Next Steps Chair: Wendy Wheeler Chair: Thom van Dooren Chair: Deborah Jordan Chair: John Plotz

Monica Gagliano: Charles Dawson David Haworth: Brian Deyo: Bodies that Peter Stiles: Rural Idyll Animal-like Learning in (participating chair) Touched and Surprised: Think: Affective and Industrial Plants Online Appreciation for Cognition in Richard Wasteland: Stephen Healy Inter-Species Flanagan’s Wanting Complementary Catherine Phillips: Charlotte Sunde Friendships Landscapes in the Care, Control and Nia Emmanouil: The Works of Elizabeth Freedom in Seed Saving Louise Boscacci: Work That Stories Do: Gaskell and Charlotte After-Affect Skin Songs: Making Visible, Holding Elizabeth Tonna John Ryan: On the Re-writing Affective Together and Invoking Agency and Voice of Dimensions of Mammal Ways of Being Julia Alessandrini: The Plants: What is the Role Species Loss London Fog and of Ecopoetics? Rod Giblett: ‘The Imperial Affect Jacqueline Spedding: Servant of the Forest’ Recalcitrance in the Meera Atkinson: The Archive Germaine Greer’s White Age of Planetary PTSD? Beech Susie Lachal: pA|A|A|A : participatory Art | Affect Roslyn Taplin: Studio | Anthropocene | Based Inquiry into Aesthetics Climate Change: Towards a Different Subjectivity and Paradigm Shift

Sir Roland Wilson Bld, Room 202

4.15 Keynote: Literature John Plotz/Gillen D’Arcy Wood Respondent: Alexis Harley 6.00 END OF DAY ONE 7.00 Conference Dinner (pre-registration only) The Common Room, Boffins Restaurant, University House. Pre-dinner drinks will be served from 18:30. program

DAY 2: Friday 20 June - Human-Animal Relations

TIME Sir Roland Wilson Bld, Room 202 8.30 Registration/Coffee

9.00 Keynote: Oceanic Ecologies Linda Williams/ Elspeth Probyn

10.45 MORNING TEA 11.15 Plenary Panel: Animals Contributing Chair: Deborah Bird Rose; with Philip Armstrong and John Miller 12.45 Lunch [and ASLEC-ANZ AGM, room 3.02] 1.30-2.40 Room 1.02 Room 2.02 Room 2.10 Room 3.02 Room 3.04 PANEL Interspecies Relations Botanical Aesthetics No Session Green Pedagogy Eco-mythologies SESSIONS workshop Chair: John Miller Chair: John Ryan Chair: Susan Pyke Robert McKay: The Molly Duggins: From There are 24 places for Geoff Berry: Ecocentric Murkiness of Mercy: the Pacific Wonderland to this workshop, please Mythopoeia in the Discourse of Species World’s Fernery: New sign up at the Anthropocene and the Ethics of Zealand, Fern Fever, registration desk at Douglas Kahn: Reverse Feeling in Michel and The South Pacific lunch time. Icarus Faber’s Under the Skin Fern Album Sasha Matthewman will Edwin Wilson: Raquel Ormella: Dominic Redfern: outline current Mullumbimby Dreaming Children’s Zoos: anti-hyper practices in green Sentimental fictions in pedagogy, and will open Emma Davies: Ethical Valentina Palonen: Takayuki Yamamoto’s A discussion on how encounter with the Botanical Anthropoid Week of the Animals these practices might ungrievable Collection: Folklore, engage with Affrica Taylor and Vegetables, and environmental and Veronica Pacini- Nonhuman Subjectivity emotional histories. Ketchabaw: Ants, Lea Kannar: The Worms and Young Dandelion Children: Mutual Vulnerabilities, Small Things, and Everyday Common World Encounters in the Anthropocene

2.45 - 3.45 Room 1.02 Room 2.02 Room 2.10 Room 3.02 Room 3.04 PANEL Notes from Seeds at Scale NO SESSION Closing Time in the Place in a Minor Key Underground Gardens of the West SESSIONS Chair: John Ryan Chair: Sasha Chair: Louise Fowler- Chair: Linda Williams Matthewman Smith Penny Dunstan & Catherine Phillips: Joachim Froese: Tom Doig: ‘Global Lesley Instone: New Care, Control and Trouble in Paradise: warming is a headf**k’: Environmental Histories Freedom in Seed Saving Re-visiting the Hortus Using Oral Historical of the Anthropocene: Conclusus in the 21st Methods to Engage With Reports From the Erica Seccombe: Virtual Century People’s Lived Coalface Landscapes Experiences of Climate Emma Lindsay: The Art Change Andrew Denton: The Alexis Harley: The of Extinction in the Road to Utopia Botany of Emergency Natural History Laura McKay: Species Museum Bound: Pushing the Barbara Holloway: Limits of the Species Trees as Treasure, Trees Lorraine Shannon: Boundaries Through as Waste: a Reading of Garden Art as Eco- Contemporary Fiction Loss, Continuity and atonement Cessation on the Kim Satchell: Antonio Southwest Slopes Boliva’s On the Edge of the Fold: Madness and Extinction program

3.45 AFTERNOON TEA

Sir Roland Wilson Bld, Room 202

4.15 Keynote: Eco-Art Tim Collins, Reiko Goto, Suzanne Davies Chair: Linda Williams 6.00 Andrew Denton Screening: Aspects of Trees END OF DAY TWO

7.00 Readings - The ANU Book Co-Op will be present at this event Edwin Wilson Luke Fischer Gillen D’Arcy Wood Thom Van Dooren With wine and finger food DAY 3: SATURDAY 21 June - Botanical Life & Seeds

TIME Sir Roland Wilson Bld, Room 202 8.30 Registration/Coffee

9.00 Keynote: Biosemiotics Wendy Wheeler/Michael Marder Respondent: Monica Gagliano 10.45 MORNING TEA 11.15 Plenary Panel: Law Chair: Charles Dawson; with Siobhan O’ Sullivan, Alessandro Pelizzon, Stephen Turner 12.45 LUNCH Conference intervention by ‘Somebody’s Aunt’ and Hive Tour by the ANU Apicultural Society

1.30-2.40 Room 1.02 Room 2.02 Room 2.10 Room 3.02 Room 3.04 PANEL Colonial Encounters Lexicon for the Australian Literature UNE SEED Rivers of Affect SESSIONS Environmental COLLOQUIUM Chair: Philip Armstrong Chair: Stephen Harris Chair: Charles Dawson Humanities Chair: Deborah Bird Rose Kathleen Davidson: Cameron Muir: Broken Danielle Clode: Session 1 Shé Hawke: Affective Economies of Affect and Neglected Nature: River Readings: Eben Kirksey: Hope Speakers and dialogue the Culture of Australia’s Forgotten Intersecting Bourdieu’s on seeds, bio banks and Acclimatization Emily O’Gorman: Nature Writing Tradition Agency, Field and cultural interests. Belonging Habitus With a Rick De Vos: ‘The Deborah Jordan: 13:30 - 13:40 Psychological History of Greatest Affection’: Kate Wright: Colonialism and the Human and Non-human Pleasure and Sorrow on New Woman Writer: Matthew Rimmer Becoming-with Becoming Through the Frontier Finding a Guide for the Matthew Kearnes: Water Relations Middle Ground 13:45 - 13:55 Natasha Fijn: Taming Spirit Sally Norton Charlotte Sunde: the Wild: Donald Inga Simpson: Thom van Dooren: Dialoguing With the Thomson’s Encounters Care Australian Nature 14:00 - 14:10 River, Te Awa Tupua: A With Other Cultures and Writing and Emotional Tom Bristow: Memory New Ecosophy of Other Animals in Environments Sue Scheele Understanding Northern Australia 14:15 - 14:25 Merlinda Bobis: Arnaud Barras: The Shashank Mauria Creative-critical Affective Resonance of Empathy for Rivers: The Country: Performing 14:30 - 14:40 Philippines and Canada the Ecopoetic Self Kylie Lingard Projects Through Aboriginal Narratives Sasha Matthewman: Fluid City program

2.45 - 3.45 Room 1.02 Room 2.02 Room 2.10 Room 3.02 Room 3.04 PANEL Material Regenerations Cultural Studies Ecocriticism (2) UNE SEED Stories, Prayers, SESSIONS COLLOQUIUM Poems and Hauntings: Chair: Eileen Joy Chair: Gillen D’Arcy Chair: Grace Moore A Decorum for the Wood Anthropocene Chair: Deborah Bird Rose Kate Clark & Samuel Alanna Myers: When Iris Ralph: Pre Texts, 14:45 - 14:55 James Hatley: Walking Dunscombe: Parking Whales Speak Tree Texts, and with Ōkami, the Lot Park Biosemiotic Theory Leanne Liddle Large-Mouthed, Pure Danny Jennings: The God Louise Fowler-Smith: Aesthetics of Nature Paul Alberts-Dezeeuw: 15:00 - 15:10 Art, Mining and and the Cinematic Robinson Crusoe as Kumi Kato: Evacuations Remediation Sublime Literary Anthroposcene Stephen Forbes and Extinctions: Ōkami-Itate-Fukushima Gabriella Blasi: Bridget Sutherland and 15:15 - 15:25 Terrence Malick’s Paul Judge: Don Driver Ruth Hawthorn Janet Laurence: Poetics of Nature Magician: An Eco- Residues critical Perspective Michael Chew: Water 15:30 - 15:40 Helary Ngo: Water as a Peter Cuneo Metaphor

3.45 AFTERNOON TEA

Sir Roland Wilson Room 3.02 Bld, Room 202 UNE SEED COLLOQUIUM 4.15 Keynote: Historical & Session 2 contemporary perspectives Dialogue on the Future Eileen Joy/ Ariel Salleh Respondent: Penelope Woods 6.00 Freya Mathews (remote participant) – Closing Comments

END OF DAY THREE

7.00 Post-Conference Drinks

Salton Sea 2, Andrew Denton Conference Organisers abstractsprogram

Death Valley, Andrew Denton

Tom Bristow is President of ASLEC-ANZ Empire was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s an editor of PAN, a board member of the Award for Literary Scholarship in 2006. Her most Josh Wodak is an interdisciplinary artist and Australasian Consortium of Humanities recent book is The Victorian Novel in Context researcher whose work transforms climate Research and a current fellow of the HRC. (Continuum, 2012) and she also works on pirates, science into visceral and embodied experiences Tom’s research projects include the crime fiction and Neo-Victorian writing. Grace is of climate change, by metaphorically mapping placement of artists in herbaria across at present working on a book-length study of audiovisual representations of change onto Australia (funded by the Copyright Agency settlers and bushfires, Arcady in Flames: human and non-human landscapes. Formally Cultural Fund), the Cultural Value of Seeds Representations of Bushfires in Nineteenth-Century trained in Visual Anthropology (Sydney University) (funded by the Cooperative Research Centre Settler Literature and Culture, while developing a and Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research for Remote Economic Participation, a research interest in emotions and the (Australian National University), his work has monograph, Lyricism in the Anthropocene: environment. She blogs about her work at www. been presented as performances, screenings, Literary Geography and its Ecopoetic historiesofemotion.com and is somewhat installations and exhibitions in art galleries, Counterpoint (Palgrave, 2014) and a surprised to have recently completed a project on museums, theatres, performative spaces, children’s book, Our Planet and You: Anthony Trollope and dingo hunting. cinemas, and festivals across Australia. He is Ecological Algebra, which will be developed currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the as part of a research project dealing with Faculty of Architecture, Design & Planning, empathy for the more-than-human world John Ryan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in University of Sydney and a Visiting Fellow at the (Penguin, 2016/17). Tom will join the CHE’s the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Humanities Research Centre, ANU. ‘Shaping the Modern’ programme at the Cowan University where he conducts University of Melbourne later in 2014. interdisciplinary research in the fields of cultural studies, ethnography, ecopoetics, ecocriticism and practice-led research. He is the author of Welcome to Country: Charles Dawson is ASLEC-ANZ’s Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and founding Vice-President (New Zealand). Language (2012, TrueHeart Press), Two With Charles holds a doctorate in environmental Nature (2012, Fremantle Press, poetry), and literary themes from UBC in Vancouver, Unbraided Lines (2013, CG Publishing), Being With Violet Sheridan Canada. He has worked as a policy analyst (2014, CG Publishing) and Digital Arts (with Cat with a focus on Treaty of Waitangi and human Hope, 2014, Bloomsbury), as well as numerous rights issues, and as the inquiry facilitator articles on Western Australian landscape and Violet Sheridan is a Ngunnawal Elder who into the Wai 262 claim at New Zealand’s literature. With Patricia Vieira and Monica grew up in her mother’s country, Yass, NSW. truth and reconciliation commission, the Gagliano, he is editing a collection called The Today, she laughs when she tells you she lives in Waitangi Tribunal. Charles will speak about Language of Plants (forthcoming 2015) bringing a Canberra suburb called Ngunnawal. “I didn’t the Waitangi Tribunal’s report into the flora, together emerging perspectives on plants from choose it because of the name—but you know, fauna, Maori cultural and intellectual the sciences, humanities and arts. He is the country is so close to my heart that it seems property claim. Biocultural heritage is Chief Investigator on an ECU-funded project right to live in a suburb called Ngunnawal”. central to the claim, which was was ‘FloraCultures’, conducted in consultation with extensive and innovative on national and Kings Park and Botanical Garden in Perth With three sons, a daughter and fifteen international levels; it reminds us plants and (2013-14) to develop a digital collection of grandchildren, Violet passes in the knowledge animals are potent carriers of cultural and cultural heritage content about Perth’s flora. she gained from her uncle, Bruce Merritt, about pharmaceutical knowledge. The subsequent her mother’s Ngunnawal birth line. “I treasure Waitangi Tribunal report sets out a major the knowledge my Uncle has given me and blueprint revision of government policy Linda Williams is Associate Professor of Art, although I have lived in Kamilaroi country for a across the public sector. Key policy elements Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT while, I yearned to come home. “Canberra is a of the report will be canvassed. Poised at the University where she leads the AEGIS Research multicultural community—no one judges people intersection of affective engagement with Network and leads an ARC Linkage project by their colour or their race; as a Ngunnawal genealogy and cultural lore, and the Spatial Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change. woman, I respect the right for everyone to live extraction of plant compounds and cultural Her research and publications are based in an and love this part of the country. It is important knowledge for profit, the Wai 262 claim and interdisciplinary field including: cultural and that we all work together in order to preserve the Tribunal report remain instructive. social theory, eco-philosophy, biosemiotics & and protect the heritage of the Ngunnawal human-animals relations, climate change & culture”. species extinction. She also has a particular Grace Moore is a senior research fellow at interest in 17th century studies. Her publications the ARC’s Centre for Excellence in the History can be viewed at rmit.academia.edu/ of Emotions. Her monograph, Dickens and LindaWilliams

7 abstractsprogram

Keynote Speakers: Suzanne Davies Eileen Joy This presentation is a general reflection on a Post/Apocalyptically Blue range of exhibitions curated in recent years Tim Collins and Reiko Goto engaging with the theme of art, the This talk is an attempt to think about environment and ecology at RMIT Gallery. depression as a shared creative endeavor, as RMIT Gallery has been in the vanguard of a trans-corporeal blue (and blues) ecology Art and Environmental creatively addressing such issues and is that would bind humans, nonhumans, and Change acutely concerned for the need to maintain stormy weather together in what quality in creative work in material and anthropologist Tim Ingold has called a critical terms. meshwork, where “beings do not propel The philosopher Murray Bookchin describes themselves across a ready-made world but two ideas of nature; first nature the as Suzanne Davies is Director and Chief Curator, rather issue forth through a world-in- wilderness or land that is assumed to be RMIT Gallery. She has extensive experience in formation, along the lines of their unaffected by human developments. Then the arts in policy and as an academic, publisher, relationships.” In this enmeshment of the second nature, a cultural landscape where editor, writer, critic, jurist and curator with “strange strangers” of Timothy Morton’s humanity is intertwined with all things. This responsibility for 257 exhibitions to date of fine dark ecology, “[t]he only way out is down” arts, fashion, architecture, new media and sonic gives rise to a third nature, the age of the and art’s “ambiguous, vague qualities will anthroposcene. Goto and Collins understand art both nationally and internationally. Exhibitions addressing art, environment and help us to think things that remain difficult to this as Eden3, a time of reparation and put into words.” It may be, as Morton has atonement. ecology include, The Idea of the Animal; Heat: Art & Climate Change; Shelter: On Kindness; also argued, that while “personhood” is real, Twenty years ago Tim Collins and Reiko Goto 2112 Imagining the Future. nevertheless, “[b]oth the surface and the left San Francisco, California for Pittsburgh, depth of our being are ambiguous and Pennsylvania; they were overwhelmed with She has served on the Board, Curatorium and as illusory.” And “still weirder, this illusion the plethora of post-industrial problems in Chair, Biennale of Sydney. Recent major might have actual effects.” I want to see if it that place. With this move, they began to international projects include Power Cloths might be possible to cultivate this Commonwealth Games Cultural Program, Delhi paradoxical interface (literally, “between realize that the complexity inherent in the and Udarta/Kindness, Delhi, for the Australian environmental issue and its material Government. Her current curatorial research is faces”) between illusion and effects, conditions pushes the artist (and potentially focussed on traditional and contemporary water especially with regard to feeling blue, a the field) to new levels of activity and management in Australia and India. condition I believe is a form of a deeply purpose. This talk will focus on their thinking empathic enmeshment with a world that about artwork as an interface between suffers its own “sea changes” and which can people and natural systems and art as a never be seen as separate from the so-called correspondence with the vitality and agency Tom Griffiths individuals who supposedly only populate of living things. (“people”) it. Through readings in both the Earthing history contemporary and medieval post-apocalyptic The artists will refer to Nine Mile Run archive (the novels Wittgenstein’s Mistress by It is both awful and awe-inspiring that we are (1997-2000), 3 Rivers – 2nd Nature (2000- David Markson and Fiskadoro by Denis living through the years when we are defining 2006) and Eden3 (2008 ongoing). They will Johnson, the films Red Desert and Safe, and a new geological epoch of our own making. talk about art making as an evolution of the Old English elegies “Seafarer” and To declare humanity a geological force on a subjectivity that demands theory when faced “Wanderer”), I want to question whether planetary scale and to name an epoch ‘the by seeming intractable problems. They will depression, sadness, melancholy -- feeling Anthropocene’ is to see humans as a species discuss experimental planning work that blue -- is always only taking place within the among other species across deep time. intended to make a small contribution to the interior spaces of individually-bounded forms Such a leap of science and the imagination emancipation of living things. Followed by a of sentience and physiology, or is it in the requires new cultural histories that give body of sculptural work that that uses world somehow, a type of weather or meaning to that perspective – narratives of technology and sound to explore the atmosphere, with the becoming-mad of the the Earth, of life and extinction, and of aesthetic experience of photosynthesis while human mind only one of its many effects (a humans among other living organisms. seeking an empathic relationship between form of attunement to the world’s What do such ‘big histories’ look like, and humans and trees. They will close with an melancholy)? Could a more heightened and what emotions do they generate and call overview of current work in Scotland that consciously attuned sense of the emanations upon? How do the humanities reach across examines the form of a remnant Caledonian and radio signals of “blue” sensations, such gulfs of time? And what kinds of pine forest. What it means to engage a forest feelings, and climates enable constructive intimate social and ecological histories of impacted by three centuries of conflicted interpersonal, social, and other blue place and belonging might we need now land uses, and the challenges of establishing collaborations that might lead to valuable more than ever? a discourse about future aesthetic virtues, as modes of better advancing “into / the sense art. of the weather, the lesson of / the weather”? Tom Griffiths is the W K Hancock Professor of History at the Australian National University, Here, there is no environment, only fluid Tim Collins and Reiko Goto are space (from tears to rain to oceans and environmental artists, researchers and authors Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian working together since 1985. Over the last fifteen Dictionary of Biography and Director of the everything in between) and in Ingold’s years they have developed a research approach Centre for Environmental History. His writing has formulation (following Andy Clark), to artistic inquiry that has focused on the cultural won prizes in literature, history, science, politics everything leaks. Themes of exile, and of aspects and experiences of environmental and journalism, and his books include Hunters moving through and inhabiting furnished and change with specific attention to ecosystems and Collectors (1996), Forests of Ash (2001) and unfurnished worlds (where life is played out Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (2007). such as forests, trees, rivers and landscapes. upon the either hostile or hospitable They have worked together as research fellows in Among his edited volumes are Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies surfaces of the crust of the earth), although the USA, then Tim was involved in research powerfully attractive in Western cultural management in the UK. As Reiko completed her (co-edited with Libby Robin, 1997) and Words for PhD, they opened the Collins & Goto Studio for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia narratives, perhaps break down under the art, design, research and planning in 2010 in (co-edited with Tim Bonyhady, 2002). His latest pressure of the fact that everything is always Glasgow Scotland. book, co-written with Christine Hansen, is Living already an “intimate register of wind and with Fire (2012). He is a Fellow of the Australian weather.” Academy of the Humanities.

8 abstractsprogram

Eileen Joy is a specialist in Old English literary features to be explained; on the other, he the nonhuman. In this paper I argue that how studies and cultural studies, with interests in crucially insists that any complete account of we care or don’t for the organisms we eat, poetry and poetics, historiography, ethics, animal (and human) behavior must also the environments in which they live, and the affects, embodiments, queer studies, the politics explain how such expressions are humans that catch them is very much a of friendship, speculative realism, object oriented ontology, the ecological, and the post/human. comprehended and responded to by those question of habitus. I explore the affective She is the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working around them. realm of the oceanic, which for millennia has Group (http://www.babelworkinggroup.org), been a source of awe, wonder and fear for Co-Editor of “Postmedieval: a journal of medieval humans. This affective realm needs to be Darwin’s work can, therefore, be clearly cultural studies” (http://www.palgrave-journals. animated if we are to frame a compelling distinguished from “objectivity” espoused by com/pmed/index.html), Editor of “O-Zone: A mode of sustaining fish and humans. Journal of Object Oriented Studies” (http:// critics such as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, ozone-journal.org), Director of Punctum books: whose On Growth and Form savages Darwin Elspeth Probyn (FAHA; FSSA) is the spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion (http:// for seeking explanations for animal behavior Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies at punctumbooks.com/), and Assoc. Director of in such complex signaling systems rather the University of Sydney, and convenor of Punctum records (http://punctumrecords.com). than in straightforward physical properties of MER (Mariculture Environmental Research) She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the English the materials that make up animal bodies. at the Sydney Environmental Institute. She is department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is teaching courses in However, Darwin’s notion that emotions the author of several groundbreaking literature and the environment. (including the sense of beauty) help animals monographs as well as over a hundred make sense of their environs is also entirely articles and chapters. Her work on affect and distinct from the kind of emotive intuitionism emotions has been central to rethinking the (beauty is simply inexplicably work of shame (Blush), subjectivity and Michael Marder transcendentally grounded) that motivates desire (Sexing the Self, Outside Belongings), Ruskin’s memorable assault on Darwin. and eating (Carnal Appetites) Her current (remote participant) research (funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project) focuses on the Darwin’s attention to the complexity of how sustainable production and consumption of The Sense of Seeds emotional expression functions as a signal to fish within the transglobal food system, and others also allows us to compare his work in will be published by Duke University Press as In this talk, I approach the spatial and revealing ways to the arguments for Oceanic: sustainability, humans, fish, & sea. temporal meaning of seeds as the vehicles environmentalism put forward by Reginald for preserving and augmenting life. I focus, Marsh in his influential 1864 Man and Nature: in particular, on the possibility of an almost Physical Geography as Modified by Human indefinite delay in germination and the idea Action, the work that is often credited with Ariel Salleh of sprouting as “excrescence,” or outgrowth. first formulating the concept of an I conclude by showing how “seed” erases the “anthropocene era.” In ways that have The Vicissitudes of an Earth distinctions between the singular and the revealing parallels to Darin’s exploration of Democracy plural, between plant and animal subjects, how emotions are made sense of by those as well as between the catalysts for who witness their expression. Marsh Even as we face the global crisis, an Earth on interpreting and the interpreted material. explores what it would take for humans to fire, the role of water goes unacknowledged. grasp (not only to know but also to feel) that Yet it is water that joins Humanity and Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research their actions have not only intended but also Nature, mind and body, subject and object, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the unintended consequences. men, women, queers, children, animals, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), plants, rocks, and air. Water carries the flow Vitoria-Gasteiz. He is the Associate Editor of of desire, nourishes the seed, sculpts our Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought and John Plotz is a Professor and Chair of English at the author of The Event of The Thing: Derrida’s Brandeis University. He is the author of The valleys, and our imaginations. As water joins Post-Deconstructive Realism (2009); Groundless Crowd (California, 2000) and Portable Property heaven and Earth, it steadies climates. But Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (Princeton, 2008) and most recently a young the Promethian drive to mastery, militarism, (2010); Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life adult novel, Time and the Tapestry: A mining, manufacture, steals water, leaves (2013); Phenomena—Critique—Logos: The Project William Morris Adventure. His current deserts in its wake. More than peak oil, we of Critical Phenomenology (2014); and The projects include “Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics face peak water. What kind of ecotheory will of Partial Absorption” and a book-length study of Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium turn this Anthropocene around? Who (2014). literary Naturalism’s relationship to late 19th-century scientific debates, from which this embodies the deep flow of resistant affect talk is drawn. that Adorno and Kristeva find in non-identity? Can the universities give us theory that is John Plotz guided by this logic of water? Or are our canons and cognitions still too embedded in Emotional Intelligence, Elspeth Probyn the commodities and objects of fire? While life on Earth falls into Anthropocenic Darwin-style: The Work of Affecting an oceanic disrepair, a global bourgeois culture Feeling in an Era of habitus promotes ad hoc action as policy and “Objectivity” pastiche as style. Timothy Morton’s recent It is now widely known that the oceans and essay ‘The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Darwin’s thinking about how emotional their inhabitants are in trouble. Ocean Awareness’ is provocative in this respect. In expressions work both as accounts of inward acidification, pollution, climate warming, and response, we ask: What does the hybrid states and as deliberate messages to others the fact that in their desire to live near the politics of ecological feminism say about is highly complex, and lies at the core of his sea, people are loving coastlines to death. affect and the dissolution of old binaries like struggle (throughout the 1860s and early But it is overfishing that generates the most Humanity versus Nature? How does its 1870s) to explain the role of animal behavior, concern. Often this plays out in blanket embodied materialism translate into an thought, and feeling in evolutionary condemnation of fishing and fishers at the Earth Democracy? Whose affective habitus processes. On the one hand, he notices cost of a framework that recognises the can nurture nature’s agency - indigenes, expressions of emotions as objective delicacy of bringing together the human and mothers, peasants? Whose common labour

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skills reproduce the unity of water and land? researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. books, two on biosemiotics, and many essays on His research interests span a broad range within the topic in journals and edited collections. She Ariel Salleh is a Fellow in Post-Growth the fields of climate and Earth System science, is currently completing her fifth book The Flame Societies at Friedrich Schiller University with an emphasis on incorporation of human and Its Shadow: Reflections on Nature and Culture Jena and Honorary Associate in Political processes in Earth System modelling and from a Biosemiotic Perspective. Economy at the University of Sydney. She has analysis; and on sustainability and climate taught at NYU, York, UWS, and Lund. Salleh change. is a longtime activist, and was a founding editor of the US journal Capitalism Nature Linda Williams Socialism. Her embodied materialist approach is developed in Ecofeminism as Wendy Wheeler It’s About Time: Ocean Politics (1997), Eco-Sufficiency & Global A Feeling for Life: acidification, affective Justice (2009), and numerous articles: www. ecosemiotics and the pivotal arielsalleh.info. Among these, her critiques Biosemiotics, the Objects of of eco-socialism, deep and social ecology are Meaning and the Growth of role of the longue durée. widely debated, and in 2011 she was Imagination and Knowledge Drawing on sources from biosemiotics, the shortlisted for the International Buttel Award arts and materialist phenomenology, this for Distinguished Scholarship in In a world in which to be alive is to be alive to paper selects three specific geographical Environmental Sociology. meanings, in which habitus is the semiotic locations as spatial correlatives of both umwelt of every species of organism, human histories and the lives of tiny marine whether bacterium, fungus, plant or animal, invertebrates. The first locale is a cultural habit is the mode of organic being which artefact in the Museum of Natural History in Will Steffen stabilises sign relations. With this London. The second, an unnamed point in realisation, many of the old distinctions are (remote participant) the cold waters of the Great Southern Ocean overcome while interesting new ones are between 50° and 60° parallels south. And the Welcome to the discovered. This talk will discuss the third resides in the human body itself. fundamental concepts of biosemiotics, and Anthropocene note the ways in which they transform These three sites provide a way of exploring the affective contours of the human histories The term “Anthropocene” originated nearly modernity’s dualist conceptions of mind and of the oikos: as house or dwelling place, with 15 years ago as a scientific concept body, culture and nature, realism and the marine œcologies of phytoplankton and describing a proposed new geological epoch idealism, along with the gene-centrism of zooplankton. The worlds of other such for planet Earth. The concept grew from the the biological Modern Synthesis, first nonhuman beings (as conceived by Von global change research community, which described by Julian Huxley in 1942, and now Uexküll) may at first seem unfamiliar, yet has documented the many changes to the departing, which secretly perpetuated the they are, so to speak, inside us, if only as planetary environment – climate change and essence/appearance metaphysic. But if the ancient biological blueprints or fragmented more – that are being driven by human new biosemiotically orientated developments material memories. activities. The evidence suggests that the in biology transform our understanding of Earth System is being pushed out of the the natural world, and of the nature of life For Merleau-Ponty the world of the flesh is 11,700-year stability domain during which and heritability, they also imply a difference an inchoate condition of what he calls human societies have developed agriculture, of emphasis in what we understand evolution chiasmic space: a space of origins, immanent villages and cities and more complex to be. Cybernetic and teleological, shaped by inversions, and ancient symbiotic conduits civilisations. Although confined largely to the the formal constraints of the past, evolution between the worlds of millions of creatures. natural science community for its first and development turn out to be creative Chiasmic phenomenology extends decade, the concept of the Anthropocene has dances in the play of habit and chance. This ontologically across all species and into now attracted a rapidly growing amount of means that life’s semiotic complexifications deep, sedimentary models of time in ways attention from the social sciences and the must also engender the evolution of what that evoke a powerful sense of being at home humanities around such issues as equity and biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer has called in the world. Yet the folds of chiasmic space responsibility. The future trajectory of the greater degrees of semiotic freedom. All also transfigure human and non-human Anthropocene has yet to unfold, but already organisms have a kind of ‘aboutness’, a worlds through the perpetual compulsion of some interesting trends are emerging. These feeling for living which makes them makers, violent predation, and now by extension: include the rise of large countries like China, and something akin to imaginative seeds. In anthropogenic extinction. Thus the vast India, Brazil and South Africa; the hyper- this we can see the beginnings of human longue durée of the regenerative power of connectivity of the global economic system habitation. Metaphor, too, along with story, is the world’s oceans is now subject to a contributing to shocks such as the Global a matter for all evolution’s creatures. Our bio-political regime that may yet bring about Financial Crisis; and the continuing own poetic life begins to emerge from the its demise over the relatively minute period destabilisation of the climate system and the habits of nature. The final part of the talk will of one, two, or perhaps three human loss of biodiversity. The ultimate question thus discuss a biosemiotic account of both generations. surrounding the trajectory of the natural and literary imagination and Anthropocene is whether it will lead to a new knowledge. Linda Williams is Associate Professor of Art, peak in human well-being or whether we are environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT headed for a global collapse. Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of University where she leads the AEGIS Research English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Network and leads an ARC Linkage project Metropolitan University. She is also a Visiting Spatial Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change. Will Steffen is a Councillor on the publicly- Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London Her research and publications are based in an funded Climate Council of Australia that delivers and RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. She has been interdisciplinary field including: cultural and independent expert information about climate a Visiting Professor on the Literature and the social theory, eco-philosophy, biosemiotics & change, and is a global change researcher at the Environment programme at the University of human-animals relations, climate change & Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. Oregon, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the species extinction. She also has a particular From 1998 to mid-2004, Steffen served as Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities at interest in 17th century studies. Her publications Executive Director of the International the University of Edinburgh where she also can be viewed at rmit.academia.edu/ Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, based in collaborated on the Environmental Values project LindaWilliams Stockholm, Sweden, and is currently a guest between 2008 and 2010. She is the author of four

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Florentine Valley, Tasmania, Andrew Denton

Gillen D’Arcy Wood numerous international meetings. Inspired by her personal encounters with Nature and Elaine Kelly I received my PhD in Critical and indigenous elders from many parts of the world, Cultural Studies from Macquarie University in The Return of Climate she has pioneered the emerging scientific field of 2010. In part, my PhD examined the racial politics Pessimism: The Ghost of the plant bioacoustics by demonstrating for the first of refugee policy in an Australian context through time that plants emit their own ‘voices’ as well as the lens of critical race and whiteness theory and 1810s detect and respond to the sounds surrounding Derridean deconstructive thought. My current them. She has extended the concept of cognition The massive eruption of Mount Tambora in research looks at the political, ethical and to plants by demonstrating experimentally that socio-cultural dimensions of climate change Indonesia in 1815 produced waves of extreme plants can learn just like animals do, re-igniting adaptation. In my work I focus on two modes of weather across the globe, throwing human the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical ‘adaptation’: local adaptation (keeping people safe communities into chaos. The climate standing. Her progressive and holistic approach and in place), and migration as adaptation. I will emergency of the 1810s likewise affected to science interfaces with areas as diverse as also be looking the issues associated with popular views of climate, particularly in the ecology, physics, law, anthropology, philosophy, relocation, considered as a ‘last resort’. The Torres United States, where a prevailing ideology of literature, music and art. Monica is currently a Strait Islands and Bangladesh are two main case climate optimism gave way to anxiety and Research Fellow of the Australian Research studies in my work, but other examples will be Council based at the University of Western drawn on in the research book. misgiving. The insurgent climate pessimism Australia. of the 1810s offers an illuminating historical precedent for the increasing climate chaos I am currently writing a book which examines the Alexis Harley lectures in nineteenth-century contribution Continental Philosophy can have on and direful climatic rhetoric of the 2010s, literature and autobiography at La Trobe debates regarding climate change, migration and where climate optimism, properly called University. Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the adaptation. I am especially interested in the ideas “denialism,” has been revived as a highly Natural History of the Self will be published later of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt, but also ideological formation dedicated to the this year with Bucknell University Press. engage with Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel principle of economic growth and the Enduring fascinations include representations of Levinas. Recently, work in the field of ‘new protection of entrenched power. nonhuman animals, especially “ferals” and materialism’ has forced me to consider how we “invasive species”, nineteenth-century natural can reconceive rights and responsibilities in the history writing, and autobiographical practices. context of a more-than-human world. I also hope Gillen D’Arcy Wood is Professor of English at Her current project is titled Tragic Ecology: to write a report which examines the notion of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, extinction, change and the literary forms of loss. ‘migration as adaptation’. This report will examine where he also serves as director of the the debates and evidence surrounding issues of Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Don Henry was Chief Executive Officer of the climate-induced migration and seek to evaluate if Humanities. He is the author of books on Australian Conservation Foundation from 1998 migration needs to become part of a broader Romanticism, an historical novel on yellow fever, until he stepped down in March this year. Prior to approach to adaptation and how this can be and, most recently, Tambora: The Eruption that heading the ACF, Don was Director of the Global operationalised. Changed the World (Princeton University Press, Forests Program, World Wildlife Fund, working April, 2014). with the World Bank to conserve 250 million Penelope Woods is a Research Associate at the hectares of the world’s forest. His campaigning ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of for the protection of the environment began in Emotions (1100-1800) working on theatre audience Respondents the 1980s in Queensland. More recently he has research and early modern performance history. advocated to optimize the Murray-Darling Basin Penelope is collaborating with UK and Australian Plan and he played a key role in brokering the Monica Gagliano is a research scientist in theatres on research into audience emotion in Tasmanian Forest Agreement. evolutionary ecology. She has published her work theatre spectatorship today and developing our in over 36 academic articles in top scientific understanding of audience emotion in theatres in journals, and convened and presented at Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Penelope

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Salt Lake 1, Andrew Denton collaborated with Shakespeare’s Globe and realm of objects. What are the objects that Queen Mary, University of London on a PhD on might speak to us of the changes of our era? spectatorship, reconstruction and audiences. How do they make us feel? Libby Robin FAHA is Professor of She has a forthcoming chapter on seventeenth Environmental History at ANU, Senior Research century audiences: “The Indoor Theatre Fellow at the National Museum of Australia and Audience: Pity and Wonder” in Moving Guest Professor at the KTH Environmental Shakespeare Indoors by Andrew Gurr and Farah Slow Media Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm. Current Karim-Cooper and a forthcoming chapter on projects include Collecting the future: museums, young audiences today: “The Shakespeare Libby Robin: In a time when the fast and communities and climate change, The Culture of Audience” in Shakespeare in Practice: The furious media is defining the presence or Weeds and Expertise for the Future. Libby is Audience by Stephen Purcell. absence in our lives of such issues as author of How a Continent Created a Nation (NSW climate change, what can a slower medium, Premier’s Australian History Prize 2007), Flight of such as a museum, offer as a place to think the Emu (Victorian Premier’s prize for science about anthropogenic change over our own writing 2003), and co-editor of Boom and Bust: Plenary Panels lifetimes. Bird Stories for a Dry Country (Whitley Medal 2009). Her most recent book is The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (Yale UP) Libby Robin and Kirsten (New England Book Prize for Anthologies 2013). Real Things She and Iain McCalman edit Routledge Wehner, with participating Environmental Humanities book series. Kirsten Wehner: How do objects move chair, Kate Rigby (Thursday) people? What are some of the real Kirsten Wehner is Head Curator, People and collections of museums that might open up the Environment, at the National Museum of Imagining the Anthropocene, the geological the affective responses to global changes. epoch where traces of human activity are Australia (nma.gov.au/pate). She was previously Content Director for the Museum’s Landmarks present throughout Earth’s systems, is a (2011) and Journeys (2009) galleries and the Circa challenge. It is usually portrayed in Diving into Nature’s Archive theatre (2008), and is currently directing mathematical models and hockey stick development of two temporary exhibitions, one curves. Time is measured in eons, in on horses and one on cycling in Australia, as well millennia, in centuries and sometimes as producing a range of online exhibitions and decades, all of which capture changes in Biographies collections features. Kirsten’s research focuses Earth systems, but not necessarily how it on place and environmental histories, re- Kate Rigby is Professor of Environmental interpreting natural history collections and the feels to inhabit the Anthropocene. Human potential for museums in building ecological and experiential time can stretch and shrink, and Humanities at Monash University and a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and of the empathetic understanding. Her publications rarely works in consistent units, even single Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is a include Curating the Future: Museums, years. The environmental humanities Senior Editor of the journal Philosophy Activism communities and climate change (forthcoming endeavour to restore the human to the Nature, and her books include Topographies of the 2015, co-editor and co-author) and Landmarks: A Anthropocene, to imagine fully what living in Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European history of Australia in 33 Places (2013, co-author a changed world entails for our humanity. Romanticism (2004), and Ecocritical Theory: New and co-editor). Kirsten is a member of the Rosanne Kennedy writes of the European Approaches (co-edited, 2011). Kate was Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory in the inaugural President of the Association for the Environmental Humanities and a professional ‘Anthropocene Imaginary’ in literature, associate of the Donald Horne Institute Centre others use the same expression Study of Literature and Environment (Australia- New Zealand), the founding Director of the for Research in Creative and Cultural Practice at sociologically, drawing on the social Forum on Religion and Ecology@Monash, and the University of Canberra. imaginary of Charles Taylor. This panel will she is a board member of the Humanities for the take the Anthropocene imaginary into the Environment Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory.

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John Miller Capital, Aesthetics and Cryptozoology: The Nostalgic Habitats of King Kong and The Lost World The rise of national parks at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth formed a key aspect of the development of conservation as a practice of environmental management. ‘Wilderness’, in many locations, has become a function of administration; animal populations are the subject of extensive research and sometimes control. One effect of the bureaucratisation of wild habitats has been to facilitate the representation of endangered species, most routinely in TV nature documentaries. Rarity appears as a kind of commodity, fuelling and fuelled by a public enthusiasm for depictions of animals on the brink of disappearance. At the same time, however, this cultural appetite testifies to a continuing fascination with the possibility of space beyond human interference: remote areas in which rare, even unknown, creatures may still find their homes. Salton Sea 3, Andrew Denton Taking Arthur Conan-Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and Merien C. Cooper’s King Kong (1933) as paradigmatic texts of cryptozoology (the quest for lost and legendary beasts), this paper explores imaginings of mythic habitats my paper: the wonder provoked by animals, and hyperbolic animal presences in terms of a ANIMALS and its function both as an invitation and a paradox. On the one hand, these landscapes challenge to the organisation of knowledge articulate the desire for spaces ungraspable about the nonhuman natural world. Philip Armstrong, John by capital; on the other, it is the very ‘outside’ I will begin by considering some types of of capital that drives a sensation hungry global Miller, with participating wonder evoked by animals in a range of media. Cryptozoology, therefore, emerges as a chair, Deborah Bird Rose pre-modern taxonomies: classical natural point of tension between the possibilities of a (Friday) histories, fabulous travelogues, medieval radical environmentalism and the bestiaries. I will then briefly outline the place disappearance of conservation into economic of wonder in the emergence of scientific and imperatives. Enlightenment thought, with a particular Philip Armstrong focus on René Descartes and Thomas John Miller is a lecturer in nineteenth-century Browne. The paper will conclude with a literature at the University of Sheffield and the consideration of the role of wonder in two general secretary of ASLE-UKI. He is the author of ‘The Wonderment of this Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and contemporary forms of bestiary: David Taxonomy’: Animals and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (2012) and the Attenborough’s wildlife documentary co-author (with Louise Miller) of Walrus for Wonder from Herodotus to Galapagos 3D (2013), and Bruce Bagemihl’s Reaktion Press’s Animal series (forthcoming, Galapagos study of non-heteronormative behaviour 2013). He is currently working on a literary history amongst animals, Biological Exuberance of fur. In his preface to The Order of Things, Michael (1999). Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ of modern scientific epistemology, he quotes a passage from Philip Armstrong is an Associate Professor in Deborah Bird Rose Jorge Louis Borges, supposedly derived from the Department of English at the University of a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and At the Edge of Extinction: ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the the co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Blessings in a Time of Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking Human-Animal Studies (www.nzchas.canterbury. ac.nz). His most recent book, co-authored with Sadness pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) Annie Potts and Deidre Brown, is A New Zealand included in the present classification, (i) Book of Beasts: Animals in our History, Culture and My questions emerge from the desire to frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a Everyday Life (Auckland University Press, 2013). understand communities that precipitate in this very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) His other books include What Animals Mean in the era of extinction. I draw on my ethnographic having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that Fiction of Modernity (Routledge, 2008), research into multispecies communities, and from a long way off look like flies.’ For Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, discuss two case studies currently in process in Foucault ‘the wonderment of this taxonomy’ 2001), Shakespeare’s Visual Regime (Palgrave, Hawaii: communities that form around Laysan 2000) and, as co-editor, Knowing Animals (Brill, has the effect of ‘breaking up all the ordered Albatross and Hawaiian monk seals. 2007). He is currently completing Sheep for surfaces and all the planes with which we Reaktion’s Animal series. are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of Drawing on the work of Wyschogrod, Levinas, and Lingis, among others, I examine communities that existing things.’ Borges’ hoax classification are, in Wyschogrod’s words, ‘spaces in the social and Foucault’s response embody the topic of

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web where, in the death age, desire for the 262 claim and the Tribunal report remain about animals and democracy. That issue will be Other’s continued existence can be expressed in instructive. the topic of her address at the conference. discourse and action.’ At the heart of it all is the question of witness – as a mode of presence and Charles Dawson is ASLEC-ANZ’s founding a form of action, as a response to blessings, as Vice-President (New Zealand). Charles holds a gratitude and prayer. How may we understand doctorate in environmental and literary themes Alessandro Pelizzon and honour the multiple dimensions of present from UBC in Vancouver, Canada (“Writing the action into the unknown, unknowable, and memory of rivers”). He has worked as a policy WILD LAW AND RIGHTS OF unimaginable? analyst with a focus on Treaty of Waitangi relationships, and as the inquiry facilitator for the NATURE CONTEMPORARY PATHS Professor Deborah Bird Rose, FASSA, inquiry into the Wai 262 claim at New Zealand’s TOWARD AN ECOLOGICAL Environmental Humanities Program, University truth and reconciliation commission, the of New South Wales, investigates how we Waitangi Tribunal. His current work is principally JURISPRUDENCE humans include and exclude other members of with US tertiary students through the non-profit When, in 1972, Professor Christopher Stone the family of life on earth in this era of network HECUA. He is Secretary of the Voice Arts concluded one of his property law lectures extinctions. She is the author of numerous Trust, which focuses on arts outreach to the acclaimed books including, most recently, Wild community, and is chair of a trust that focuses with the highly provocative question ‘should Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction, published by on the interface of science, biodiversity and trees have standing?’, a number of eyebrows University of Virginia Press (2011). Her current mātauranga Māori at the internationally- were raised in disbelief. How could any legal research focuses on multi-sited, multispecies significant Otari-Wilton’s Bush native plant system possibly conceive of legal personhood ethnographies in zones of extinction (see www. collection. beyond natural and artificial persons? Even if extinctionstudies.org). With Thom van Dooren that were possible, how could non-human she co-edits the new journal, Environmental Humanities (www.environmentalhumanities.org). entities ever be granted standing in any She is the author of the popular blog ‘Life at the meaningful way? Rather than being daunting, Edge of Extinction’, http://deborahbirdrose.com/ Siobhan O’Sullivan however, the questions prompted a number of scholars first, and of activists after, to envision Nonhuman animals, and engender the normative possibilities LAW democracy and the entailed by Professor Stone’s question. challenge of including the Following Cormac Cullinan’s seminal book Wild Law, published in 2002, throughout the ‘other’ last decade a number of jurisdictions enacted Siobhan O’Sullivan, Democratic forms of political engagement legislation to recognise rights to their Alessandro Pelizzon and have come to dominate around the world ecosystems, generating a fruitful and vibrant Stephen Turner, with with most countries either having some kind debate on Wild Law, Earth Jurisprudence and of recognizable democratic state, or rights of nature, a debate that clearly indicates participating chair, Charles professing to be democratic despite actual the emergence of a novel branch of legal Dawson practice. This victory of democratic values, theory informed by ecological sensibilities, a while arguably good for humans, leaves us novel ‘Ecological Jurisprudence’. with a puzzle. What does democracy afford Certainly marked by highly visible practical Charles Dawson nonhuman animals? Animals are incapable implementations, Ecological Jurisprudence is of political participation, but so too are many testimony of a re-imagination of deeper humans. Democracies allow political Perfecting poroporo: ontological and normative possibilities. In participants to advocate on behalf of ‘others’. asking fundamental ontological and plants, steroids & Yet in liberal democracies most of those epistemological questions about the meaning indigenous Maori ‘others’ are entitled to rights. According to of ‘nature’, while at the same time considering intellectual property. the majority view animals are not. postmodern conceptualisations of power and In this presentation I argue that democracies social interactions, scholars in the emerging In Aotearoa New Zealand, Maori carry with them two promises that might be field of Ecological Jurisprudence inhabit the understandings of plants, seeds and animals effectively used to safeguard the interests of vibrant, chaotic and creative intersections of remain fundamental to cultural identity. In nonhuman animals; the promise of equity, culturally construed visions of ‘nature’ and of 1991 a group of Maori leaders lodged the and a commitment to transparency and inherently anthropocentric normative regimes, 262nd claim with the Waitangi Tribunal (“Wai citizen engagement in decision-making. with the view to articulate conceptual 262”). The scope of this flora, fauna , Māori Combined, these fundamental democratic frameworks capable of avoiding some of the cultural and intellectual property claim was principles might be leveraged to safeguard ecological hazards caused by human extensive and innovative on national and the interests of nonhuman animals. exceptionalism. international levels. New Zealand plants— However, democratic values are no panacea. and government science research regarding They are sufficiently flexible, and open to Italian by birth and Australian by choice, those plants and any possible interpretation, that they may also be used to Alessandro Pelizzon completed his LLB/LLM pharmaceutical products—were central to in Law in Italy with a specialisation in comparative justify animal suffering. As such I conclude the claim: the Wai 262 claim reminds us law and legal anthropology. His thesis comprised a that even within democratic states, broadly plants are potent carriers of cultural and field research project on pre-Colombian family based positive community sentiment towards pharmaceutical knowledge. protocols in the Andes of Peru, Bolivia and nonhuman animals is essential to Ecuador. Alessandro has been involved in In addition to canvassing key recommendations meaningful interest protection. Indigenous rights for over 15 years. Together with from the 2011 Waitangi Tribunal report on its other young researchers in Italy, during his inquiry into the claim, I will address a Siobhan O’Sullivan is a Research Fellow in university years he established a research group with which he participated in and supported the nearly-forgotten scientific endeavour to extract the School of Social and Political Sciences at the drafting of the UN Declaration on the Rights of steroidal components from the Australasian University of Melbourne. She has written extensively on animal related issues including a Indigenous Peoples in Geneva. His PhD thesis, shrub Solanum aviculare, known in New book titled ‘Animals, Equality and Democracy’ conducted at the University of Wollongong and Zealand by its Māori name, Poroporo. Poised and numerous journal articles in publications completed in 2011, and now published as a book, at the intersection of affective engagement such as Environmental Politics and Res Publica. focused on native title and legal pluralism in the with genealogy and cultural lore, and the Recently Siobhan has been working with Prof. Illawarra. During the course of his PhD research extraction of plant chemicals for profit, the Wai Adrian Little on a forthcoming book chapter project, Alessandro began to explore the emerging

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discourse on rights of nature, Wild Law and university, including the responsibility of Crusoe has been read as a characterizing Earth Jurisprudence. His main area of interest is teaching. colonial appropriations of human and the intersection between this emerging nonhuman others, but it also reveals the discourse and different legal ontologies, with a anxieties and demands that the human particular focus on Indigenous legal structures. Alessandro has organised the Second Australian Speakers experiences in the face of other species. Conference on Wild Law and Earth Confronting, but also requiring nonhuman Jurisprudence in 2010 and has contributed to the species to fabricate the boundedness of organisation of the Third Australian Wild Law human sociality - and thus the ‘properly’ Conference at Griffith University in 2011, he is Ashraful Alam self- possessed human - the lone Crusoe one of the founding members of the Global mediates and is himself ‘mediated’ through Alliance for the Rights of Nature and of the Rural settlement dynamics, processes of determining the wild and the Australian Wild Law Alliance and he has domesticated. This ecocritical reading aims contributed to establish the Earth Laws Network agricultural practices and at Southern Cross University. Alessandro’s main more-than-human rural to trace the minor and submerged figures of areas of research are legal anthropology, need and dependency in nature in the comparative law, legal theory, Indigenous rights resource management narrative, that subvert the simplistic figure of and ecological jurisprudence. Crusoe the conqueror, while also Agricultural practices are components of contributing towards a more general thesis particular land and water systems about literature’s anthroposcenic logic. incorporating numerous assemblages of humans and non-humans. Thinking through Stephen Turner Paul Alberts lectures in philosophy at the these more-than-human assemblages University of Western Sydney, and has recently The Law of Waters proffer deeper engagements with settlement published on the Anthropocene in Angelaki, and morphology raising the potential for more on Foucault’s concept of Nature in the Blackwell In this paper I consider the compendious and ethical decision-making in rural resource Companion to Foucault. He is writing a authoritative recent statement of the Treaty management. In this paper, drawing on monograph entitled Anthroposcenes for of Waitangi Tribunal on the matter of flora cases from Bangladesh, we explore, how the completion in 2014. and fauna (known as WAI 262), and its emerging rural settlement dynamics implications for the country’s waterways. I (agro-economic, post-agro-economic, rural illustrate the entwined issues of development and climate-change) are constititutionality and water with the case of transforming and reconfiguring traditional Julia Alessandrini Lake Omapere in the Northland region, agricultural practices and marginalizing the which sits at the centre of the territory (rohe) role of more-than-humans. We argue that The London Fog and Imperial of the Nga Puhi tribe (iwi). The idea of new settlement dynamics are transforming Affect raising the water level to make the severely rural agrarian production spaces to spaces degraded lake healthier illuminates for consumption and such transformation In its industrial practice, nineteenth-century contrasting attitudes to land and water. The opens up new avenues of exploitation and London was truly the centre of the Empire. capital-intensive possessive individualism of marginalization. It disintegrates existing Within the Imperial City itself, tens of local farmers is opposed by the view that multi-species assemblages from the thousands of industrial (and domestic) returning the lake to health involves landscape problematizing the social chimneys pumped their malodorous, nourishing local relationships that management of rural natures. On this choking, sticky and often vividly coloured encompass human and non-humans actors, disparity, the paper calls for re-imagining smoky exhausts into London’s already damp, organic and non-organic elements, whether the rural resource management discourse foggy air on a daily basis. This powerful those who use water for business, recreation where agricultural spaces retain elements of atmospheric cocktail, which came to be or sustenance, or the flora, fauna and production by recognizing the affective known as the London fog, then etched itself water-life, including the sacred eel spatiality of more-than-human assemblages. blackly onto the man-made and natural (Kirikopuni) that makes its way to the sea surfaces of London unifying all it touched through the Hokianga river. Taking such My research explores affective methodologies to with the sooty band of Empire. But, it was not relations to constitute a local parliament, the address sustainability and resilience of only London’s physical appearance which lake may be considered to have built-spaces in cities. In 2011, my master’s was affected by the city’s famous constitutional force, insisting as an entity in thesis, ‘social production of urban regeneration atmosphere. The beliefs, attitudes and its own right (a taniwha or guardian to local in Hong Kong’ received the best dissertation behaviors of London’s inhabitants were also award. Following years, in 2011 and 2012, my Maori) that its attributes and properties take susceptible to the influences of the engulfing planning proposals received Hong Kong Institute London fog. precedence over property-based law that of Planners Prizes. I also worked as development governs their commodification. A law of land consultant of the Asian Development Bank in Samuel Luke Fildes’ socially confronting, emerges whose primacy challenges the acts Bangladesh during 2011-2012. At present, I am Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward of and agencies mandated by government to a doctoral student at the Department of 1872-74, and Claude Monet’s turn-of-the- Environment & Geography in Macquarie manage it. century aesthetically beautiful Waterloo University, Sydney. My research centers on the “more-than-human exploration of political Bridge Series works all make use of the Dr Stephen Turner is a Senior Lecturer in ecology and production of space in the third- London fog in their representations of what English at the University of Auckand, New world”. can be understood, respectively, as imperial Zealand. His research interests include critical theory – especially colonial, 18th century shame and imperial pride. These works, literature, New Zealand studies and writing along with others, will be explored in this art studies. The majority of his writing concerns historical paper in regard to the complex processes of settlement in the historical context Paul Alberts-Dezeeuw social and visual relationship between of New Zealand. More broadly, the three Empire, the London fog and affect. interrelated projects he is currently engaged in Robinson Crusoe as Literary can each be understood in terms of the theme of Anthroposcene Julia ALESSANDRINI is an art historian whose encounter. These projects span the settlement of interest in representation, aesthetics and new countries, the living knowledges of Often claimed as the first novel, Robinson materiality began during the years she spent as indigenous peoples, and the function of the

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a practicing visual artist. The use of smoke, mist defined through a set of visual and social will use the example of Alexis Wright’s and fog as a material in her practice, and her codes that have sedimented into a cultural Carpentaria, a contemporary Aboriginal interest in the capacity of such materiality to hold and political place that is romantic, narrative, to illustrate that reading is a and convey meaning, eventually drove Julia’s continuous and at a safe distance from the process in which the reader enters into an historical research deep into the territory of the Industrial Revolution and smog-ridden impacts of humanity and technology. In “The affective resonance with the described nineteenth century London. Julia’s current art Three Ecologies” Felix Guattari writes: “In country. This interaction between reader and historical research interests include beauty, the future much more than the simple work involves three cognitive operations: the affect and the Imperial Aesthetic. defence of nature will be required … and the vicarious enactment of experiential adoption of an ecosophical ethics adapted to processes; the articulation of indigenous this terrifying and fascinating situation is ecological knowledge; and the substantiation equally as urgent as the invention of a of a plural and relational storyworld. The Meera Atkinson politics focused on the destiny of humanity” affective resonance thus produced is (2000, p.66-67). Australian artists Hayden performative. It enables the reader to The Age of Planetary PTSD? Fowler and Fiona Hall, and New Zealand experience the described ecosystem artist Stella Brennan all construct media emotionally through the lens of indigeneity, In her discussion of the ‘gendering of installations that demonstrate how unnatural but it also expands her awareness of her own agricultural animals’ Erika Calvo (2008) coins our relations with nature are. In their hands enmeshment in the fabric of life. In other the term ‘anthroparchy’ to describe the way nature is not static; it does not simply end words, reading Carpentaria directs the in which the history of patriarchy meets and where technology begins. Birds that can no reader’s attention to her poetic engagement informs the anthropocentric age. This paper longer sing are suddenly given voice, and with the ecological world. Ultimately, this considers, via Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book humans regress into the dystopian reality of conception of reading as an ecopoetic (2013) and Carpentaria (2006), the traumatic a techno-entropic environment. At the heart process reaffirms the importance of literary underpinnings and consequences of of each work is a newly imagined entropy not texts in the continuous transformation of anthroparchy by focussing on non-human as death but renewal. Their works suggest socioecological systems. animals, speciesism and global warming. that extinction does not manifest as a final Further, it discusses how such traumatic fiery end but a terrifyingly slow dwindle. In Arnaud Barras is a PhD candidate at the operations can manifest testimony in a the current shifting geo-physical University of Geneva, Switzerland, where he writing practice I call the poetics of trans- environment where natural and human works as a research and teaching assistant in trauma – trans-trauma being my disasters have blurred into rolling contemporary literatures. In 2013 Arnaud abbreviation for familial transgenerational obtained a 1-year mobility fellowship from the catastrophes of technical and environmental Swiss National Science Foundation to study the transmission of trauma and its relations with melt-down, this paper asks what can be history of environmental ideas at the ANU. cultural and collective trauma. gained from an ecosophical approach to Arnaud’s research interests lie in the contemporary art. Overall, this paper The Swan Book quite literally takes up where postcolonial representations of the relationship examines how the ecological concerns raised between organism and environment. His doctoral Carpentaria left off: extreme weather hits by both Deleuze and Guattari have been thesis draws on ecology, anthropology and toward the end of Carpentaria, wiping out the renewed in contemporary media art such reader-response theory to study metafictional town of Desperence. When Wright returns representations of the organism-environment that the energetic forces of ‘nature’ continue with The Swan Book this extreme weather process in the work of Rudy Wiebe, Amitav Ghosh to present aesthetic challenges for artists has become full-blown climate change, and Alexis Wright. and viewers in the techno-ecological climate which has already destroyed the Northern of the 21st century. Hemisphere and is working on what remains. I argue that Wright reveals a Dr. Susan (Su) Ballard is a senior lecturer in contemporary reality: a kind of cyclical Geoffrey Berry Art History and convener of the CAST condition both rooted in trauma and furiously (Contemporary Arts and Social Transformation) Ecocentric Mythopoeia in producing it and bound by affective research centre at the University of Wollongong, transmissions and bondage, and that such Australia. Su’s research examines materiality, the Anthropocene testimony is vital to confronting denial and machines and nature in contemporary art and In the anthropocene, we have a duty to care resistance to change. the art gallery. She edited The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader in 2008, and in 2013 she curated the about how we can help shift the dominant Meera Atkinson is a Sydney-based writer, major exhibition Among the Machines for the paradigm from the dangerous self- poet and scholar. Her writing has appeared in Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NZ. She is an editor involvements of egotism and many publications, including Salon.com, of Fibreculture Journal. http://suballard.net.nz anthropocentrism to an ecocentric Meanjin, Best Australian Stories 2007, Best worldview. Much of the transitional story we Australian Poems 2010, Griffith REVIEW and The are attending to is conveyed in the scientific 2013 Voiceless Anthology. She has a PhD on the rationalist mode. This is perfectly acceptable transgenerational transmission and poetics of Arnaud Barras and necessary, but we also require stories trauma from the Writing and Society Research powerful enough to motivate action; moving Centre at the University of Western Sydney. She The Affective Resonance of is co-editor of an academic volume Traumatic stories whose imagery reaches deep into the Affect (2013), an international volume of essays Country: Performing the other worlds that inspire us to act – worlds exploring the nexus of trauma and affect. Ecopoetic Self through of instinctual or libidinal energy, emotional Aboriginal Narratives resonance, the yearning to feel at home and also to evolve beyond our limits. Myth is the In the 1990s the advent of theories of vehicle for this level of discourse. There is Su Ballard embodied cognition have rendered porous plenty of creative mythopoeia attending to the boundaries between cognition, such needs at the level of popular, cinematic More than the simple physiology, and ecology. A decade later or literary eco-dystopia; but such narratives defence of nature: artists ecopoetics has set itself to rethink the place can also inspire withdrawal into conventional confront extinction of the human organism in the ecological modes of nostalgia, hedonism or other fabric of the world. In this paper, I suggest paradigms not conducive to the kind of If aesthetics had an invisible force it would be that an ecopoetic approach can be applied to radical response required by climate change. called nature. In the histories of art, nature is reading postcolonial environmental fiction. I Ecocentric mythopoeia requires engagement

16 abstractsprogram with the most profound layers of the ongoing Merlinda Bobis glean and gather collective knowledge for story of environmental destruction in a way both community and the biogeographic that supplies a positive vision yet also Creative-critical empathy record. What was not written was the satisfies our craving for reasoned argument. profound emotional and intellectual Concurrently, it must do so without for rivers: The Philippines provocation of these skin objects for elder stultifying the transrational life of mythic and Canada projects women who had not seen the animals for narrative. I present an outline of what this decades yet retained specialist knowledge How can creative-critical empathy (CCE) might look like. of biology, behavior and cultural re-think river responses and governance? emplacement in songs. What was not How is CCE shaped as process by a critically Dr Geoffrey Berry is Director of Studies at recorded, except in private field journals interrogated arts practice underpinned by The Phoenix Institute of Australia, where he also and anecdotal de-briefings, was the shared Philippine indigenous beliefs on loss, teaches myth, symbol, ritual and various grief of this encounter by the respect, and kinship? How does the ‘ethics of psychologies and ecologies of consciousness. mammalogist-provocateurs. Both are location-translocation’ in these beliefs humming lacunae in accounts of species develop a community infrastructure around loss. Whose voices should write new an ecologically challenged river? How are ecological histories? How to author the differences in location (place, culture, Gabriella Blasi voices of deceased Indigenous custodians demographic) negotiated and ‘translocated’ of ecological knowledge? In invoking ‘the to a shared river? How can policy collaborate Terrence Malick’s Poetics affective’ as a lens of return analysis, and with human infrastructure in building public of Nature given the entanglement of affect, emotion, infrastructures around rivers? These sensation and action in contemporary This paper argues that in the contemporary questions will be addressed in this paper transdisciplinary discourse, which affect/s? phantasmagoria of nature-images as about the design, implementation, and commodity forms, ecocritical practices outcomes of two river projects facilitated by Louise Boscacci (BSc Hons; BFA), a former should reclaim a poetic rather than aesthetic Merlinda Bobis for artists, writers, teachers, biologist, is an interdisciplinary scholar and approach to nature-images in films. Through and community organisers: 1) Gaygay arts practitioner presently undertaking a figural approach to the cinematic Salog-Gaygay Buhay doctoral research in the creative arts at the treatment of nature-images, Walter University of Wollongong Australia (‘Finding (Tracing River-Tracing Life) on the Naga Benjamin’s ontological ideas on allegory and the Round Table Place: An Illuminated Archive River (Bicol, Philippines); and 2) Re-thinking the poetized enable a reading of nature of Affect?’). A key interest is exploring creative River Responses and Governance on the beyond representation and aesthetic affect. and critical possibilities sparked by the Fraser River (British Columbia, Canada). Examples of this poetic approach to the affective provocation of an encounter, object or These two case studies raise the possibility atmosphere. A recent assemblage work, natural world can be found in Terrence that “the turn in ecocritical theory to the ‘Pulse_ Pause: Eco-ethical Aesthetics in the Malick’s use of aesthetically beautiful, yet relevance of empathy, sympathy and Shadow Places’ (2013) composed a meeting of poetically disturbing images of the natural concordance” could be, in fact, a turning affective and ecological becomings of ‘place’, world in his films, particularly in Days of drawing on the rich concept of Shadow Places back to the organic ‘feeling-thinking-doing’ Heaven (1978) and The New World (2005). A articulated by the ecophilosopher Val of indigenous and grassroots practices. poetics of nature, the paper suggests, Plumwood. bypasses the affective, aesthetic power of Merlinda Bobis is an award-winning the commodity form and enables a vision of Filipino-Australian writer and performer, nature beyond beauty and sublimity. As it will currently researching rivers and the Anna Boswell be argued, Malick’s evocation of the natural transnational imaginary. She has published three world calls for an ontological (rather than novels, a collection of short stories, and five perceptual) reassessment of human-nature books of poetry. She has performed her Eeling and Feeling relations. This reassessment is paradoxically one-woman play ‘River, River’ adapted from her In June 2013, the New Zealand Ministers latest novel ‘Fish-Hair Woman’ in Spain, Canada, enabled by Malick’s use of the film medium for Primary Industries and Conservation itself. A Benjaminian poetics of nature does US, Singapore, and the Philippines. These creative works are the foundation of her ongoing announced the establishment of a review not try to transcend the inherently material collaborative research (Canada, Philippines) on panel to reassess the commercial fishing and mediated visions of nature-images, but creative-critical empathy for rivers. The project of longfin eel (or tuna, as it is known to – rather – reads these images in their has four streams: creative production, scholarly iwi), with a view to the possible imposition appearing, for what they say and do in how enquiry, community engagement, and pedagogy. of a nationwide moratorium. Managed as a they appear. So what does the film’s imagery She teaches Creative Writing at the University of PR ‘event’, this feel-good moment in the do in-between its beautiful and disturbing Wollongong. http://www.merlindabobis.com.au life of the nation was accompanied by the visions of nature? Terrence Malick’s films self-congratulation that can only attend allegorize and poetize (in a Benjaminian such a turning point when it is de-coupled sense) both sacred and profane visions of from a less easily celebrated history of the natural world, thus enabling possibilities Louise Boscacci human habitation. The government of being with nature. announcement was made under the After-Affect Skin Songs: pressure of a report by the Parliamentary Gabriella Blasi is a PhD candidate at the re-writing affective Commissioner for the Environment, itself University of Queensland, with a project on the influenced by a grassroots public work of Terrence Malick. Gabriella’s professional dimensions of mammal education campaign involving a blog, a background is in film production and scriptwriting and she has only recently turned to species loss travelling quilt, school children and sequins and satin, a picture book and a academic research with a strong interest in The route from ecological places and the march on parliament, as well as the ecophilosophy. Gabriella’s academic publications ecological space of thought to affectus / are in ecocritical theory and practices in trumpeted development of Te Wao Nui at affectio in a compositional pathway scores a literature and film, in the international journal Auckland Zoo which proclaims the native refrain of after-affect. At the edge of Arcadia (“Reading Allegory and Nature in eel an iconic and threatened species. Maralinga – Tjarutja lands, Anangu elders Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” forthcoming) and Long-living and deep-ocean-spawning, the in the Journal of Language Literature and Culture reached out to take museum skins of desert eel has come to be recognised as a (“Nature and the Unmaking of the World: mammals disappeared from both Country, remarkable marker of the vitality of the Reading Figures of Nature in Terrence Malick’s and continent. As a scientist collaborator nation’s waterways and as an exemplar of Days of Heaven). with these senior informants, the aim was to 17 abstractsprogram

Friends of Bangladesh to continue solidarity work. an instinctually-driven will-to-life. philosophical analysis of the first two stages, Michael completed a masters in Social Ecology in production of a final artwork for exhibition, 2013, exploring the role of creativity to mediate In crucial ways, however, the eel seems a with consideration of implications for human-nature relationships. He currently works belated and unlikely icon of conservation horse-human relations and the role of in sustainability education at Maribyrnong principles, and its rising profile as an object multispecies performance art in relevant Council, while pursuing various creative projects. of public pedagogy begs a series of justice dialogues. questions, to do with remembrance and ‘difficult learning’ (Simon 2000, p. 77) within Madeleine Boyd is driven by a series of a settler-colonial place, that refuse to stay intense inquiries into the matters of non-human Kate Clark & submerged. This article considers the animals and the phenomena of existence. reconstruction of the eel in the terms of a Currently engaged in a slow and determined Samuel Dunscombe settler sensible order which is unable fully to process of discovering what it is like to ‘intra-act disavow the dispossession of iwi and the war with horses’, she presents her findings as a Parking Lot Park: a sound against the environment conducted in its series of public videos, photographic works and promenade, mapping train. Briefs of evidence to the Waitangi installations. Madeleine is currently a PhD student in Sculpture, Performance and geologic, sexual, and Tribunal on the toxic bioaccumulation of Installation at Sydney College of the Arts, political ecologies of San Agent Orange within the flesh of this kaitiaki University of Sydney. In 2013 Madeleine curated species indicate the extent to which the the exhibition ‘Intra-action: Multispecies Clemente Canyon, California recent conservation measure points Becomings in the Anthropocene’ towards Parking Lot Park is a performance event that development of a performative multispecies towards—at the same time as it masks—the maps out the various geographies (geologic, aesthetics. A forthcoming edition of Antennae underlying ecological, constitutional and political, social, and sexual) which intersect pedagogical crises of settlement. What curated by Madeleine will feature a selection of papers on multispecies art practices as they within the space of Marian Bear Memorial would an eel’s-eye view of this place take in, intersect Karen Barad’s Agential Realism. Open Space Park, in San Diego, California. the article asks, and how might the envisioning of this kind of ‘consciousness’ of http://madeleineboyd.wordpress.com The land has undergone many habitat (Clifford 1997, p. 326) be made to transformations: formerly an ancestral matter? homeland of the Kumeyaay Indians and later a grazing spot for Mexican cattle ranchers, Anna Boswell teaches writing studies at the Michael Chew the currently U.S.-owned canyon was University of Auckland. She talks and writes protected from highway developments in the about settler-colonial worlds and is particularly Water 1970s by it’s namesake, Marian Bear. Since interested in intersections between history, this period, rampant urban development has Water access issues pose continual memory, pedagogy and place. Anna is a founding hemmed the canyon, creating an island of co-editor of Argos Aotearoa and a member of the problems for villages in arid areas of green in an otherwise suburban landscape. writing collective of the same name. Rajasthan, India, and the common response The park has become a popular cruising spot has been technological solutions through for homosexual encounters, sparking a water management projects. Qualitative backlash of plainclothes arrests and participatory research can provide alternative surveillance, raising questions of the Madeleine Boyd approaches to these issues, and this paper management of open spaces in the 1990s reflects on one such project run as part of a and 2000s. Justice and atonement: A larger scale development evaluation performative investigation program. The project used a participatory A spoken narrative detailing historical and of horse whipping photography process to allow villagers to contemporary experiences of the space is take and select photographs that combined with audio field recordings. As the Human actions towards horses are in part represented what water meant to them in verbal unravels layers of social and physical shaped by each horse and historical the present and future, along with how they space, the recordings (taken live in the park experience of ‘horse’ and are not entirely saw their own responsibilities these areas. and minimally edited) mimic this process in a human innovations. In this way the trappings The complex visual and textual data was number of ways, most notably through the of horse-human relations from bits to analysed using two different analytical use of mediating acoustic objects as ‘filters,’ stables, fences to hay and from race days to processes – a positivist ‘measurement’ and pan-perspective recording techniques. In the dressage ring are sedimentations of approach in line with the water management both cases, a ‘filtering’ process allows for a material- discursive entanglements in the paradigm, and an alternative actor network reflection on the geo-social relationships present and historically. The matter of these ‘relational’ approach. While both strategies that combine to give the park form. materials is mutable over time and with new produced useful insights with different cuts an altered state of horse- human strengths and weaknesses, it is argued that Kate Clark is an artist, writer, and social enactments has come about, across cultures the relational approach has the potential to choreographer. Her projects re-imagine ways and time, and can come about in the future. provide opportunities for solidarity landscapes are predominantly, managed, This paper considers one such material relationships beyond that of instrumental ritualized and interpreted. She is pursying her MFA at UC San Diego, and has studied device, the whip, and performance, the act of development or research paradigms. interdisciplinary studio art and urbanism at the whipping, as it applies to racehorses in Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art, Bauhaus particular, and with reference to broader Michael Chew is a sustainability educator, Institut Weimar, the Evergreen State College, and cultures of horse-human relations, and even community cultural development practitioner, IUAV di Venezia. She has worked on urban and the whipping of humans by humans. The and visual artist with degrees in Art Photography, rural projects in Japan, Mexico, Italy, France, and starting point for this project is empirical Mathematical Physics, and Humanities. He the United States. Kate Clark is co-founder of research on whipping of racehorses co-founded the 2004-5 Melbourne Environmental Living Archives, a UCSD Humanities Center Arts Festival to explore the creative nexus Research Group, and a former research fellow at conducted by Prof. Paul McGreevy, School of between environmental arts and activism, and Veterinary Science, University of Sydney, Provisions Library for Arts and Social Change and later Friends of Kolkata, to coordinate the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum. In 2010, Australia. The middle point of this project is international volunteer programs and teach Clark co-founded Knowledge Commons DC- a a video artwork performed with a horse participatory photography projects in India, free, interdisciplinary school that floats throughout made in response to this research. The Indonesia, East Timor and Bangladesh. After public sits in Washington DC. The project currently ongoing stage of this project is this paper’s returning to Melbourne from a year working on serves a student body of over 3,000. climate adaptation in Bangladesh, he co-founded

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Samuel Dunscombe is a San Diego/ Davidson, Kathleen and apprehension. I seek to extend Butler’s Melbourne based musician, specialising in the argument in order to explore how shared use of clarinets, computers, and microphones. Economies of Affect and the conditions of precariousness and His work examines the intersection of the aural vulnerability require us to challenge practices of sound installation art, field Culture of Acclimatization recording, notated contemporary music, dominant frames that preclude the computer audio, and free improvisation. He is a During the second half of the nineteenth nonhuman realm from recognition, and thus specialist in extended clarinet technique, a fluent century more than fifty acclimatization prohibit the acknowledgement of loss in this user of MaxMSP, and has undertaken field societies were founded around the globe. realm as grievable. I seek to extend Butler’s recording projects on 5 continents. In 2013, The purpose of the societies was to ‘promote argument to understand how shared Samuel’s works for instruments and electronics the rational exchange of aesthetically conditions of vulnerability and were presented at the Tokyo Experimental precariousness might imply an ethics of Festival, the Bendigo International Festival of pleasing and useful flora and fauna’ nonviolence in the human-nonhuman Exploratory Music, the Toronto Electroacoustic worldwide. Generally established through Symposium, and received an IDEAS grant from the efforts of individuals, the acclimatization relationship, in such a way is inclusive of CALIT2. Samuel is currently a candidate for movement was more than just a scientific these shared ontologies and challenges a Doctor of Music Performance (DMA) at the and economic enterprise. The systematic normative framing which I refer to as a University of California (San Diego). introduction of plants and animals by vital-centric approach. How ontologies of acclimatization societies had tangible vulnerability and precariousness constitute benefits and considerable appeal as it served grievability and furthermore how grievability to provide a comfortable, pleasurable and informs ethics in the human-nonhuman Danielle Clode refined lifestyle. Yet, it also had its detractors relationship are the key focuses of this as it could lead to degeneracy and investigation. Neglected Nature: environmental catastrophe. Emma Davies is a PhD student in Philosophy at Australia’s forgotten Very little attention has been paid to the the Australian National University. She nature writing tradition global acclimatization movement with regard completed bachelor degrees in Arts (Hons. to visual culture. By examining images Philosophy)/Economics at the University of Australia is often regarded as lacking a produced at the height of the acclimatization Queensland. Her PhD is an investigation of how strong tradition of nature writing period, I will draw together some research ethics in the human-nonhuman relationship is, commensurate with that found in the US and areas that are not usually juxtaposed. As well and might be, informed by the affects (specifically grief and wonder). This project aims the UK. And yet, since the beginning of the as considering some of the key ideas that European exploration and colonisation of to explore connections between ontology, affect, were circulating in the era of acclimatization, framing and ethics in the human-nonhuman Australia, nature writing has played an I will explore this most pragmatic of sciences relationship. Broadly, the project aims to explore important role in reconciling our affective in relation to Victorian domesticity and the plausibility of moving beyond a human relationships with the country and wildlife, constructions of masculinity; the centred ethics; more narrowly, examining the and shaping a sense of belonging and transplanting and representation of leisure roles of grief and wonder, in the ethical nationalism. Australian nature writers activities; the redistribution, domestication encounter between humans and nonhumans. through the nineteenth and twentieth and remodelling of nature as ornamental centuries have contributed significantly to and affective commodities in different parts education, conservation, popularisation as of the world; and the emergence of well as the natural sciences, yet they appear Aestheticism. Rick De Vos not to have had the same impact in the literary domain. This paper will consider the Dr. Kathleen Davidson is a sessional staff The greatest affection: work of Mrs Edith Coleman (1874‐1951), the member at the University of Sydney and pleasure and sorrow on the first woman to be awarded the Australian independent scholar. She is a Visiting Scholar at frontier Natural History Medallion, for her extensive the Yale Center for British Art during 2014, and body of popular and scientific writing and was the C.P. Snow Visiting Fellow at the The sensibilities of European explorers and particularly for her discovery of the University of Texas at Austin during 2012-13. Her naturalists negotiating unfamiliar spaces has book Photography, Natural History and the shaped the way that that they perceived and phenomenon of pseudocopulation in orchids. Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of I will explore Coleman’s work and legacy in Empire is forthcoming with Ashgate. Previously, made sense of their encounters with the broader context of her role as an she was Curator of International Photography at animals. Their journals and field notes, amateur scientist, populariser and nature the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. while providing a record of these writer, using the implications of both post‐ occurrences, rarely present a detailed and colonial and ecocritical frameworks, to explicit sense of how the writer and the discuss our shifting appreciation for animals responded to each other. The Australia’s vibrant nature writing tradition. Emma Davies dictates of scientific and colonial observation frame and shape what is perceived and how Danielle is the author of several literary Ethical encounter with the it is meaningful. However, when freed from non-fiction books. She studied psychology and ungrievable the social and cultural demands of officially politics at Adelaide University, before completing recorded history and science, the a doctorate in zoology at Oxford in 1993. Since This paper will explore how the ethics of the descriptions of these encounters indicate then she has worked as a freelance author, relationship between the human and the researcher and editor across a wide variety of absences, gaps and silences, offering clues nonhuman is and might be informed by grief. science and humanities disciplines, publishing in as to how nonhuman animals may have fields as diverse as aged care, portraiture, Drawing heavily on the work of Judith Butler interpreted and made sense of these genetics, drug addiction and history. She taught in Frames of War, When is Life Grievable I will exchanges. Desire, pleasure and pain can be writing at Melbourne University and creative explore how precariousness and seen to motivate and to be elicited by these non-fiction at the Victorian Writers Centre before vulnerability, as ontological conditions, call acts of contact. The fact that some of the moving to Flinders in 2011. Her recent books us to question the frames that determine our animals encountered no longer exist in these include Voyages to the South Seas and A Future in consideration of the loss of others as spaces adds a greater significance and Flames. She is currently working on her seventh grievable or not. Frames are understood as book, which is about marine reptiles of poignancy to the meetings. Focusing on the the frameworks through which we filter the Australia’s ancient inland sea. writings of Charles M. Hoy and Georg Steller, world affecting understanding, recognition this paper attempts to retrieve the times and

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sky. That moment seemed to encapsulate Brian Deyo spaces of these encounters to look at the and concentrate the subject I was working different ways the humans and animals on into a single resonant distilled image of Bodies that Think: Affective present responded to each other, and the beauty and despair. Over the many months Cognition in Richard sense to which these encounters evoked that I found myself in isolated and broken more than an instrumental exchange. places and spaces I pointed my camera up Flanagan’s Wanting into the sky and collected 100s of video core Richard Flanagan’s novel, Wanting, samples of these slices into the sky. Rick De Vos is an adjunct research fellow in the speculatively re-enacts the colonial School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. His research focuses on The installation is an evocative and visually encounter between Europeans and species extinction, its cultural significance, and arresting collection of these shots. The indigenous peoples in Australia during the the way it functions as social and cultural work is designed to be projected into a large early to mid-nineteenth century. In the practice. He has had essays published in two gallery space in single or poly channel interest of rewriting the history of settlement, edited collections, Animal Death and Knowing configurations. the author imaginatively attends to the often Animals, and is currently preparing a monograph tacit or overlooked affective intensities of the examining constitutive practices and colonial encounter. In addition to Flanagan’s representations of extinction. Abstract Three: Road to representation of the colonizer’s vexed, Utopia: Working towards an unsettling relations with indigenous peoples, he offers an analytic of the colonizer’s Andrew Denton Affective (Poetic) Cinematic affective responses to the extra-human Inquiry into the “Ecological world. My paper reads these responses as Abstract One: Aspects of Emergency.” symptoms of ecophobia. Though the concept of ecophobia refers to humanity’s innate Trees The research project and essay film Road to fears and anxieties with respect the sheer Aspects of Trees is a film and sound essay. Utopia seeks to film changes to the ecology, alterity and unpredictability of nature, The subject of the work is the North in poetic or affective cinematic registers, Wanting suggests it is modulated/betrayed by American pine beetle epidemic. In the last with the aim to evoke an emotional response a historically specific set of anthropocentric decade the beetle has noticeably decimated in the attitudes toward the natural world. Flanagan high elevation arboreal forests in British Viewer. Working from the position that coordinates anthropocentrism with Columbia, Alberta, Colorado and New fear-inducing documentary polarizes popular Enlightenment philosophical discourse and Mexico. It is an ecological disaster that has opinion, might a poetic and affective mode of imperial ideology – systems of signification emerged as a dramatic visual reminder of visual and aural inquiry offer another method and meaning that exalt the agency of reason the complexity and fragility of what Morton of communicating anthropogenic climate almost precisely as much as they derogate terms the “ecological emergency”. The film change? The project is focused on late- the sphere of embodiment, emotion, is the fifth collaboration between film artist capitalist human addiction to fossil fuels, and intuition, and the senses. While I argue that Andrew Denton and composer Teresa the infrastructure that supports our Wanting deconstructs the binary logics of Connors. It is an extension of their previous ever-escalating dependence on oil. The anthropocentrism and imperialism, I also artistic explorations into human impact on project was filmed over three months, in wish to contend that it positively reinscribes ecosystems. 2013, from Northern Canada (Fort the body to recuperate and posit the value of MacMurray and Edmonton) to Southern indigenous sensibilities and epistemologies Aspects of Trees aims to break through in the context of the Anthropocene. cumulative apathy around our escalating California (Palm Springs and the Salton Sea). ecological crisis by engaging with the The presentation will look at three images from the film and attempt to unpack what is Brian Deyo is an assistant professor in the inherent complications of the subject Department of English at Grand Valley State through an evocative and affective mediation affective and/or poetic about them as University in Michigan. He received a B.A. in of image and sound. The project’s aural and individual shots or as core samples of Zoology at Miami University (OH) and a Ph.D. in visual conversation, and ultimately eulogy, temporal space and altered place. English at Vanderbilt University. His research is proposes that a poetic and affective mode of broadly interested in the intersections among representations of race, gender, species, and the inquiry might offer an emotional and Andrew Denton’s current research project, Affective Moving Image and the environment in postcolonial literatures. He is alternative means to progress debates about Ecology, works from the belief that a more currently working on a book that examines anthropogenic climate change. effective tactic for progressing debates/ contemporary fictional reconstructions of colonial encounters in South Africa, Australia, The presentation includes a screening of the conversation into anthropogenic climate change may be poetic or affective modes of inquiry, and South America. He teaches courses in work and an artist talk. rather than fear-inducing, ‘fact’ based critical theory, postcolonialism, nature writing, documentary approaches or short-grab media and British literature. coverages. He considers these latter approaches Abstract Two: Jet-stream to be the agents for not only polarising popular opinion, but also stagnating discussion around Jet-stream is an accident. A work made the level of ecological threat that we face, and Molly Duggins while making another work. Yet it resonates our role in it. Since many threatened ecological with the intent and purpose of the project it subjects (and objects) are invisible, their very From Pacific Wonderland to was made inside – or around. In 2013 and intangibility, or unfathomability gets abstracted 2014 I filmed an essay film, Road to Utopia (in into mere data. This, he argues, stymies our World’s Fernery: New production working title)1. During the shoot I capacity to have an emotional or affective Zealand, Fern Fever, and The relationship with the ecology: and yet, perhaps found myself standing on the side of the road another form of visual and aural abstraction is South Pacific Fern Album in the Mojave Desert, filming heat waves useful to penetrate the complexities inherent in shimmering off a highway. While the camera engaging with our current “ecological A colonial gift-book combining pressed New rolled I looked up and saw a jet-stream emergency”? His project is an experiment into Zealand fern specimens with an illustrated tearing a soft white line into the dark blue ecology, film and sensation. letterpress introduction inspired by the picturesque atlas model, The South Pacific 1 Road to Utopia is an essay film that Fern Album, ca. 1889, demonstrates how the attempts to tangle with human addiction to fossil fuels and the infrastructure that supports our ever- New Zealand landscape was transformed escalating dependence on oil. into a global phenomenon through

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nineteenth-century fern fever. While As an artist working with a natural history possible to do research through an ontology of Australasian ferns were lauded as curiosities collection, I have the opportunity to provide a being with and articulate relationships with an and commodities abroad, in the colonies they unique avenue through which to consider agential, more-than-human world? Nia is the were embraced as cross-cultural landmarks new ways of “looking” at these vulnerable author of the blog Being with Country and the forthcoming essay in the PAN Journal, You’ve got entangled in notions of locality and identity, animals. In re-presenting these calls as an to drown in it. with the endemic Cyathea dealbata, or silver overlay back into the built environment that tree fern, taking on emblematic proportions aided their demise, I aim to give new life to as a national symbol in New Zealand. these creatures, and engage with the important role museums play in preserving Evolving in tandem with the commodification Natasha Fijn and re-presenting aspects of our fragile of natural history, such commercial fern earth. albums mirrored New Zealand’s export fern Taming the Wild: Donald industry, which engaged in multi-directional Sarah Edwards is a PhD Candidate in the Thomson’s encounters with botanical exchanges through trade and School of Art at RMIT. Her practice-led research other cultures and other exhibition. Within the pages of The South examines the work of the natural history Pacific Fern Album, nestled amongst its museum and its critical role as the sole animals in Northern ornamentally arranged fronds, the image of repository for some life on earth. Since 1990, Australia New Zealand as ‘the Pacific’s wonderland’ is Sarah has worked in the cultural heritage sector, Donald Thomson is a well-known cultivated into that of the ‘world’s fernery’, including twelve years at Museum Victoria where anthropologist, particularly noted for his anchored in the international aesthetic value she provided access to the Museum’s natural science and social history collections. She early fieldwork and peacekeeping abilities in of the fern. Beyond discussing its continues at the Museum in a research capacity. Northern Australia. He lived for extended significance as a mobile repository for ferns Her art practice utilises the ephemeral mediums periods in remote areas, initially in Cape and fern imagery, I will consider how the of light and sound in response to site-specificity. York, then in Arnhem Land, from 1929 album reproduces the fernery’s collapse of through to the Second World War. While in the indigenous New Zealand landscape into the field he made meticulous field notes, an intimate and interactive form of spectacle aesthetically beautiful, classic photographs responding to the theme of colonial Nia Emmanouil and amassed a particularly large collection modernity. The work that stories do: consisting of sacred artefacts, as well as botanical and zoological specimens. Molly Duggins is a sessional lecturer in the making visible, holding Department of Art History and Theory at the Thomson also wrote many articles in popular National Art School, Sydney. In 2012 she together and invoking ways newspapers and magazines relating to completed her PhD with a thesis on nature and of being natural history subjects, on topics such as the colonial album. She has been awarded dingo, emu, and cassowary. At the time fellowships at the State Library of New South Each year people are invited to walk the Thomson made a delineation between his Wales (2011) and the Yale Center for British Art Lurujarri Dreaming Trail with Goolarabooloo academic publications on anthropology- (2012). Select publications include, ‘“Which custodians, following the Northern Traditions related subjects and those that related to Mimic Art Hath Made”: Crafting Nature in the Song Cycle 80-kilometers up the west Victorian Book and Album’, for the Yale Center of natural history, reflecting the British Art’s exhibition, Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Kimberley coast from Broome to epistemological divide between the Flower: Artists’ Books and the Natural World Bindinyankun, in NW Australia. On this trail humanities and the sciences during his (2014) and ‘Arranging the Antipodes: The Archer the sharing of stories from Bugarregarra (the lifetime. This paper revisits some of his Family Album as Metaphorical Cabinet’, Dreaming) is interwoven with walking, natural history material to draw out his Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies (2009). camping and being with country. This paper observations on Aboriginal attitudes towards examines direct embodied experiences of animals. His photographs, too, depict many Goolarabooloo and non-Indigenous walkers encounters with both the people and animals of the Trail and their expressions of being while in the field. Thomson’s observations Sarah Edwards with country through storytelling. By are revealing in terms of his own and exploring storytelling as a performance of Aboriginal Australian perspectives on the Call of the Wild: Re-visioning relationality, I consider how people-place are distinction between domestic and wild Nature through Sound emergent (although sometimes reluctant animals. and elusive) along the Lurujarri Dreaming Environmental issues and climate change st Trail. In particular, how do we deal with Natasha is a College of the Arts and Social place 21 Century museums directly in the entities that are barely perceptible or Sciences Research Fellow at The Australian spotlight. As a practising artist and PhD seemingly impossible and what kinds of National University. Her ongoing interest is in Candidate based within Museum Victoria’s realities emerge when these entities are cross-cultural perceptions and attitudes toward natural history collection, I have produced a made visible? Stories shared by other animals; as well as the use of multimedia, series of artworks that examine the critical particularly observational filmmaking, as an Goolarabooloo custodians are used to integral part of her research. Natasha is involved role the museum plays in mediating our explore a conceptual language through relationship between the natural in teaching courses within the Masters of Visual which entities from more-than-human Culture Research Program at the ANU. Her environment and the audience’s critical role worlds might be rendered visible and given current project engages with significant totemic in caring for it. legitimacy, contributing to the thesis that animals to Yolngu in northeast Arnhem Land. One specific art project involved the stories have the potential to act and do work, She also carries out research amongst semi-nomadic herders and their herd animals in museum’s unique collection of frog calls in that they make visible, hold together and the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia. including a number of species that have invoke ways of being with. become extinct within the last fifty years. Working with Dr Murray Littlejohn (Zoology, Nia Emmanouil is a PhD candidate at Charles University of Melbourne) who recorded the Darwin University. Her dissertation, entitled Louise Fowler-Smith three hundred hours of calls, I engaged the ‘Being with country: the emergence of people- place along the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail,’ collection as evidence of the impact the articulates an ontology of being with, through the Art, Mining and Remediation expansion of our built environment and stories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous global warming have on this highly storytellers, who have been on the Trail. A key Over the last twenty years, a number of susceptible animal. challenge is addressing the question: is it projects have developed from collaborations

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between artists, architects, botanical knowledge, the little panel stands Council based at the University of Western landscape designers, curators, engineers, out as an early depiction of the Hortus Australia. scientists and communities that involve the Conclusus, amalgamating a number of remediation and regeneration of former sacred and secular influences, which can be mining sites, which are often contaminated read as visual evidence for early modern and environmentally depleted. The creation interpretations of European nature. Nina Gartrell of landscaped parks, community gardens, The Paradisgärtlein in its art historical outdoor exhibition spaces or art parks give Journeys with Seeds: context is an important new reference for a rise to a confluence of art, technology and emotional landscapes and recent body of works from my research in art social engagement, and could be considered photography which will be discussed in merging geographies of a new form of multidisciplinary practice. response to both the concept of the Hortus This paper examines case studies of such tourism Conclusus and current ecocritical theories, artist-led projects in Europe and North How do the ethics of seed-saving and particularly Timothy Morton’s concept America, which have taken place on former seed-swapping became part of the shifting of wording. mine sites, in order to provide guidelines for physical and emotional terrain of an possible projects for Australia in future. In Joachim Froese is an art photographer who eighteen-month overland journey from line with these international examples the lives Brisbane and Berlin and since 2014 he is England to Australia? This paper will trace, paper will introduce an initiative which will undertaking a PhD at RMIT in Melbourne. Mainly Hansel-and-Gretel-like, the trail of seeds result in the establishment of the Broken Hill known for his still life work, his images have a that the journey left behind. This includes Environment, Art & Sustainability Hub strong narrative quality and often explore forays into the homes of farmers, students, (BHEASH) – a living, interactive, personal family history. His PhD work now radicals and professionals in the Middle interdisciplinary museum which will begin its engages with early modern imagery depicting Atlas Mountains, the Caucasus, Transylvania, life on a large are of contaminated land that nature in order to develop a new eco-critical Greece and Bali. Through an analysis of the angle for his photography. Froese has exhibited includes an old tailings dam. This project widely across Australia, Europe, Asia and North long-term intangible effects of in-situ brings together artists with scientists, America. His work is included in numerous interactions between seed, place and engineers, architects and the local public collections including the National Gallery traveller, this research seeks to produce community to create a centre, or hub that of Australia. To see more of his work, visit www. critical understandings of how seeds forge will research, explore, initiate and document joachimfroese.com. distinctive relationships between travellers then display innovative ideas for the and the spaces and places that they visit. The rehabilitation of land that has been propensity of these relationships to contaminated by years of mining. overshoot the spacial and temporal Monica Gagliano demarcations of the journey, challenges the Louise Fowler-Smith is an artist and Senior conceptual understanding of travel as a Lecturer at COFA, UNSW. As Director of the Animal-like Learning in bounded event that terminates when the Imaging the Land International Research traveller returns ‘home’ to the routines and Institute (ILIRI), she is interested in promoting Plants new ways of perceiving the land in the 21st geographical spaces of day-to-day life. Scientists have wondered for some time Integrating critical concepts from tourism century. She believes that how we perceive and whether plants, like animals, can truly learn contemplate the land affects how we treat the geography, ecocriticism, affect theory and land. Her teaching focuses on Art and the from the past and adjust their future environmental anthropology, this research Environment, bringing together students from behavior appropriately. We adopted the same sheds light on the complex role of travellers multi-disciplines including art, architecture, approach used in studies of animal learning as agents of seed dispersal, addressing how engineering and science, while her most recent and memory and put the sensitive plant the imperatives of climate change and rapid gallery based work focuses on the veneration of Mimosa to the test. We found that plants too loss of biodiversity are shaping models of trees. Her recent ARC Grant application, can learn, and rapidly, when circumstances travel and geographies of tourism in the Transforming derelict mine sites via collaborative demand it, but most importantly they partnerships: Combining community and creative Anthropocene century. remember what has been learnt for several practice with science and technology is under weeks (at the very least). These findings consideration. Nina Gartrell is a DCA (Creative Writing) demonstrate that memory is not property candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast. special to organisms with a nervous system, Her current research combines permaculture inviting us to re-examine the fundamental design with travel writing, cultural geography, Joachim Froese mechanisms shaping behavior across living natural history, sociology of tourism and systems. ecocriticism. The fieldwork for her DCA comprised of an eighteen-month flightless journey from Trouble in Paradise: Re- England to Australia through twenty-one Monica Gagliano is a research scientist in countries, including Morocco, Greece, Georgia, visiting the Hortus evolutionary ecology. She has published her work Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia st in over 36 academic articles in top scientific Conclusus in the 21 and Timor-Leste. Nina’s pioneering attempt to journals, and convened and presented at develop an ethical travel praxis underpinned by Century numerous international meetings. Inspired by seed-saving, couch surfing, WWOOFing, and the her personal encounters with Nature and This paper investigates the Hortus applied ethics and principles of permaculture indigenous elders from many parts of the world, Conclusus design, is the subject of her creative artefact, Seed: (the enclosed garden) as a she has pioneered the emerging scientific field of symbolic space reflecting early modern plant bioacoustics by demonstrating for the first a permaculture-travel memoir. European approaches to nature. Such early time that plants emit their own ‘voices’ as well as modern approaches will then be considered detect and respond to the sounds surrounding in the context of contemporary images and them. She has extended the concept of cognition concepts of nature. to plants by demonstrating experimentally that Rod Giblett plants can learn just like animals do, re-igniting I will concentrate in particular on a painting the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical The Servant of the Forest: by the unknown Upper Rhenish Master: standing. Her progressive and holistic approach Paradisgärtlein (Little Garden of Paradise) to science interfaces with areas as diverse as Germaine Greer’s White from around 1410/20. With its detailed ecology, physics, law, anthropology, philosophy, Beech rendition of birds and flowers based on literature, music and art. Monica is currently a Research Fellow of the Australian Research In 2001 Germaine Greer, the noted careful studies of animal behaviour and pioneering Australian feminist, bought a

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block of land in degraded rainforest in with an interspecies sympathy for thrush, environmental humanities at UNSW. Her south-eastern Queensland and attempted to and for weeds as cultivated objects in a research and creative projects explore weather, rehabilitate the rainforest back to its post-nature future. plants, food and the politics of dwelling. As an pre-European contact and settler state which artist, Jennifer creates live, collaborative and A main focus will be the dismantling of usual participatory projects, including Walking in the she construes as ‘wild nature.’ She also plant aesthetics conventions. An Rain (PSpace, 2011), Tilting at Windmills (with recorded her observations of the place, its anthropocentric view of biology and art will Tessa Zettel, 2013), erskineville (with Craig plants and animals, as well as the process of be replaced by a co-evolutionary and Johnson, Tiny Stadiums, 2013) and The Yurt rehabilitation, both of which resulted in her Empire (with 18 others, ongoing). She is currently interdependent attitude of care and remedy. recently published book, White Beech: The completing her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Through an active engagement with plants Rainforest Years. This paper suggests that Pitiless Storm. Her other publications appear in as intelligent and agented entities, bio-art Greer could be considered to be the Rachel Southerly Journal, Australian Humanities Review, may help illuminate issues of environmental The Conversation and ArtLink. Carson of Australia. In Silent Spring Carson demise and simultaneously offer remedial mounted a critique of the military-industrial- capitalist complex. The closest Greer ever solutions, if not a new art aesthetic. comes to a Carson-like critique is when she Alexis Harley discovers that 2,4,5-T was used on her Prue Gibson is a Teaching Fellow in creative writing (UNSW) and an art and fiction writer. Her property. She does not discuss, nor seem to research interests include schizo-fiction, Object The Botany of Emergency have read, the extensive literature on Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism. Her environmental history and of the relationship PhD investigates speculative art writing and she In 2013, Canadian scientists reported the between humans and the earth, culture and is organising Aesthetics After Finitude, a “resurrection” of mosses that had been nature, especially the development of conference and exhibition, 2015. She is author frozen into dormancy for some four hundred military-industrial capitalism, nor the of the art book The Rapture of Death and has had years. Without themselves moving, with the extensive literature on the problematic over 200 art essays/articles published. Her regular tempo of their organic development concepts of ‘wild’ or nature.’ This paper curated exhibitions are The Carpentry of suspended for centuries, these Methuselanic Speculative Things, Alaska Projects 2013 and The plants emerged from beneath a retreating argues that Greer’s book would have Pharmacy of Love and Hate MCA Artbar 2013. An benefitted from being located in the tradition exhibition Plant sentience is being developed for glacier to an environment inevitably different of nature, bioregional and environmental February 2015. from the one that preceded their writing, such as Carson, Leopold and immurement. Thoreau, and in the ecological paradigm I read these emerging mosses alongside within which they operate. Wendell Berry’s recently reiterated claim Jennifer Hamilton that an agriculture based on the mass Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland, Rod Giblett’s cultivation of annual plants keeps nature “in own venture into nature and bioregional writing Bad Flowers: a meditation with environmental philosophy and history, was a state of emergency”. Berry’s emergency published in 2013 by Intellect Books. He is on the different languages connotes both disorder, if not catastrophe, Associate Professor and Co-Convenor of the of humans and plants and the process of issuing forth into being. International Centre for Landscape and The difference between emergency and Language at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Gabrielle de Vietri’s artwork, The Garden of life-as-usual is a matter of scale, both Western Australia where researches and teaches Bad Flowers (2014), unites some of history’s temporal and spatial. That is, emergency is environmental humanities. He has published most malicious magnoliophyta in a lively in some sense a relative condition (one twelve other books in the field. His next book, botanical installation. The work, entity’s footfall is another’s landslide). In this Canadian Wetlands: People and Places, is commissioned by the 19th Biennale of forthcoming from Intellect Books later this year. paper, I interrogate how recent Sydney and funded by Arts Victoria, was He is currently researching and writing several apprehensions of emergency states relate to created for a specific site on Sydney’s books, including one on cities and wetlands. the thinking of beings as objects, as Cockatoo Island. Due to a complex set of individual lives or individual systems. In circumstances, involving global supply focusing on plants, either emerging (like the Prudence Gibson chains, corporate sponsorship of the arts moss, longlived, relative to a human lifespan) and federal immigration policy, the work was or in emergency conditions (like the annual Plant sentience: aesthetics not exhibited in this year’s Biennale but domesticated crop plant, shortlived, relative to of care rather at Earlwood Farm (www. a human lifespan), plants that are generally earlwoodfarm.com), a suburban share living fixed in place, I seek to concentrateemergency Several contemporary artists are creating a experiment and my current home. into its temporal aspect, and thereby shed new eco-aesthetic of plant life, in response The negative attributes awarded to some light on prevalent ideas about the identities of to environmental anxiety and species plants in the Garden–Basil’s hatred, individuals, species, and places. extinction. Plant sentience and aesthetics of Lavender’s distrust and Lobelia’s care are growing topical themes in visual art, malevolence–belong to a non-scientific Alexis Harley lectures in nineteenth-century articulated through investigations into taxonomic tradition; these meanings occupy literature and autobiography at La Trobe medicinal herbcraft, civilized weeds and University. Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the a largely anthropocentric, and, indeed, empathy for maligned fungal infections. Natural History of the Self will be published later historically particular, sphere of intelligibility. These disruptive topics fit well into a this year with Bucknell University Press. But, as Michael Marder has recently argued, discussion of bio-art and environmental Enduring fascinations include representations of plants ‘are not mere objects to be studied nonhuman animals, especially “ferals” and aesthetics. and classified, they are also agents in the “invasive species”, nineteenth-century natural Drawing on the ‘philosophy of science’ production of meaning’. Taking the curious history writing, and autobiographical practices. theories of Isabelle Stengers, this paper story of de Vietri’s artwork as a point of Her current project is titled Tragic Ecology: extinction, change and the literary forms of loss. investigates plant-related art, that functions departure and exploring the role of vegetal as cure, consolation or remedy. It follows a life in poetic works such as Ovid’s shift away from a human-centred view of Metamorphoses as well, this paper will being and towards a more speculative and expand upon the idea that plants are agents cross-species approach. The artists, whose in the production of meaning. work I will discuss in the context of an aesthetics of care, are Tarsh Bates and Emily Jennifer is a scholar, artist and activist. She is Parsons Lord, whose work respectively deals a lecturer in eco-criticism at NYU and a fellow in

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Shé Hawke well as recalling a plethora of children’s texts we might cultivate them. such as fairy tales, nursery rhymes and Affective river readings: cartoons which normalise inter-species Stephen Healy escaped from the clutches of his friendships. However, many of the real life technical training by working for Greenpeace intersecting Bourdieu’s inter-species friendships documented online International in London and gaining an academic agency, field and habitus originate from experiences of captivity, post, in Science and Technology Policy, in the UK. He transferred to UNSW via a short stint at the with a psychological hardship or the death or rejection of a NSW EPA, drafting a briefing paper for their history of human and non- parent, and some of these friendships end executive, to facilitate their corporate planning quite violently. Such aspects are often process. Currently a member of UNSW’s human becoming through downplayed or silenced within these Environmental Humanities program his interests water relations. celebratory webpages. This paper uncovers meander from his historical focus on energy and the world-view that is presupposed by these its politics through to the affective challenges To make sense of inheritance and ‘touching’ texts: one which seems to deny posed by the anthropocene. connectivity within systems and communities any brutal, violent aspect of inter-species Bourdieu proposed his tripartite concept of relations in favour of an Edenic, fairy-tale habitus, field and agency. This paper world of peace and harmony. However, the attempts to re-make water in the public fact that these friendships are also Peter Hobbins imaginary by interpellating it as both field characterised as ‘surprising’ suggests that and agent in its own becoming, acted upon the overall online response is more nuanced An animal in us: intimate by other agents, whose habitus and sense of than this: it implies an understanding that histories of envenomation cultural, symbolic and natural capital is as such harmonious, altruistic relations are not “We are conscious of an animal in us”, wrote various as the flows of water itself. The the norm, that inter-species relations can Henry David Thoreau in 1854. “It is reptile and eco-humanities is increasingly invested in often be violent, self-motivated and brief. In sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly understanding water as its own entity this way, by being ‘touching’ but also expelled”. If Thoreau was unsettled by (multiple as that entity is) as well as being ‘surprising’, these texts perform and embody pre-Darwinian intimations of innate animality, part of webs of relation with humans and a tension between two alternate ways of how did his contemporaries apprehend the non-humans. Bourdieu’s concept, in looking at and responding to nature. association with understanding waters incorporation of animal matter into their psychological and agential confluences, is DAVID HAWORTH is a doctoral candidate in bodies? Meat and milk raised few qualms, yet latterly taken up by the work of cultural the School of Culture and Communication at bestiality was reviled. Many abhorred anthropologist Gaetano Mangiameli, who the University of Melbourne. He completed a vaccination via cowpox scabs or calf lymph, along with the intentions of this paper sets Bachelor of Arts in English and Art History at but what of envenomation? An early and Bourdieu’s schema to a new purpose and the University of Western Australia, enduring concern for white colonists across offers a different reading of water and its transferred to the University of Melbourne the British Empire was the passage of poison attendant relations. for his Honours year, and went on to do a from venomous beasts into their person, and Master of Arts by research. David’s Masters its homologous effects upon their Shé Hawke is a trans-disciplinary scholar, who thesis focused on the relation between domesticated ‘brutes’. The bite itself – by currently teaches in the School of Sociology at language, thought and embodied experience snake, spider or rabid dog – remained the ANU. Her research is concerned with meaningful in contemporary Language poetry, for which apex event. Beyond that, however, the and productive alignment between ecological, he received the 2013 Percival Serle Prize. His historical record remains largely silent. Why economic and cultural flows of water and cross current research explores the relation did colonists’ accounts of envenomation cultural elemental literacy. She is also a convey so little sense of existential alarm? ficto-critical poet whose novel in verse Depot Girl between nature and art in twentieth-century was nominated for the Miles Franklin Literary literature and visual culture. What did it mean that an animal ‘virus’ crept Award in 2009 and shortlisted for The Colin under their skin, coursed through their veins Roderick Literary Award in the same year. and permeated the deep fabric of their bodies? What was the fundamental nature of that Stephen Healy material: inanimate, germinal or autonomously animal? Drawing upon David Haworth Anthropocene Dispositions nineteenth-century case reports, medical theories and posthumanist scholarship, this While modernity was marked by faith in paper explores both affective encounters with Touched and Surprised: mastery and control the anthropocene is venomous creatures and the ontological status Online Appreciation for characterized by the impacts of just such of their toxins. Inter-Species Friendships. outlooks. This problematizes questions regarding the dispositions and outlooks Peter Hobbins is a historian of science and This paper examines the recent popularity of consistent with anthropocene challenges. medicine at the University of Sydney. Drawn to the inter-species animal friendships within While ethical matters take a high profile in certain Web 2.0 platforms such as Buzzfeed, structures and techniques of experimental medicine, such considerations this paper will focus he has published on the growth of biomedical Tumblr, and YouTube. Webpages celebrating upon the affective dimensions to these. This research in Australia. His recently completed PhD these purported friendships characterise account takes it that less structured ways of pushed back to European arrival on the continent, them using words such as ‘touching’ and engaging with these, such as contemporary exploring the ways in which venomous creatures ‘heart-melting’, as well as ‘surprising’ and notions of affective atmospheres, are better were characterised and known by whites. In ‘unexpected’. In what ways could one be placed to do this than more structured particular, he focused on snakebite in domesticated animals and the practice of vivisection, which was ‘touched’ by an online video of an owl and a modernist notions, such as that of habitus. pussycat playing together? Why do some both rampant and ethically unproblematic for Humanity increasingly confronts existential colonists through to World War I. Peter’s current people find such things ‘touching’? Arguably challenges, even in the face of the weather project focuses on the history and archaeology of it is because these online phenomena are or other once mundane matters, in which the quarantine in Sydney. contemporary iterations of much older learned habitus that once served us well now notions of a heavenly harmony and ill serve us. This paper will attempt to survey communion between species, wherein ‘the where and how we confront just such limits wolf will live with the lamb [and] the leopard to the dispositions of modernity, sensibilities will lie down with the goat’ (Isaiah 11:6), as that may currently serve us better and how

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Barbara Holloway technologies in urban park spaces with an emerging theme on human-grass relations. Trees as Treasure, Trees as Lesley Instone & Penelope PenELOPE Dunstan is a Doctoral candidate Waste: a Reading of Loss, at the University of Newcastle in Fine Arts. Continuity and Cessation on Dunstan ‪‪Her current research concerns understanding the future of the Upper Hunter the Southwest Slopes New environmental landscape when coal mining has run its Until recently, trees have been valued by histories of the course and the terraformed land is returned to humans as timber, for the fruits they bear, Anthropocene: reports wider social interaction. for the shelter they afford, and for their from the coalface Her artworks seek a dialogue with presence. New relations with forests are rehabilitated landscape and to engage, developing as comprehension of the In coal mining regions around the world the encounter and redefine these spaces in implications of the Anthropocene. Trees take forces of anthropogenic change are non-engineering, social and psychological on a new value allotted by environmental startlingly visible. It is here in the geosocial ways. Penny is anticipating a vision of the science and recognized by both governments domains of coal production and export that future, to confront the new landscape and to and landholders. Yet factors — emotional as new environmental histories are being forged re-establish social connection and a sense of well as material, economic or practical — across multiple scales. From the local plants the new land belonging. that have been in play throughout European under our feet, to the realignments of presence, even under Aboriginal hydrology, the terra‐forming of landscapes, Besides pursuing a career as a visual artist, management, influence the present. the pollution of overseas cities, the distress Penny is also an Agronomist and Viticulturist of bodies by dust, the disruption of and has undergraduate and post graduate Beginning with the current turn to Wiradjuri community life, and the remaking of qualifications in science. knowledge, I survey the trees of the region at climates, worlds are being transformed in intervals back to the 1860s when the first unpredictable ways. alarm, in Australia, at the signs of humanly- induced climate change through Given the extent of environmental and social deforestation was voiced. This paper outlines change forged by extensive open cut Danny Jennings some ongoing interactions in tree-life in a coalmining in the Hunter Valley of NSW we small area of NSW southwest of Canberra. ask, what remains? What are the materials, The Aesthetics of Nature and Geographically the region is termed the relations, remnants, memories and bodies the Cinematic Sublime Southwest Slopes, and identified botanically that will tell the tales of the environmental Cinematic representations of the natural as Dry Schlerophyll Forest merging with the histories of the future? In our project, world can evoke an aesthetic of the sublime White Box Grassy Woodland, an endangered ‘Tracking the Anthropocene’, a cultural and provoke metaphysical spheres of human ecosystem. The Schlerophyll Forest has been geographer and a visual artist follow the rail existence by emphasising the self - heavily exploited for timber and firewood, lines from the port of Newcastle, the worlds transcending qualities of reality, that is, the especially the stringy-bark, the ironbarks, and largest coal port, up the Hunter Valley to the tendency of natural phenomena to reveal red gum. White Box Grassy Woodland is the mines and communities at the cutting edge frontiers of matter, space, time, and human foundation of iconic rural landscapes of NSW, of landscape, environmental and community perception. The natural sublime, in a neo- with mature eucalypts scattered across a upheaval. Drawing on practices from romantic sense, describes the aesthetic affect paddock supporting farm animals or crop. ecology, new materialism, more‐than‐ caused when certain qualities of natural The mature trees were not being renewed, human geographies, affect and art practice phenomena overwhelm the subject and areas with the native grasses, forbs and we stage encounters along the track to perceptually and imaginatively. As the human understory intact were extremely rare. document the multispecies entanglements perceiver is consumed by the power, vastness, that constitute Anthropocene nature cultures In both systems they had been reduced by darkness, silence or otherness of the forest, in the making. In these encounters we risk exploitation, oblivion, overstocking and the desert, mountains, the ocean or attachment with all manner of unlikely and deliberate destruction as occupying space foreboding skies they can potentially sometimes unlikeable remains such as dust, wanted to fulfil other human desires. experience haunting emotions of awe, wonder, despair, weeds, steel, machinery, and scarred or fear. This paper investigates how digital What interests me is the continuity within lungs, in an effort to address Haraway’s video images of nature captured within the what is usually framed as loss and cessation: insistence on ‘coming to terms with the world South-West of Western Australia can visualise what, including forest, is found to be we live in’ in ways that force ‘the question of and manifest sublime qualities. It will also surviving for better or worse? What signs “what is to be done”’ (Haraway in Gane 2006, discuss a process of experimentation with 3D lead to new understandings and 145). modelling and animation which specifically intervention? My approach to identifying Lesley Instone teaches in geography and explores the sublimely infinite geometric continuity is to treat the human as an environmental studies at the University of nature of space and time as seen through the integral part in the forest ecosystem. Newcastle, Australia. Her work explores the flow and growth of botanical, oceanic and entanglements of humans, nonhumans, atmospheric phenomena. It will then discuss Barbara Holloway is a Visiting Fellow in the School of Languages, Literature and Linguistics belonging and colonialism that constitute whether these emerging sublime digital video at ANU. Her research on NSW South-West cultures of Australian natures. She draws on and 3d animated representations of nature can Slopes and Plains is into the living practices, a richly diverse ‘undisciplined’ theoretical possibly stimulate an awareness of certain natural and human, as a single ecosystem. She landscape from science studies, cultural metaphysical spheres of human existence divides her time between Canberra and the geography, performativity, and more-than- such as dreams and spirituality. region, with practical research into regeneration human modes of enquiry. Recent work on the Danandbilla Range. As well as the English focuses on critical questions of Australian Danny Jennings is a PhD candidate at the Department, ANU, she belongs to the Lachlan Department of Film, television and Screen Arts, Catchment Management Authority network, nature-cultures, including urban dog- walking, landscapes of detention, biodiversity Curtin University, Perth, Western Australian and is White Box Grassy Woodlands network, Superb a recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award regulation, and belonging in Australia’s Parrot Monitoring Group, and Conservation scholarship. Danny is also the director of Agreements NPWS. Her most recent publication urban north. Currently she is working on Crosswaves Digital Media. CDM is a 3d is the fictocritical ‘Rockolalia, Lithomania’ in ‘matters of concern’ emerging from everyday visualization and animation studio based in Mudmaps, Special Issue 17, Text, 2013. http:// material and embodied encounters between Margaret River, Western Australia and produces www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue17/ various humans, nonhumans and content for television commercials, documentaries Holloway.pdf 25 abstractsprogram

Salton Sea 5, Andrew Denton

and architectural visualizations. The 3d animated Dr Deborah Jordan, Senior Research Fellow global warming in that the former initiated a short film ‘Blank Oblivion’, 2006 , written, (adj) National Centre for Australian Studies self-awareness of self-annihilation that animated and directed by Danny has been works as a historian, writer and cultural critic. In describes our present ecological condition. screened in short film festivals around Australia the long term she is especially interested in This paper will pose the question of the and overseas and was nominated for a Western climate change narratives in literature and the agency of the Sun with special reference the Australian screen award. history of the book in Australia; in 2014 she was experimental television work on the Sun, awarded the Helen Taylor Local History Award to Altisonans (1966), by the Swedish composer research the life and work of Leontine Cooper, Karl-Birger Blomdahl. and the Queensland Women’s Suffrage petitions. Deborah Jordan Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute for Colonialism and the New Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University Douglas Kahn of New South Wales. He is author of Earth Sound Woman writer: Finding a Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the guide for the middleground Reverse Icarus Arts (University of California Press, 2013) and Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts ‘No doubt’ wrote Leontine Cooper in 1886, the The “non-human” often presumes agency (MIT Press, 1999) and editor of Mainframe: ‘violet is modest and the snowdrop pure: the limited to the biotic, with the abiotic Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (UC Press, 2012); and objection is to the facts being taken for relegated to a scenographic “environment” in Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (UC granted because of the attitude of one or the which things act. Where some make Press, 2011). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim colour of the other’. This paper explores the sentience a precondition of empathy it is still Fellowship and an ARC Future Fellowship. environmental imagination of Leontine difficult to grant agency to what determines Cooper, fin de siecle feminist and our existence and could not care less: the Queensland’s leading suffragist who also Sun. The vengefulness of technological wrote a series of New Woman novels. Again ambition has been identified with Icarus who, and again Cooper warns of how human flying too closely to the sun, fell into the sea Susie Lachal emotion was disconnected from the and drowned. The myth would appear environment. Taking as one starting point Sue applicable to the present where the Sun pA|A|A : participatory Art | Kossew’s contention on the ‘unsettled grows hotter and sea levels rise, but in an Affect | Anthropocene | identities’ of White Australian settler woman, important respect the myth has been Aesthetics on the one hand, and Cooper’s deep ecology reversed. No longer is it necessary to fly on the other, this paper will address some of toward the Sun because, since U. S. Through the lens of visual arts, this paper will the writer’s key preoccupations about President Truman stated in his speech explore Anthropocene Aesthetics and the democratic process, about justice and sixteen hours after the bombing of opportunities for artists to engage affective especially justice for women, about emotions Hiroshima, the Sun has descended upon the theory with the anthropocentric paradigm. and the environment, about changing Earth and it is now setting upon the human If we accept that the Anthropocene exists as a species. The philosopher Michel Serres climates and the animal kingdom from the result of humankinds’ actions, I propose a relates the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to speaking position of the emigrant. focus on enquiry into methods of affective

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engagement, to encourage an opening up of fields: (i) climate change; (ii) botany; (iii) cabinets”’ and Fiona Hall’s commissioned the ‘bloom spaces’ between subject fauna – either extinction or migration. installation ‘Grove’. Given that the Museum’s (participants) and object (art work/event) recent publications explicitly refuse nostalgia allowing for the opportunity of an extension as a legitimate ‘museal mood’, I ask what and stretching in the personal perceptions of varieties of melancholy atmosphere the ‘last the viewer. colonial economic botany museum in the Studio based Inquiry world’ might nonetheless generate. Visitors Current trends in participatory and and commentators remark on ‘poignant’, or community based art projects have the This proposal explores the Dandelion, a plant just plain ‘sad’ feelings upon encountering potential to directly address the relationship with various connections to human evolution. the cabinets of 19th century model fruit, between aesthetics and the Anthropocene. My research involves the Galapagos Tree particularly a single, ‘lonely’ wax Through participatory arts practice it is Dandelion Sonchus canarlensis and pomegranate, and the large but remnant possible to develop artwork enabling the references its development into a tree. collection of papier mache pomological viewer to experience affective encounters Believed to have evolved from the familiar models made by the German company that in turn allow for incremental change in weed Dandelion Taraxacum officinale, its Arnoldi (1856‐1899). These cabinets of the viewer’s perceptions concerning the evolution on a landscape within the model apples, pears, plums, peaches and anthropocentric paradigm made possible by Galapagos Archipelago is reflective of our apricots attest at once to a colonial urge to the ‘bloom space’. current society, given our direction towards know about and acclimatise many fruit This paper addresses two critical questions. monoculture. Our conscious and varieties and to our own loss of type diversity. How might affect theory be applied to an unconscious actions impact the environment Fiona Hall’s ‘Grove’ (2006) engages directly investigation of Anthropocene aesthetics and have changed our understanding of the with the tradition and poetics of the cabinet through a review of current trends in world we inhabit. of curiosities, especially ‘artifactual density, participatory art practices including the work unusual juxtapositions and organisation The Tree Dandelion’s evolutionary of Cai Guo-Qiang and Allora and Calzadilla? according to allegorical themes’. ‘Grove’, like progression references our current Great How can this further our understanding of the Arnoldi pomological cabinets, draws Acceleration and how this affects future human interactions with the physical attention to the Santos Museum of Economic species diversity and our place in the environment? Botany’s self‐conscious embrace of its environment. My Studio investigation looks mixed epistemological heritage and to the to create awareness about how the In 1993, I completed a Masters of Education at ethical imperatives of contemporary the University of Melbourne entitled, ‘Educational alterations we make in nature transform not ecological melancholy. Approaches to a Sustainable Society.’ This year I only the flora, but also social, ethical and enrolled as a PhD Candidate in the School of Art cultural values in society. Creating Heather Kerr is Senior Lecturer, English and at RMIT with the topic, Responding to the metaphors for our connection to it and the Creative Writing and Associate Investigator, ARC Anthropocene: An enquiry into sculptural Anthropocene through images that use the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, responses for changing anthropocentric values. human DNA within the plant cell structure, I University of Adelaide. ‘Museal Moods’ is part of With my cross disciplinary training I hope to be work to show the spectrum of influence of a project exploring the afterlives of ‘pre-modern’ able to offer viewers and participants of my humans on the natural environment. physic-theological concepts such as Sympathy artwork the opportunity to explore the concepts and Social Love. That project, ‘Varieties of of human equity (post colonial acceptance that Examining the potentials for life using this Melancholy’, studies models of mimetic and all humans are valued and supported equally) existing form raises questions for analysis of contagious passions and affections in literature and environmental justice (all living organisms from the 17th to the late-18th centuries, and their and non-living objects and phenomena have what can happen if a species known to our everyday life is given the opportunity to continuities with contemporary ideas about equal status with humanity). affect, emotion, mood and atmosphere. evolve without direct interference; will this “Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith’s plant be a metaphor for the legacy we leave Bioregional Imaginary”, was published in behind? Armbruster, Glotfelty and Lynch’s The Bioregional Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger is an MFA Metaphors for Evolution, Candidate, completing a Masters by Coursework in 2013, both at Sydney College of the Arts from weed to Tree an (University of Sydney). In 2013 & 2014 Lea exploration of the undertook residencies in Bio-Art at the School of Emma Lindsay Visual Arts in New York at their Nature and Dandelion Technology Laboratory. Her work centres on the The art of extinction in the Perceptions, values and representations of Anthropocene and Evolution, using mediums as varied as video, print, ceramics and installation. Natural History Museum our relationship with the physical Lea’s work includes the Tree Dandelion, Tree This paper focuses on how contemporary art environment have been read anew in the Daisy and Galapagos Islands. Having received a can communicate scientific issues on the Anthropocene century through the lens of grant Lea will continue her research on the Flora ecocriticism and affect theory. At present we on the Galapagos Islands in October this year. extinction of Australian bird species whilst are witnessing a turn in ecocritical theory to also articulating our ambivalent emotional the relevance of empathy, sympathy and responses to the processes of extinction. concordance, and how these move across I focus on an art research project flora and fauna; yet ecocriticism has not Heather Kerr investigating how extinct native bird thoroughly considered whether human and specimens are represented in global natural non-human affect are reducible to a theory Museal Moods and the history museums, whilst exploring artificial of the emotions. This conference both seeks Santos Museum of Economic ‘encounters’ with nature in these urban to refine the theoretical turn and to address archives of biodiversity. the interdisciplinary shortcoming, while Botany (Adelaide Botanical ecocritically articulating the contemporary Garden). In particular, the art project aims to counter expansion of the analysis of the humanities dominant conventions in how the imagery My paper considers affective atmospheres of ‘life’ is often used as a visual contrast in Studio based inquiry in one of the following and the MEB’s ‘Arnoldi “pomological art and scientific illustration in the

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representation of lost species in order to future of water use in their city is decided. compassion and authority, subjection and present a more reflective view of the agency, accountability and imperiousness, Sasha Matthewman has recently taken up ambivalence of encounters with extinct birds weakness and strength. The twist is that the the position of Senior Lecturer at The in the museum ‘landscape’. activist and meat producer are nonhuman University of Auckland. Previously she was a and the meat is human. This allows me to Senior Lecturer in Education and PGCE Emma Lindsay is a visual artist based in explore the novel’s challenge to the notion English Course Leader at The University of Brisbane. Lindsay has been a finalist in the that language capacity absolutely Bristol. She was also unit course tutor for Churchie Emerging Art Award, Redlands determines species difference, rendering New Media and Digital Literacies in the MSc Westpac Emerging Art Award, the 2014 inconsequential those similarities that unite Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, and has Education, Technology and Society. During beings under a dual rubric of feeling: shared been awarded residencies in Australia, Iceland 2000-2004, she coordinated the English kinds of sentience (for example, sensitivity to and New York. Lindsay’s paintings were featured research team in the ESRC funded pain) and affective responsiveness, such as in the 2011 Studio TV Artstart Artbreak series. Interactive Education Project which Her work is held in the Moreton Bay Regional flows of empathy and sympathy that are investigated the role of ICT in subject Council and University of Queensland Art unconstrained by the logic of species. Museum collections, and private collections in learning in eight schools in the UK. From 2004 she worked with a team of English and Australia, Canada, England, Iceland, Switzerland, My literary research analyses the way and USA. A current PhD candidate with RMIT, geography teachers to develop cross contemporary novelists in English have Melbourne, Lindsay is represented by the Heiser curricular links and subject initiatives in responded to ethical questions around human- Gallery, Brisbane. ecocriticism and Education for Sustainability. animal relations. After my PhD, The Literary Sasha started her career as an English Representation of Pro-animal Thought: Readings teacher in Bristol and has worked in both in Contemporary Fiction, I published essays on inner city and rural comprehensive schools. J.M. Coetzee, Justin Cartwright, Angela Carter, Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood and on animal Sasha Matthewman (Alys ethics in literary criticism and theory. In 2006 my Longley, Karen Fisher, co-written book (with the Animal Studies Group) Killing Animals was published by the University of Charlotte Šunde) Robert McKay Illinois Press. In my current research project I am looking at how the literature, film and culture Fluid City: Water Stories in of the post war period, complicates and exceeds The Murkiness of Mercy: the public and political humanitarianism. I am Environmental Education Discourse of Species and studying figures such as James Agee, Arthur Miller, John Huston, Romain Gary, Peter Viertel, the Ethics of Feeling in Hubert H. Humphrey, Patricia Highsmith, Brigid The city of Auckland in New Zealand is Michel Faber’s Under the Brophy, Walker Hamilton and others. surrounded by sea, and its suburbs are Skin More broadly, I am interested in the streaked with rivers. Water is a defining ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all representations of animals in culture and am environmental and cultural element of life in ordinary human life, it would be like hearing active in the research field of animal studies. Auckland City; one that is becoming the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, In 2000 I organised Millennial Animals: increasingly both prized and threatened due and we would die of that roar that lies on the Theorising and Understanding the Importance to issues of global warming and urban other side of silence.’ (George Eliot, of Animals, a conference here at Sheffield over-use. It is this environmental context that Middlemarch) with Sue Vice that was cited in PMLA as frames our research project fluid city, an groundbreaking in the field. I have also art-science-education project in which public For Lauren Berlant, Eliot senses that ‘we are co-curated exhibitions of contemporary art art communicates important water taught, from the time we are taught anything, addressing animal issues and I set up the sustainability issues for diverse general […] to feel appropriately compassionate’. interdisciplinary White Rose Animals publics. Compassion and coldness, she continues, Seminar. I am the Associate Editor are ‘two sides of a bargain that the subjects (Literature) for Society and Animals (Brill). I of modernity have struck with structural have contributed reviews to Society and Fluid City is currently co-creating a public art inequality’.2 I want to confront the Animals and Safundi and acted as an editorial event with a secondary school in Auckland. importance of these points for animal ethics. reviewer for Humanimalia, Parallax, Mosaic, Our panel discussion will present The power of Eliot’s words lies in the PMLA, Society and Animals, Anthem Press and pedagogical possibilities, issues and imaginative intensity with which they posit Columbia University Press. challenges around collaborating both unconstrained ethical attentiveness of vision between academic disciplines and with a and feeling while mortally precluding it. She secondary school community, in developing rules out responsible feeling for ordinary eco-critical engagement and biophilia. Our human experience on the basis of the more tactics for doing so are to facilitate radical impossibility of ‘hearing’ plant and Alanna Myers environments of curiosity, play, wonder, animal life; yet must make sense of such optimism and active engagement through experience in order to do so. I will explore When whales speak: the workshops that move between art, science the tenuous management of ethical feeling non-human voice in and geography-led skill-bases. and unfeeling via the discourse of species: environmental journalism the notion of a morally significant difference Our panel discussion will respond to the in kind between humans and other animals. While ecocritics have long been interested in question, ‘How can educators address the Leaving Eliot’s England for the otherworldly non-fiction nature writing and literary cultural context of students’ lifeworlds in Scotland of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin journalism, less attention has been paid to order to make emotional connections with (2000), I will discuss a scene in which an the role of daily news media in contributing their local and global environment?’ The activist argues for the rejection of meat to the formation of environmental conscience methods fluid city proposes for thinking with production by the novel’s protagonist on the or producing particular affective responses students, schools, communities and cities grounds of an ethics of mercy: an ambivalent in audiences. On the other hand, these are interdisciplinary, creative and dynamic. A nodal point of sensibility and law, questions have been extensively explored in key aim of this project is to allow the voices the field of environmental communication of young people to be heard by the wider 2 Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion and media studies, though from a community and by policy makers as the (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 10.

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predominantly social sciences perspective. and fluidly explore water and to create monkeys. In this paper, I seek to offer an ecocritically- further understandings as to how we can The artistic process engaged in this work informed analysis of the representation of understand and interpret homeliness and simultaneously presents two cultural environmental conservation campaigns in nationhood within nature. representations animals. One is the mainstream media. This involves moving imaginative voice in the children’s songs and beyond questions about whether Helary Ngo is a student of the University of the second is a zoological framing of a wild environmentalists’ viewpoints are Technology, Sydney within the Transforming creature. Both representations are underrepresented or environmental impacts Cultures Research Centre. sentimental fictions, and it is in the overlooked in news reports, and approaching conjunction of the two that Yamamoto the media as a space where the interests of displays their limits. In my analysis of the non-humans can be – and indeed to some Anne O’Brien role of living animals as active agents within extent are already – presented and debated this work, I will focus on how Yamamoto alongside the claims of various other Conserving soils through creates multi-layered complex meanings, competing stakeholders or appellant entities, convivial, ‘more than while resisting the impulse to interpret the to use the language of Latour’s Parliament instrumental’ assemblages. animal’s presence. This work uses the of Things. While this throws up tricky audience’s empathy with both the performing questions of its own (e.g. can non-humans In this paper I will examine ‘more-than- children and the caged animals to explore speak? Can we speak on behalf of non- instrumental’ encounters between human the complexity of human/animal humans?), it does begin to open up a space land stewards and non-cultivated organisms relationships. of shared enquiry between the environmental in practices of agriculture and greens- humanities and environmental keeping that aim to conserve soils as Raquel Ormella is an artist and academic communication and media studies. habitats. I will elaborate on my concept of the ‘convivial assemblage’ to examine based at the School of Art, ANU. She teaches in the Painting Workshop and is the Honours Alanna Myers is a PhD candidate in the material, embodied, technological and Convenor. Her recently completed PhD examined School of Culture and Communication at the ethical dimensions of such practices. This human relationships with urban birds. She has University of Melbourne. Her research examines will prompt reflection on norms that can been exhibiting regularly in national and the role of place and the discursive legacy of the inform a land ethic for regenerating soils in international exhibitions for over a decade. wilderness concept in contemporary the long term. Recent exhibitions include: The 1st Californian environmental conservation campaigns, Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, particularly in the context of mining and Anne T. O’Brien is a PhD student in Political USA, and Direct Democracy MUMA, Melbourne, industrial development in Australia. Her thesis 2013; the 8th Shanghai Biennial, China, 2012; the takes as a case study the recent campaign and Social Thought at ACU. She is interested in new materialism, land ethics, social justice, 1st Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan and In the against the construction of a gas processing balance, MCA, Sydney, 2010. plant in the Kimberley region of Western community economies and activism. While an Australia and examines the contested undergraduate, her priorities shifted after construction and framing of Walmadan (James attending the Students and Sustainability conference. She threw herself into campus Price Point) in national and regional news media. environmental and social justice organising, maintaining this for 14 years. Her honours Valentina Palonen project in 2006 was on Just Transitions in the Hunter, focusing on the steel and coal industries. Recasting the Mandrake: Helary Ngo Her PhD is a hybrid of geography and philosophy Folklore, Vegetables and as she is interested in how land stewards change Water as a metaphor their practices and tools to accommodate soil Agency entwined in biodiversity. The interpretation of aspects of the understandings, affects nonhuman world as bewitched or consciously embodied nonhuman subjects is and senses of homeliness Raquel Ormella far from new. And within the visual arts such for Vietnamese Australians anthropomorphism offers one of the most potent and tangible modes for exploring Feelings of homeliness and nationhood is Children’s Zoos: nonhuman subjectivity. My 18 piece mixed highly politicised and within Australia, often Sentimental fictions in media installation, Botanical Anthropoid involving a Europeanised interpretation of Collection is directly inspired by one of the nature and the environment. The Takayuki Yamamoto’s A week most intriguing examples of understandings of water has been reduced to of the animals. anthropomorphism in Western folklore, the a chemical formula of H2O which is in A week of the animals (2010-2011) is a recent mandrake. The mandrake is associated with contrast to the Indigenous understandings of artwork by Japanese artist Takayuki many curious traditions which led to its water as a kin, not a source of life, but a form Yamamoto. This work is a single channel almost revered status in times gone by. of life itself. For many Vietnamese video that documents a children’s These traditions seem to suggest that this Australian, water is a intrinsic part of not performance from a workshop with the plant, or more precisely this root, was only escaping one’s homeland to another artist. Yamamoto asked the participants to believed to be endowed with a kind of form of homeland (by boat) but also is a part write different verses to a primary school subjectivity or personhood, pertaining of sensory experiences of feeling both at song about daily routines, as though they directly to its humanoid morphology. The home and displaced within the Australian where an animal in the zoo. These where personified status with which the mandrake landscapes. The Vietnamese word of water, then performed in front of the appropriate was associated, the significant role it played nước, is the exact same word for country, cage. The songs describe the children’s in society and the empathy it ignited, are one evoking a linguistic and cultural link to this imaginary lives of the animals with varying of the central motifs of this work. Taking natural matter to the collective emotional degrees of anthropomorphism and empathy. inspiration from mandrake folklore, the work and cultural sense of belonging. The talk Likewise the child collaborators embody an seeks to identify new visual references to the will combine Sigmund Freud’s ideas of The array of emotional states from nervous human body already existing in the natural Uncanny (Unheimlich) as well as explore sweating to exuberated theatrics. Similarly world, and to capture these representations Australian Colonialism, Ecopsychology, the caged animals also display a variety of of agency in talismanic resin casts of Sensory Emotions, theories of Materialism responses, from the complete indifference of vegetables. and family history and stories, to poetically the crocodile, to the engaged curiosity of the

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Valentina Palonen is a mixed media artist Catherine Phillips Dr. Catherine Phillips is a Research working across a variety of media and processes. Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural She has exhibited extensively across a range of Studies at the University of Queensland. Her gallery spaces, undertaken residencies both Care, Control and Freedom research explores nature-society relations, locally and abroad, and been the recipient of in Seed Saving particularly those involving agriculture and various grants and awards including an Australia food. She is curious abut the ways in which Council New Work grant. Palonen has completed Diverse scholarship in botany, philosophy, these relations are formed, understood, and a Master of Fine Art (by research) at the Victorian and more-than-human studies have begun contested in everyday life in (dis)connection College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, challenging the assumed lower status and with governance efforts. Her latest book, and is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT passivity of plants. This paper contributes to Saving More Than Seeds: Practices and University. this nascent literature on plants, by paying Politics of Seed Saving, draws on ethnographic research to analyse the learning, relations, particular attention to seed-people relations and politics involved in seed saving. Further, it as enacted through seed saving. situates these practices in an international Contemporary seed saving is increasingly economic and political context by detailing Zheljana Peric constrained by a corporate seed regime seed-related neoliberalisation processes, involving commodification, privatisation, and intellectual property rights strategies, and Plants talking and what we technologisation; and yet, seed saving global genebanking efforts. Catherine’s work persists and in some contexts is resurging. encompasses cultural geography, science and hear technology studies, food studies, and Drawing upon ethnographic and survey work environmental studies. Invasives, injurious and poisonous to livestock, undertaken in Canada, this paper explores contaminators of wool, competitors of crops the relative agencies of savers and seeds and pastures, and carriers of disease. Invaders through a discussion of how they act of native ecosystems, foreigners who reduce together. The ‘degrees of freedom’ (Haraway biodiversity and degrade water quality. 2008) involving dynamics of care and control Iris Ralph Preventers of regeneration who exclude natives (Law 2010) within seed saving are elaborated and alter natural habitat. Impactors on human through attention to ways in which seed Pre-texts, tree-texts, and health causing allergies and can be poisonous. saving involves selecting possibilities, biosemiotic theory They are declared pests. adapting capacities, demanding accommodation, and presenting My paper focuses on several ‘tree-poems’ The above quotes are from Australian opportunities. Final consideration goes to from Australian poet Miriel Lenore’s in the government websites in relation to plants how this kind of engagement challenges garden (2007) and North American that have been demonised as ‘weeds’. At a conventional plant-as-object notions. Hawaii-based poet W. S. Merwin’s The Rain recent Landcare road tour a member of the in the Trees (1988) according to an audience became very emotional when argument about language that Wendy discussing Tropical soda apple, calling it Evil Wheeler makes in The Whole Creature: and urging people to fight this wicked and Complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of evil plant. The Tropical soda apple in this Catherine Phillips (Lesley culture (2006), namely that language is man’s narrative took on humanlike Head and Jennifer more than written and spoken language by characteristics capable of intentions, that is, humans, or is semiotic, biological and to be evil. By name calling we personalise Atchison) shared across species. I tie this and characterise plants. We turn plants into argument—that language is a trait, beings with personality with whom we can Plant Capacities and function, and capacity that extends beyond interact in accordance to the character/ Implications for More-than- humans as a species—and the argument personality we have assigned to them. By Human Studies that language unites humans as a species characterising Tropical soda apple as Evil we with other species—to the themes of then interact with the plant ‘as if’ it is an evil Although the agency of plants is increasingly ecocide, silence, and loss of language in entity and any means we choose in dealing demonstrated, scholars have yet to fully W. S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees. with it is justified. Thus chemical warfare is respond, for plants, to Lulka’s (2009) call to Lenore’s in the garden, specifically its justified and collateral damage becomes part attend more carefully to the details of implicit acknowledgement of the histories of the necessary price. In this paper I explore nonhuman difference. This presentation and experiences that humans and plants’ abilities to communicate and have draws on collaborative work with Lesley other-than-humans share, such as intentions, and whether they are truly ‘evil’ or Head and Jennifer Atchison. We provide a colonization, migration and simply misunderstood. Taking a systematic and provisional overview of the transplantation, provokes address of psychodynamic approach based in the work shared capacities of plants, in order to take Wheeler’s argument as the latter includes of James Hillman, in conjunction with the them seriously in their own terms, and to an emphasis on the ‘social nature’ of work of Bruno Latour, I examine what these consider what that means for human-plant humans. I comment on this term in the misunderstandings may be saying about relations more generally. We begin by context of poems by Lenore that speak for ourselves and what the plants might be identifying and discussing materialities and humans’ (openness to and desire for) communicating, to us, to one another and to capacities that scientists consider plants to social or affective or ‘ecosemiotic’ other others. share, plus three additional capacities relations with beings other than members fundamental to plant living – moving of their own species. Zheljana Peric (BASocSc, PGDip Psych) is independent of humans, sensing and studying for a PhD at The Centre for Studies in communicating, and taking shape as flexible Iris Ralph is Assistant Professor, Religion and Theology at Monash University, bodies. Together these contribute to a sense Department of English, Tamkang University, exploring how astrological archetypes can be of plant worlds in which distinctive but highly Taiwan. Between 2006 and 2009, she taught at applied to an understanding of social and various institutes in Melbourne, Australia and personal contexts within New Materialist variable plant forms have their own lives and also interact with humans and others in in the Republic of Korea. Between 1998 and frameworks. Ms Peric is currently a Research 2005, she was an Instructor in the English Associate for the Weed’s Network, Monash contingent ways. As empirical illustration we Department of the University of Texas at University. http://invasivespecies.org.au/ explore the adversarial relationship between Austin, where she earned her Ph.D. in English rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) and (2005). Recent articles by her have been invasive plant managers in northern published in NTU Studies in Language and Australia. We conclude by considering some Literature (National Taiwan University), implications for more-than-human studies. Concentric (National Taiwan Normal

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University), and The Ecohumanist (ASLE- Is the possibility of plant-speak a matter of through a contemporary visual art Taiwan). A book chapter on the phenomenon of human belief or disbelief, hence only valid perspective. I will cover aspects of my Taiwan’s gou-mama (dog mothers) in through a scientific basis? What is the practice-led research project Grow: International Perspectives in Ecofeminist difference between giving voice to and visualising nature at nanoscale where I am Ecocriticism (Routledge) is forthcoming (2013). A book chapter on the subject of Ted Hughes and listening to the voice of plants? Is the former using 4D Micro-CT to enable an audience to posthumanism is under contract with Palgrave an outmoded, anthropocentric and experience seed propagation at a scale Macmillan and is scheduled to be published in dangerous idea? Additionally, is plant agency enlarged well beyond the natural proportion 2013. Dr. Ralph is currently working on a book a necessary precondition for an ethical of the original process. Because I do not chapter focusing on teaching English literature concept of plant voice? And finally, how is want to create purely didactic or illustrative in the context of environmentalism in Taiwan for poetry a medium for hearing, listening and works with this science and technology, I will a book proposal titled Doing English in Asia: giving voice to—where literary language discuss how I intend to engage the viewer Global Literature and Culture. becomes a porous interface between the with ideas of a virtual experience of nature by ‘speaking’ us and the ‘unspoken’ plant other? using phenomenological methods in order to create sensation, meaning and affect in my In this paper, I will return to some of the work. Therefore I will elucidate why I am Dominic Redfern knotty issues raised by questions of agency proposing that an individual’s subjective and voice in relation to plants. Indeed, the experience of this work can be considered as Anti-Hyper problem of ‘nature’s voice’ in the history of an additional fifth dimension. I will also ecocriticism is an old one. Greg Garrard My paper will explore the relationship describe how staying at the Millennium Seed describes it as a post-Romantic problem between botanical art and Australian identity Bank in the UK has informed this project, where voice is ‘necessarily human and and the potential for this to remain a vital and in relation to this, I will also discuss “reflective” and yet almost naively open to part of our ongoing relationship to ‘place’. In elements of the current time-lapse giga- the natural “other”’. In similar terms, botanical art we can still find art and science pixel imaging of the National Arboretum Jonathan Bate asks, rhetorically, if voice in expressing their joint concern with the Canberra by Dr Tim Brown. accurate description of our experience of the nature is only a metaphor, figuration or pathetic fallacy—knowing well that most world. My paper will focus on a body of my I am a visual artist based in Canberra. I am a video work that presents a contemporary ecocritics would tend to say ‘yes’. Bate raises recipient of the 2011 Synapse residency through approach to botanical illustration utilising the question as to whether the capacity of ANAT, and the 2012 Australia Council for the Arts the medium of video. I will describe ways in the non-human to speak also entails the London Studio. I am currently a PhD candidate in which my own studio practice co-opts the capacity for pain. In other words, is there a Photography and Digital Arts at the ANU School relationship between speaking, agency and, of Art, and my research project Grow: visualising technology of scientific imaging and science nature at nanoscale is conducted at the ANU reporting, as well as the methodology and by extension, ethics? Through examples from Western Australian poetry, including the Micro-CT laboratory, Department of Applied aesthetics of botanical art, to challenge the Mathematics, and Vizlab, the ANU diagrammatic and signifying functions of work of John Kinsella and John Mateer, I will Supercomputer Facility, supported by NCI, the prosaic ‘description’. These works will be stir the sleeping dragon of nature’s voice in National Computational Infrastructure. www. situated within a reading of Australian light of posthumanism and new empirical ericaseccombe.com.au history that aligns botanical art and evidence for plant vocalities. illustration to our emerging identity through the late enlightenment and into the modern John Ryan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith era. I will discuss the notion that clearly Cowan University where he conducts Lorraine Shannon seeing and describing does not necessarily interdisciplinary research in the fields of cultural eschew post-modern approaches to studies, ethnography, ecopoetics, ecocriticism Garden Art as Eco-atonement landscape that construct it as a socio- and practice-led research. He is the author of historical nexus of different narratives, but Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and This paper examines garden art that is does, at some level, return to the source, to Language (2012, TrueHeart Press), Two With specifically created for the benefit of the specifics of a given place and that which Nature (2012, Fremantle Press, poetry), non-human species. Such art offers Unbraided Lines (2013, CG Publishing), Being With we find there. eco-atonement for human destruction of (2014, CG Publishing) and Digital Arts (with Cat habitat necessary for the flourishing of Hope, 2014, Bloomsbury), as well as numerous insects, reptiles, birds and small animals. It Dominic Redfern creates video artworks articles on Western Australian landscape and focussed on the ways our understanding of ‘place’ literature. With Patricia Vieira and Monica is an aspect of our obligation to restore is informed by the relationship between social and Gagliano, he is editing a collection called The urban and suburban gardens to health and natural histories. These interests are expressed Language of Plants (forthcoming 2015) bringing wholeness through artistic, political and with a self-conscious approach to the technology together emerging perspectives on plants from philosophical creativity. and culture of the moving image. Over the last the sciences, humanities and arts. He is the couple of years Dominic has had exhibitions at Chief Investigator on an ECU-funded project I argue that in this sense eco-atonement art home as well as in Tokyo, Stockholm and ‘FloraCultures’, conducted in consultation with follows the tradition of poet-gardeners of the Shanghai as well taking part in the Spatial Kings Park and Botanical Garden in Perth eighteenth century who often sought what Dialogues ARC project on water in our region. (2013-14) to develop a digital collection of Alexander Pope referred to as a ‘place to Dominic is an Associate Professor in the School of cultural heritage content about Perth’s flora. stand’ by creating a garden. Within this Art at RMIT University in Melbourne. domain the poet-gardeners established a counter-order so that they came to be seen as social thinkers distilling ethical values John Ryan Erica Seccombe through the transformation of landscape. Rather than defining nature as political On the Agency and Voice of Paper Proposal Virtual territory dominated by man, the neoclassical landscapes and landscape garden aimed to give voice to Plants: What is the Role of the natural order through a combination of Ecopoetics? I am a visual artist working in an art/science classical content in gardens that cultivated interdisciplinary field. To address the theme an untamed, natural appearance. If we accept that plants have voices—as of this conference I propose a paper in which current research in bioacoustics suggests— In the twentieth century, this practice was I will discuss ideas about conservation and how should we listen to and write about their revived by the poet-gardener Ian Hamilton engagement with environmental concerns voices and our experiences of hearing them?

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Finlay in his Scottish garden, Little Sparta. metaphor, and emotional truth versus fact, of Sydney in December 2011. She taught in the This ‘garden of ideas’ in which poems and in Australia’s environmental history – and a Foundation program at SCA in 2012 and delivered quotations are placed in a natural more sustainable future. a conference paper at the Australian Ceramics environment resulted from Finlay’s need to Triennial in Adelaide the same year. Jacqueline managed the SCA Images Online digital archive Inga Simpson has a PhD in creative writing reflect on the conjunction between the project for the University of Sydney from 2005-10, (QUT), and a Masters in English literature aesthetics of power in the modern world and successfully delivering an online database of (UNSW). She is currently researching Australian the power of aesthetics. I present examples of over 20,000 images for teaching, learning and nature writing for a PhD in English literature at eco-atonement art that continue this research within the University. She is currently UQ. She is the winner of the 2012 Eric Rolls employed as the Editorial Coordinator for the tradition. They oppose the sterile, paved ‘room Nature Writing Prize, and the author of Mr Wigg, Dictionary of Sydney. outside’ and using tactics of transgression which was shortlisted for the 2014 Indie Awards create nesting boxes, insect hotels and other and longlisted for the Dobbie Award. Her new eco-atonement art forms whose classical novel, Nest, will be released in August this year. allusions attempt to create a special order that critiques the violence perpetrated on non-human garden life while providing spaces it which such life might flourish. Jacqueline Spedding Scott Manning Stevens Placing the creation of nesting boxes, insect Recalcitrance in the archive An Enduring Connection: hotels and other garden art forms in this Native Americans and the grand tradition may seem heresy but I argue Within the impulse to archive, to remember it is to adopt tactics of transgression and to and record, is the answering impulse to Natural History Museum attempt to transfigure our commonplace destroy and annihilate, and to forget. The A major American museum of natural history existence in which ecological degradation isolated specimen, removed from its recently advertised its exhibit about the and species extinction. environment, classified, labelled and pinned relationship between Native America and down, presents an ordered, and ordering, natural history by stating, “American Indians Lorraine Shannon is a freelance writer and view of the world, one in which Nature exists have an enduring heritage of connections editor. She has a PhD in postcolonial literature external and separate to Culture, it’s chaos with the natural universe.” My paper and a non-traditional PhD in writing and ecology. and unpredictability lying safely behind the She has published articles in journals such as examines this notion, commonplace in containment of our garden walls. Yet in an American culture, through the lens of Native PAN, Island Magazine, Australian Humanities era of increasing climate change and Review, TEXT and Societies and edited a American studies. How is it that one group of unpredictable weather events, that wall is collection of writings by Val Plumwood, The Eye people, in this case the indigenes of North of the Crocodile. She is a founding member of repeatedly being breeched: floods, fire, America, should be portrayed as having an the Kangaloon Creative Ecologies Group and an earthquakes and tsunami remind us on a especial relationship to the natural world in award-winning gardener. daily basis that we are intrinsically part of distinction from the Euro-American settlers natural systems. that make up the majority culture of the This paper explores how archives have United States? I trace the various Romantic, shaped our understanding of nature, with mystified, folkloric, New Age, Inga Simpson natural history collections and seed banks anthropological, and political iterations of providing the locus for discussion. From this notion of an ‘enduring bond’ between the Australian Nature Writing early botanic gardens to contemporary seed American Indian (used monolithically) and and emotional environments banks, there has been an interesting shift in nature. I am especially interested in how this discourse away from Christian notions of a notion is maintained and promoted by While about real places, nature writing return to Paradise to the rhetoric of museums of natural history in the US and extends beyond mere description or doomsday and apocalypse. Not surprisingly, exploring what its implications are for representation of physical environments and this span of time covers the birth of the contemporary Native American communities. our relationships with them. Attempting to Enlightenment that brought us many of My paper provides a brief contextual give expression to a place is a creative institutions, including our natural history overview of the issue and then will focus on process, a personal response to the museums. three specific instances in the present which landscape from the imagination of the writer. illustrate the problems attendant to this An intersection of the real and imagined, an Seed banks aim to protect us against notion. attempt at an ecological imagining. It is from catastrophic events that threaten all life yet this liminal space between a particular within that impulse is a familiar belief Scott Manning Stevens (citizen of the writer and a particular landscape, between echoed through all the archives that have Akwesasne Mohawk Nation) earned his PhD imagination and place, that nature writing come before it: that nature can be controlled from Harvard University and has taught at springs. and tamed. Just as collection entities so Arizona State University and the State University often refuse to take up the identities and of New York at Buffalo. In 2009 Prof. Stevens In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence narratives assigned to them in any fixed or became the director of the D’Arcy McNickle Buell characterises the current continuous way, not all seeds can be Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. environmental crisis as “a crisis of the archived. Many of these seeds - defined as imagination”(2), arguing that places exist as Since January 2014 he has been an associate ‘fleshy’, ‘unorthodox’ or ‘recalcitrant’ - come professor of Native American Studies at much in the imagination of the reader and from tropical areas of the globe, vital for the Syracuse University and director of the NAS writer as in the real world. Solving the crisis, economies of developing nations, from program. He is the author of numerous essays therefore, requires reimagining the natural plants like cocoa and rubber. on American Indian visual vulture, museum world and our relationships to it. studies, the history indigenous resistance in the Recalcitrant seeds tell us more about the arts and literature. It is by engaging the imagination that nature of archives and seedbanks than emotions are brought into play, allowing the ‘orthodox’ specimens, not the least of which reader to experience empathy, sympathy, concerns the ontological assumption that and to explore, albeit vicariously, ways of lies at the heart of global Capatilism: that of living more sustainably with nature. our separateness from nature. Through the nature writing of Louisa Atkinson, E.J. Banfield and Mark Tredinnick, Jacqueline SPEDDING completed a Master of Fine Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, University this paper explores the power of the 32 abstractsprogram

administration of several educational Amanda is a passionate team player and has Peter Stiles institutions. He is the Australian representative exhibited at national and international levels. She for Christianity and Literature, a Fellow of the has taught in various capacities at the ANU Rural Idyll and Industrial RSA, a Member of the Australian College of School of Art and Australian National Gallery. Educators, and a Justice of the Peace (NSW). She was the recipient of an Australian Wasteland: Complementary Postgraduate Scholarship and has received Landscapes in the Works of several awards including the Australian National University Medal. Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna Amanda Stuart Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna ( 1790-1846 ) was In collaboration with the National Museum of Charlotte Šunde an early Victorian author who made a Australia and the ANU’s VCCVAFS significant contribution to the development of Dialoguing with the river, Te the social problem novel . Her most Re-imagining the unwanted: prominent work, Helen Fleetwood ( 1841 ) is re-awakening stories Awa Tupua: A new ecosophy an interesting precursor to those novels of embedded in animal objects of understanding Elizabeth Gaskell ( 1810-1865 ) that deal with In what has become a world first, a river in the appalling conditions that prevailed in the This paper will trace the narratives behind New Zealand – the Whanganui River – has factories and mills of northern English cities two contemporaneous objects in the recently been accorded the status of a ‘legal such as Manchester during her lifetime. In National Museum of Australia’s collection entity’ under the name Te Awa Tupua. her highly polemical novel, Tonna draws that have crucial associations to extinct Assuming this new legal identity, the river particular attention to the exploitation of fauna in Australia: a thylacine skin (from the has been accorded a ‘legal voice’. This paper children in such dehumanising settings. This Pieman River, Tasmania), and a cat skin rug challenges the rationale in which our legal novel also indicates a sharp contrast (from the Monaro region, New South wales.). planning framework has developed, claiming between the peaceful, harmonious and I have been studying and responding to these that such an approach has thus far restorative nature of rural settings compared objects during my position as artist in prejudiced against the more-than-human. If with the physical and spiritual desolation of residence, in the NMA’s People and it is no longer legally acceptable to merely industrialised cities. Environment Section. talk about the Whanganui River (as object) Although there is no evidence that Elizabeth The thylacine skin is thought to be one of the but rather with Te Awa Tupua (as subject), Gaskell read the works of Tonna, it is last animals shot in the wild, and in an area how might we approach such dialogue? reasonable to assume that novels such as earmarked to be a thylacine sanctuary. It In countries such as New Zealand and Helen Fleetwood were formative in the once functioned as a domestic floor mat. My Australia, planning frameworks approach creation of Gaskell’s now widely praised and visual documentation of this tragic object decision-making regarding a proposed valued novels, Ruth (1848), Mary Barton allows for an intimate reflection upon an development and its impacts on the natural (1853) and North and South (1854). Both individual from a species that has become environment through formal legal processes. Tonna and Gaskell were zealous and emblematic of extinction. The thylacine was Positions are taken, typically favouring an religiously committed women, and both exterminated due to the threat it was economic rationale (note the language sought to use the novel as a means of considered to pose to the colonial project. employed: natural capital, human capital). changing attitudes towards the Despite its shared practical function, the cat Where science is called upon, quantitative underprivileged social classes in England. skin rug poses a stark contrast to the methodologies dominate, reducing ecology Both novelists also indicated very graphically thylacine pelt. Cats have a strong correlation to an exercise in measuring, modelling and the perils associated with industrialisation, with native fauna extinctions in Australia. My manipulating data. Social and cultural and the need to recover the richness and project locates its maker, Mrs Ena Harris factors may also be considered, so long as wholesome nature of rural environments. whose presence gives a highly personal measurable trade-offs can be negotiated. narrative behind an extraordinary animal Meanwhile, conservation-conscious citizens, Dr. Peter Stiles tutors and lectures at the object within the collection. organisations and indigenous peoples often Wesley Institute in Sydney, Australia. He is also take a stance in defence of non-human an Adjunct Professor of English and Religious Both objects reveal startling reflections upon species or so-called ‘inanimate’ natural Studies at Trinity Western University, Canada, the position of unwanted animals in phenomena (e.g., rivers, mountains, forests). where he recently taught a summer school on Australia, both in a historic and the work of Dickens and Gaskell. In addition he This paper explores a radical departure from contemporary sense. teaches a course on Australian literature at this model, seeking alternatives in Houghton College, New York. He completed his relationships based on profound respect for Amanda Stuart recently completed a PhD Ph.D. in Literature and Theology at the University ecosophy (wisdom of the earth) and the of Glasgow in 1995. He has published both based in the Sculpture workshop at the academic and creative works. His scholarly Australian National University School of Art, cosmotheandric intuition (Panikkar, 1993). articles on Elizabeth Gaskell have appeared in which researched the tense relations between journals, conference proceedings, and edited wild dogs, dingoes and humans in the South East Charlotte Šunde is research development collections, including the Gaskell Society Journal. of Australia. This body of work was directly manager of Transforming Cities: Innovations for He regularly undertakes book reviews for informed by field research undertaken and Sustainable Futures – an interdisciplinary, Christianity and Literature, Expository Times, and sought ways to visually convey the challenging cross-faculty urban research initiative of the Glass (the journal of the Christian Literary themes that ensued, within a both historical and University of Auckland, New Zealand. Charlotte Studies Group in Oxford), and organises and contemporary context. Its sculptural outcomes holds a PhD in resource and environmental speaks at international conferences in the area ranged widely and encompassed ephemeral and planning from Massey University, and completed of literature and theology. He has had performative aspects through to a major public a post-doctoral tenure at the Centre for contributions included in The Encyclopaedia of the art commission. Economics and Ethics for the Environment and Bible and Its Reception (W.de Gruyter) and the Development (C3ED), University of Versailles, in Encyclopaedia of Christian Literature (Scarecrow Amanda has been working with Dr Kirsten France. Charlotte’s research interests include Press). His latest article is entitled ‘Christmas in Werner and Dr George Main from the People and indigenous peoples’ environmental ethics and Australia’, published in CASE, the quarterly Environment Section of the National Museum on practices, complexity and the ecosystem magazine of the Centre for Apologetic a project that has aimed to shed some approach, and more recently art-science Scholarship and Education at New College, contemporary dialogue and interpretation to community engagement projects. Water and the University of New South Wales. He has selected objects of the Museum’s collection challenge of cross-cultural understanding across experience teaching in both secondary and which reference feral and unwanted animals. worldviews has been a consistent theme in her tertiary settings and has served in the research for over 15 years.

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Bridget Sutherland and Paul Adopting O’Sullivan’s analysis of between ants, worm and young children. Our contemporary art practice using Deleuze’s presentation is in line with feminist calls to Judge and Guattari’s concepts, studio practice resist the temptation to reiterate the grand arguably can contribute to the production of and heroic human techno-fix and rescue Don Driver Magician: an a different subjectivity and a new minor narratives of the Anthropocene. Inspired by eco-critical perspective literature. This minor differs from the Donna Haraway’s (2008) multispecies dominant social paradigm or affective relational ethics, our tales of seemingly Don Driver (1930-2011) is considered to be signifying regime. As much studio based insignificant events and minor players one of New Zealand’s foremost assemblage inquiry into climate change is focused on gesture towards how we might ‘redo ways of artists. In this paper we intend to explore producing something new to mediate the living and dying’ and remain upon to the some of the threads connecting his works, urgency of greenhouse warming, following possibilities of ‘re-worlding’ together focusing on reading his assemblage from this, climate change art may be seen as (Haraway, 2013). Cognisant that the survival sculptures and installations within the ‘the minor’ – with new ethico-aesthetic of our own species is also called into context of ecology and animal studies. From compositions of affect that pave a way for question in this time of anthropogenic mass this perspective it is clear that Driver was future paradigm shift. This paper discusses species extinctions (Colebrook, 2012; Rose, engaging with the conditions of industrial my approach to studio inquiry as a 2012), we focus upon the mutual capitalism on a number of levels, exploring contribution to this minor literature. My vulnerabilities, messy inheritances and the contemporary psyche, our relationship to creative focus is on aspects of the impacts complex relationalities of cohabiting in the natural environment and the rituals of on ecosystems including botanical and fauna damaged common worlds. our anthropocentric culture. impacts and the social and political barriers To do this, we draw upon the multispecies to their mitigation. My strands of inquiry The visual aspects of Driver’s local New ethnographies that we are undertaking in include: how may the considerable amount Plymouth, an industrialized, international British Columbia and in the Australian of text from climate science and negotiations port, surfaced in his art and led to a Capital Territory. We recount a series of be addressed and interpreted, and how may preoccupation with energy, creating complex stories involving children’s regular meetings a different subjectivity be crystallised within works that can be read as metaphors for the with worms in Victoria’s wet forests, and with viewers to search within their thought post- modern condition and with powerful ants in the dry bushlands of Canberra. By processes and emotional responses, to premonitions of ecological crisis. His paying close attention to the small details of summon within them a personal response to installation ‘Burnt Out’ at the Adelaide these child-animal encounters, we set out to the work, and some realisation of future Festival Centre, 1985, addressed issues of demonstrate how an ethics of vulnerability implications of climate predictions and weather and temperature increase, its effects (Hird, 2012) might attune us to our mortal impending impacts, and the on flora and fauna and its metaphorical entanglements and interdependencies with intergenerational ethics of inaction? connection to the human condition. His final other species, and help us to re-think our work, Elephants For Sale, 2010, is evocative of place in the world. our relationship with animals and deals with Roslyn Taplin is an emerging Australian artist. enormous questions such as the reality of She graduated with double Master of Art Administration and Art majoring in drawing from Affrica TAYLOR has a PhD in cultural extinction and the concept of our the College of Fine Arts, University of New South geography and has learnt and taught for many responsibility for life on this planet. Wales, Sydney in 2009 and is currently a years in remote and urban Australian Aboriginal communities. Her scholarship is marked by a Excerpts from the film ‘Don Driver Magician’, part-time Doctor of Visual Art candidate at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. keen interest in the interdependent relations made by the presenters, will be used to Her works are mainly on paper in pen and ink, between people, places and nonhuman life illustrate the main points. Driver’s work will acrylic, gouache and watercolour but she has forms. Her current research is geared towards be briefly placed within the context of NZ art also worked with mixed media approaches designing pedagogies that respond to the and the work of Australian artists such as involving redrawing on digital reproductions of ecological challenges of human-induced climate Rosalie Gascoigne. her drawings and also video and installation. In change and rapid species extinctions. A many of her works, she has been exploring the commitment to intergenerational and multispecies justice underpins her inquiries into Bridget Sutherland works within the arts as use of glyph or text in drawing. As well as her the ethical, political and pedagogical implications a lecturer, documentary film maker, freelance recent work as an artist, Roslyn is a career of entangled and heterogeneous real-world curator and researcher. She is currently lecturing academic in the area of environment and relations. in Visual Arts and Design at ideaschool, Eastern sustainability. She graduated with a PhD from Institute of Technology, NZ. Bridget has directed Griffith University in 1990 and is currently a feature documentary on the New Zealand Professor and Research Director, Australian As an interdisciplinary scholar, Affrica draws musician David Kilgour and on the sculptor Centre for Sustainable Mining Practices, upon the new material feminisms, more-than- Anish Kapoor. She most recently co- produced University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her human geographies, ecological humanities, and edited the film ‘Don Driver Magician’, a scholarly interest in climate change is a driver non-western world-views and decolonising documentary directed by Paul Judge. for her current art practice. strategies to offer alternatives to the human- centric, individualistic and neo-liberalist paradigms that dominate mainstream education. Paul Judge lectures at WINTEC in Media Arts. She uses a combination of ethnographic and He has directed the short film adaptation of reconstructive methods to investigate and James K Baxter’s poem ‘Lament for Barney Affrica Taylor promote collective and relational forms of Flanagan’ and most recently a documentary on teaching and learning with others, and more Don Driver entitled ‘Don Driver Magician’. He is Ants, worms and young sustainable and liveable worlds. also a writer on art, politics and environmental issues. children: Mutual vulnerabilities, small Affrica is a member of a well-published international research consortium that things, and everyday investigates young children’s postcolonial and common world encounters ecological relations in Hong Kong, Canada and Roslyn Taplin Australia. In her 2013 book, Reconfiguring the in the Anthropocene. Natures of Childhood, she uses reconstructive Studio based inquiry into feminist methods to explore the pedagogical In lieu of reinscribing lofty, geo-sublime and climate change: Towards a affordances of children’s real-life ‘common human-centric imaginaries of the world’ relations, including Aboriginal and settler different subjectivity and Anthropocene, we turn our attention to some Australian children’s relations with places and paradigm shift small-scale and down-to-earth encounters other animals.

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Jessica White of super feet of wood, and the first thing I Luke Fischer ever purchased in a shop was a little hatchet. I had not studied Biology at school, but an Soil and Silence: The Impact Luke Fischer is a Sydney-based poet and of Masculinity in Rural interest in the local epiphytic orchids scholar. His work focusses on connections triggered an aesthetic response. As a result between poetry, philosophy and the Environments of this I became a good boy-naturalist, and environment. His publications include the poetry went on to study Botany at University, and collection Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), a In 1830, Georgiana Molloy and her husband later worked in the Royal Botanic Gardens monograph on Rilke and phenomenology Captain John Molloy arrived on the shores of Sydney. Even as a child the latent poet in me (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015) and a book of Augusta in Western Australia, having set sail saw plants (and especially trees) as mystical bedtime stories (The Blue Forest, 2014), as well from England. With a handful of other as poems, translations and articles in Australian things, as links between the inorganic world settlers, John Molloy intended to establish and international journals. He won the 2012 of minerals in the soil (derived from rocks), himself on the land. Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, was and sentient life. After attending a lecture by shortlisted for the 2012 Newcastle Poetry Prize, However, the Molloy’s arrival was marked the poet Judith Wright at the University of and commended in the 2013 FAW Anne Elder with grief. Not long after the end of their New England (c. 1968) I saw that rainforest Award for a first book of poems. In 2008 he was journey, Georgiana gave birth to a girl, who was not so typical across our wide brown awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University died eleven days later. In her account of the land, and a finite, precious resource of great of Sydney. He has held post-doctoral fellowships child’s death and burial, Georgiana noted biodiversity that had to be conserved. and taught at universities in the U.S. and Germany. that her husband sowed clover over the A very important feature of the landscape of grave and created a bower so that the our little town (of Mullumbimby) was ‘Mount’ English plants could entwine with the native Chincogan, around which I built a whole raft creepers. There is no other account of John of rituals and mythologies. The local story Molloy’s reaction to the loss of his child, Pre-formed Panels was that Chincogan had been surveyed in the which clearly affected him. This is in keeping war at 999 feet high, and needed to be 1,000 with the silent endurance of many men in feet to be a proper mountain. So after the rural areas, which impacts negatively on Imagined Futures: conquest of Everest (1953) I arranged my their psychological health. own expedition to build a twelve inch cairn of Creative Arts By exploring historical literary stones on our big hill’s summit. Practitioners Interrogate representations of the stoic bushman and Our premature and forced departure from more contemporary accounts such as Fleur the Ecocritical Mullumbimby (in 1959) so my step-father MacDonald’s novel Purple Roads, this paper Perspective could find work was very painful, as if we’d articulates the stress and isolation created been expelled from the Garden of Eden There is growing recognition that a major by expectations of masculinity in rural (replete with snake). Throughout my adult effort is necessary to place the perspectives environments. It also contemplates the life (in Sydney) I’d retained an idealized and insights of the humanities and social psychological ramifications of losing one’s memory of the green hills I’d left behind. Not sciences at the forefront of innovative sustenance through the loss of land, that everything was wonderful back then of research based on consideration of the mirrored on a much wider scale by the course, as small-town life (in the forties and changing human condition linked to global original dispossession of Indigenous people. fifties) was very isolating and parochial, and environmental change (Palsson 2013). often racist, with incredible pressure placed Creative practitioners are a vital part of this Jessica WHITE is an independent scholar based in Brisbane. She has a PhD from Birkbeck on individuals to conform and toe the party ecocritical debate. Their original work College, University of London, and is the author line. provides the narrative and visual stimulus for of the award-winning A Curious Intimacy ongoing reflection and analysis in both the Yet throughout rougher passages of my (Penguin, 2007) and Entitlement (Penguin, 2012). academy and popular discussion about the Her short fiction, essays and poetry have also middle ages the growing of orchids/plants human impact on the planet, serving as a appeared widely in Australian literary journals. provided balm, and the mountain of my springboard for others to formulate their childhood remained as a sort of symbolic arguments. Yet it is usually theorists, not the With funding from Arts Queensland, Jessica guiding beacon in my life (and my first book is currently writing a work of creative originators of the creative work, who analyse its of poems, Banyan, was dedicated ’for Chinny’ relevance to contemporary environmental non-fiction, Rosa’s Ghosts: On deafness, ( Chincogan)). writing and reading, about Queensland concerns. This panel looks explores the novelist Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter My childhood was a time of sweet intensity, ecocritical practice of three arts practitioners Maud. She has also received funding from best revisited through the rose-violet tinted whose doctoral work explicitly engages the Australia Council’s Artists with Disability prism of separation, when distance always audiences to consider the impacts of climate Program to write her third novel, The Sea breeds enchantment. For I have been change and our relationship with the non Creatures. Mullum Dreaming all my days. human. Artist Debbie Symons work utilizes environmental data to investigate and Edwin Wilson is a Sydney-based poet and interrogate the inextricable links between painter. Born posthumously, Lismore 1942 (of environmental degradation and free market Edwin Wilson Danish heritage), he originally lived on a farm at capitalism; exploring mankind’s ecological East Wardell. Educated at Mullumbimby and conundrum. Writer Evelyn Tsitas leverages the Murwillumbah High Schools, Armidale Teachers’ popular appeal of the SF genre to explore the Mullumbimby Dreaming College, and the University of New South Wales (BSc, chemistry and botany). He worked as collapse of boundaries between humans and In 1910 the American Poet Robert Frost nature and the agency of the non human. wrote in his notebook that ‘Locality gives art’. science teacher, lecturer at Armidale Teachers’ College, Education Officer (The Australian Scientific photographer Justine Phillip’s I’d grown up on the far north coast of New Museum), and in Community Relations, Sydney research tracks the dingo’s inclusion in cultural South Wales, with the River Stories of the Botanic Gardens (from 1980). On retiring (2003) collections and as an object of scientific Richmond and Clarence, and of the ‘Big he enrolled in art classes. His Mullumbimby investigation, collating visual and narrative Scrub’ that stretched from Lismore to the Retrospective will open at the Tweed Regional history including records of live animals on Queensland border, that some of my Gallery in August 2014. Wilson has published 26 exhibit in zoos around the world. The panel will books. More information, edwinwilson.com.au ancestors had helped chop down. interrogate the tension between didactic The child of pioneers (and step-son of a content and artistic vision when it comes to the cabinet maker) originally saw trees in terms creation of an explicitly environmental discourse in their material work. 35 abstractsprogram

Debbie Symons: VISUAL Place in a Minor Key scared…” ART I argue that, for some people, “abstract” Panel members: TOM DOIG, LAURA information about the environment triggers Making art and its role in JEAN MCKAY & KIM SATCHELL not just emotional distress, but also engaging audiences to The ‘Anthropocene’ in the spectre of ‘Climate concrete physiological disturbances. consider the impacts of Change’, in terms of population, technology This paper will then compare two seemingly and ecology is becoming a brutal reality in disparate conceptions of climate change: 1) climate change. our lifetime. This sixth extinction is an event in social planning terms, as a “super wicked that implicates human activity with problem” (Levin et al, 2012) of “mind- Debbie Symons is currently completing a PhD catastrophic dilemmas unimaginable in the bending complexity, characterised by on Anthropocentrism and the Environmental past, putting into question the conditions of ‘contradictory certitudes’ ” (Rayner, in Dilemma at Monash University. Her work utilises possibility for biologically diverse forms of Hulme, 2009); scientific research and illustrates the immense life. The affective spaces of life, death and tally of species affected in a format that helps extinction are haunting, yet remain 2) in contemporary slang, as a “headf**k”: make the information conceptually manageable. enchanted and riven with delicate “a difficult or awkward situation with no She uses the visual language of universal obvious correct course of action” (www. mediums including maps, graphs, stock market contradictions, uncertainties and challenges. urbandictionary.com, 2014). boards and airport boards to do this. This These challenges register at the limit of method helps to clarify the direct impact humans conceivable language, thought and action. By I argue that there are illuminating are having on the environment and endangered and large the anthropocentrism and human symmetries between the two definitions, species. Symons’ was awarded the Emerging exceptionalism, necessitating revolt, is with “super wicked problem” Artist New Work grant from the Australia Council stubbornly ignored in the sway of a for the Arts in 2009. conceptualising climate change “from totalitarian form of economics. above”, while “headf**k” describes climate The papers of this panel turn toward a change as it is lived, phenomenologically Dr Evelyn Tsitas: FICTION minortorian reading of philosophy, literature, and viscerally, “from below”. and art as a mode of address toward the Writing alternate worlds theme ‘affective habitus’. Seeking to break Tom Doig is a writer, editor and occasional with and acknowledge human folly by performer, born and raised in Wellington, New and hybrid creatures – Zealand. Tom’s non-fiction has been published lessons learned engaging with a more-than human, in The Big Issue, New Matilda, The Lifted Brow, ‘collective assemblage’, living organisms-in- ACF’s Habitat magazine and Maxim Australia. His from literature and the-environment. The enormity and gravity of plays include Survival of the popular culture. the task at hand calls for modest, yet Prettiest, Hitlerhoff and Selling Ice to the Remains audacious proposals instantiating brave of the Eskimos. He has an MA in Hitler Comedy Dr Evelyn Tsitas completed her PhD in approaches to the lifeworld people seek to (University of Melbourne) and is currently a PhD Creative Writing at RMIT University in 2013. She inhabit, share and ultimately defend. These candidate at Monash University, researching the lived experience of climate change in Australia. studied Donna Haraway’s cyborg theories and relational styles of existence and In 2013 Allen & Unwin published his first literary tropes used writing human-animal hybrid micropolitics employ creative practices characters in science fiction. Together with her book, Mörön to Mörön: two men, two bikes, one toward kinship and a multi-species sense of SF novel Almost Human, the research reveals Mongolian misadventure. www.tomdoig.com how the hybrid’s internal conflict mirrors place. anxieties about notions of humanity. Tsitas won the Dorothy Porter Prize for Innovation in Writing in the 2008 Scarlet Stiletto Awards for her short Laura Jean McKay (The story Almost Human, a key chapter in her Tom Doig (Monash doctoral novel. University of Melbourne) University) Species bound: pushing Justine Phillip: SCIENTIFIC “Global warming is a PHOTOGRAPHY the limits of the species headf**k”: using oral boundaries through historical methods to contemporary fiction Exhibiting research: the engage with people’s lived dingo’s inclusion in experiences of climate This paper looks at the notion of ‘the species cultural collections and as boundary’ in the context of Australian change an object of scientific contemporary fiction. Defined by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin in Postcolonial investigation. This paper will discuss the opportunities, Ecocriticism as ‘the discursive construction of and challenges, facing social researchers a strict dividing line between “human” and Justine PhilLip is currently completing a PhD wishing to “access” people’s lived “other animal” ’, the species boundary is an in Ecosystems Management in the School of experiences of climate change via oral enabling structure that creates an Environmental and Rural Science at the historical methods: namely, extended, University of New England. Her project traces environment in which the livestock industries semi-structured interviews conducted and companion relationships exist and power the cultural history of the dingo, examining their within a “life narrative” (McAdams, 2006) relationship with human society for over 4,000 is defined, clearly and anthropocentrically. years, as both a traditional companion animal frame. Case studies will be drawn from While social, news and television media and apex predator in the Australian environment. interviews, exploring the relationships seemingly seeks to reinforce these Philip’s research brings history into the public between lived experience, narrative, affect boundaries, contemporary literary fiction domain and offers valuable insight into a and trauma, and focusing on how different writers that represent animals in their novels complex human-animal interface, and a greater texts (scientific; literary; pop-cultural) have seem to be actively testing them. understanding of the dingo’s unique history at affected different individuals: the edge of human society. In this paper I discuss Eva Hornung’s novel “I read the IPCC report for Australia [2007], Dog Boy, which examines the human-animal and I didn’t sleep properly for two weeks—I nexus. Hornung questions the species had an anxiety attack. I freaked out. I was so

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boundaries between humans and other Harrison, Deborah Bird Rose and Lorraine appropriate to the extinction of a species, the animals through representations of human- Shannon a Special Issue in TEXT Writing Creates journal resulting from this act moves other animal relationships and the trope of Ecology and Ecology Creates Writing. between oneric states of mind and metamorphosis. Drawing from scenes in Dog philosophical reflection, between poetic Boy, I ask whether this fictional text observation and critical analysis. In it the successfully pushes the species boundary; “Stories, Prayers, Poems very manner in which philosophical thought or whether, through the limitations of is pursued and ethical duties are fulfilled human’s representing ‘others’, the text and Hauntings: A come into question as the abstract notion of merely reinforces the boundaries it sought to species extinction gives way to the ghostly erase. Decorum for the yet palpable presence of Ōkami suffusing the places of its former habitation on the face of Laura Jean McKay is the author of Holiday in Anthropocene.” the earth. The past is not done with us, even Cambodia, a short story collection that explores if it is a ghost. the electric zone where local and foreign lives Panel members: JAMES meet. Her writing has been published in The HATLEY, KUMI KATO & JANET James Hatley After twenty years at Best Australian Stories, The Big Issue, Women of LAURENCE Salisbury University in the philosophy Letters, Going Down Swinging and The Lifted department, I have now been reassigned to Brow. She is a PhD candidate at the University of The three presentations for this panel environmental studies, a department I played Melbourne and the recipient of a Martin Bequest engage in acts of responsive witness in the an active role in establishing. My specialty is Traveling Scholarship 2014. face of anthropogenic species extinction, one in 20th Century Continental Philosophy, with of the defining characteristics of the an emphasis on the thought of Emmanuel Anthropocene. In responsive witness, one is Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In my intent not only upon the indexical elements work on environmental philosophy, I also Kim Satchell (Southern of testimony, which is to say, pointing out focus on the American personalist tradition, and identifying a species rendered extinct in which includes thinkers such as Waldo Cross University) recent memory. One is also called upon to Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Henry Bugbee, receive and nurture the legacy of that Stephen Cavell and Edward Mooney. In the Antonio Boliva’s On the Edge species, however ambivalent and fragile our last twenty years, I have published papers in of the Fold: Madness and all-too-human relationship with it has proven the fields of Ethics, Social Justice, Extinction to be. In responsive witness a species is Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, revealed, in spite of its extinction, as Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Extinction In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari remaining living kind and kin. Responsive Studies, Teaching Pedagogy and the refer to crazy etymological exercises and witness in turn calls for what Deborah Bird Philosophy of Literature. Some of the titles: conceptual personas as philosophical Rose has termed “recuperative work,” the “The Uncanny Goodness of Being Edible to athleticism. They posit the thinker in the searching out of “the hidden histories and Bears”; “Naming Adam Naming Coyote”; conceptual persona of a surfer and then the local possibilities that illuminate “Blood Intimacies: Biodicy and Keeping Faith renounce the sporting figure in pursuit of alternatives to our embeddedness in with Ticks”; “The Virtue of Temporal another. However as a surfer and thinker, violence” (Rose, 24). The three Discernment: Rethinking the Extent and there is no need to disavow the connection presentations engage in a hybrid discourse Coherence of the Good in a Time of Mass but rather rearticulate the dynamism of both of word and image, of poem and essay, of Species Extinction”; “Impossible Mourning: with personas of a coastal philosophy. The prayer and argument, in order to address not Two Attempts to Remember Annihilation”; breakthrough came when I met Antonio only how the legacy of living kinds transcend “Persecution and Expiation: A Talmudic Boliva, who became friend, stranger, sufi, their extinction but also call upon us as Amplification of the Enigma of Responsibility shaman and confidant. His near death humans to renew the very terms by which we in Levinas”; and ” “Speaking with Discretion: experience and consequent zest for life, understand our significance as a living kind Religious and Philosophical Perplexities in helped me to see everything in a new light. upon the face of the earth. Levinas.” The resultant self-directed field and archival work of this collaboration has proved James Hatley Kumi Kato invaluable in producing a minor literature of place. This paper provides a brief prologue proceeding to discuss some of the key Presentation A: “Walking Presentation B: concepts of a coastal philosophy, working in with kami, the Large- an affective register with creative practice “Evacuations and both literary and artistic. Highlighting Mouthed, Pure God.” Extinctions: kami-Itate- Boliva’s skill in ‘pareidolia’ encouraged by The extinction of the Honshu Wolf, known in Fukushima.” Leonardo as a method to exercise the Japanese as Ōkami, is currently dated from imagination, disparaged by sceptics as the After the tsunami of 2011 in which 20,000 January 25, 1905, when the last known portent of madness. Further theorising persons perished and nuclear radiation individual of what science has named Canis ‘hierophony’ (sacred in the ordinary) as flooded an already inundated landscape, lupus hodophilax was killed by foresters on practice, in the context of cascading Fukushima has become an “evacuated the Kii Peninsula. But the fact of Ōkami’s biological diversity by species extinction, region,” a place lost to human habitation extinction did not spell the end of its legacy. toward kinship and a multi-species sense of with over 260,000 persons still being denied On a monument erected near the site of the place. permission to return. This moment of 1905 killing, this haiku by Toshio Mihashi desolation has symbolic affinities to the (translated here into English) is inscribed: “I Kim Satchell is a mid-north coast of New earlier extinction of Ōkami, which also made walk/ with that wolf/ that is no more.” Taking South Wales surfer, poet, performer, writer, and its home in this area. In these two moments up Mihashi’s words as an injunction, the academic (doctoral candidate) based at Southern of devastating loss—of species and of Cross University (Coffs Harbour). His research author walked the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage habitat—the condition of the Anthropocene interests are in Cultural Studies and the Route in January of 2011 with a view to makes itself known and calls for one’s Environmental Humanities particularly becoming mindful of Ōkami’s continuing witness and action. In this case, a wolf’s concerning the literature of place. He has significance to those who would sojourn in extinction holds haunting implications for the published in leading academic journals the the mountains of the Kii Peninsula. In Cultural Studies Review, Performance Paradigm, loss of land and life due to radiation searching out a rhetorical decorum Continuum. Most recently co-edited with Martin contamination. 37 abstractsprogram

In working out these themes, this hauntolology: “the material violence of the • Cameron Muir (Broken) presentation focuses on a Shinto shrine at past emerges, reincarnate, re-fleshed, in our Itate, an evacuated village in the Fukushima future, and in a politics for which our last • Eben Kirksey (Hope) region. Just two years after the tsunami, the centuries of politics cannot prepare or even • Emily O’Gorman shrine burned down on April 1, 2013. A forewarn us.” These words were recently home to wolf worship for nearly a thousand cited by Deborah Bird Rose in her review of (Belonging) years, the shrine’s ceiling was composed of “Residues,” Janet Laurence’s most recent • Kate Wright (Becoming- 237 meticulously painted panels with diverse installation at the Hugo Gallery in Adelaide. with) images of wolves. Miraculously, these Rose argues that Laurence’s artistic work images were carefully photographed and has persistently sought to alter our all-too- • Mattthew Kearnes catalogued just a month before their human relationship with the future through a (Spirit)Thom van Dooren incineration. In the wake of this disaster renewed engagement with what is spectral within a disaster, of Itate within Fukushima, and unattended to in the past, particularly (Care) a question emerges: What is to be the fate of the past as it has been undergone by a more • Tom Bristow (Memory) the many stories that gathered around this than human world. And this occurs even as shrine, stories that included the daily lives of we come to name the geological era in which Tom Bristow is President of ASLEC-ANZ an those who worshipped here, as well as the we live after our all-too-human selves. editor of PAN, a board member of the stories of the yearly journey of the wolf as a Given her artistic oeuvre, Laurence serves as Australasian Consortium of Humanities Gokenzoku-sama, a holy messenger an apt respondent to the first two papers of Research and a current fellow of the HRC. Tom’s research projects include the placement of representing the mountain gods to the this panel. Through image and commentary, artists in herbaria across Australia (funded by congregation? These and yet other stories, Laurence will reflect upon the ways in which the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund), the including the fate of those who live in the the extinction of and other living kinds Cultural Value of Seeds (funded by the shadows of atomic bombs and nuclear call upon the artist to gaze into a future in Cooperative Research Centre for Remote reactors, of tsunamis and the extinction of which the ghostsŌkami of other living kinds are Economic Participation, a monograph, Lyricism in wolves, might find their place again in this gazing back. the Anthropocene: Literary Geography and its landscape in the rebuilding of this shrine Ecopoetic Counterpoint (Palgrave, 2014) and a Janet Laurence has had a long and under its now altered circumstances at Itate. children’s book, Our Planet and You: Ecological profound engagement with the ‘life-world’. It Algebra, which will be developed as part of a In planning its restoration, hope is offered by seems that much of the desolation that has research project dealing with empathy for the identifying and nurturing the bases for currently gripped the Australian landscape is more-than-human world (Penguin, 2016/17). community resilience, one of which involves beyond healing, habitats and species are Tom will join the CHE’s ‘Shaping the Modern’ local religious beliefs related to the land. programme at the University of Melbourne later decimated and yet Janet Laurence explores in 2014. Kumi Kato is Professor of Environmental what it might mean to heal, albeit Studies, Wakayama University, Japan and metaphorically, the natural environment. Matthew Kearnes completed his BSc Research Associate at the University of Fusing this sense of communal loss with a (honours) in Human Geography at Macquarie Queensland, Australia. As a member of an search for connection with powerful University and his PhD at the University of ecohumanities scholars group, Kangaloon, life-forces her work alerts us to the subtle Newcastle. Before arriving at UNSW he held founded in Australia, she defines herself as dependencies between,the elements that post-doctoral positions at the Department of an ecohumanitarian activist who ‘acts on’ form our eco-system nature and culture In Geography at the Open University and the diverse environmental issues we face today. the face of this, we do yearn for a form of Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Most recently he held a Research Council’s UK Her approach is a ‘creative conservation’ that alchemy, for the power of enchantment or Academic Fellowship at the Institute of Hazard, attempts to emphasise strength, beauty, transformation. It seems that the place for Risk and Resilience Department of Geography, trust and the joy of being in this world. this sensation is created through art. Durham University. Matthew’s research is Activism here has a broader meaning situated between the fields of Science and embracing research, education, creative Technology Studies (STS), environmental work and celebration with the foremost sociology and contemporary social theory. His priority on community empowerment and current work is focused on the social and political dimensions of nanotechnology and benefits. Before returning to Japan, Kumi A Lexicon for the synthetic biology, climate change and society, worked in Australia for 24 years, starting Environmental and the social and political dimensions of with teaching languages at secondary climate modification and geoengineering. His schools and a business school, and training Humanities research has been funded by the Economic and teachers of foreign languages. She gained a Social Research Council (ESRC, UK), the Master degree in Environmental The Environmental Humanities inhabit a European Commission and the UK Government. Management & Education at the School of difficult space of simultaneous critique and Environmental Sciences, Griffith University action. Our work is grounded in an important Eben Kirksey holds a three-year DECRA and a doctorate from the University of tension between, on the one hand, the fellowship from the Australian Research Council Queensland. She also has a Master in common critical focus of the humanities in in the Environmental Humanities program at ‘unsettling’ dominant narratives, and on the UNSW in Sydney, Australia. Writing in Applied Linguistics (Intercultural collaboration with Stefan Helmreich he coined Communication). Her research focuses on other, the dire need for thoughtful and constructive practice in these dark the term “multispecies ethnography” to describe human ethics seen in various human-nature new approaches for studying contact zones interactions, most strongly manifested in times. where the lines separating nature and culture traditional forms of natural resource use As a way into this fraught space, each have broken down. His latest book, an edited – e.g. fisheries, agriculture, forestry. member of this panel will offer a provocative collection called The Multispecies Salon (Duke, 2014), leverages collaborations with artists and engagement with a key concept for the biological scientists to illuminate how diverse Environmental Humanities, addressing its organisms are entangled in political, economic, potential to open up new approaches to the and cultural systems. Freedom in Entangled Janet Laurence, Visual Artist world in this time of rapid change. The panel Worlds (Duke, 2012), explored an indigenous is chaired by Deborah Bird Rose. political movement in West Papua.

Presentation C: “Residues.” Cameron Muir is Australian Research Council Nick Mansfield has written concerning Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National Panel speakers and Topics: University and the National Museum of Australia. the Derridian notion of

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From 2013 to 2014, he was a Fellow at the Rachel cultural complexity in a scientific research current focus is on strengthening intellectual Carson Center for Environment and Society, setting? property-led business development in the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, public National Agricultural Research 4.Is traditional knowledge of seeds liable to Germany, and in 2014 will be a visiting scholar at System. He contributed to the development The University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the be subjected to bio-piracy? author of The Broken Promise of Agricultural of “ICAR Guidelines for Intellectual Property Progress: An Environmental History (Routledge The contributions and outcomes of the Management and Technology Transfer/ 2014). colloquium will be published in a special Commercialization, 2006” and its edition of the International Journal of Rural implementation. He expects to implement Emily O’Gorman is an environmental historian Law and Policy. new ICAR guidelines on ‘Professional Service with interdisciplinary research interests. Her Functions (Training, Consultancy, Contract NB: The UNE Seed Colloquium is limited to research within the environmental humanities Research and Contract Service)’ to serve focuses on how people live with rivers, wetlands, 30 people, speakers and delegates that interested agencies outside the agricultural and climates. Currently a Lecturer at in the specifically registered for this event. Please research system. He has also involved Department of Environment and Geography at see Tom Bristow or Mark Shepheard if you himself in creation of a public-limited Macquarie University, she holds PhD from the would like further clarification. School of History at ANU and undertook a for-profit Company for the organization, postdoctoral candidacy in the Australian Centre namely, AgrInnovate India Ltd. to further for Cultural Environmental Research at the SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES: bring in more professionalism in technology University of Wollongong. She has published in a transfer from ICAR and agriculture range of journals and is the author of Flood Dr. Matthew Rimmer is an Australian universities in India. Country: An Environmental History of the Research Council Future Fellow, working on Murray-Darling Basin (CSIRO Publishing, 2012). Intellectual Property and Climate Change. She is an Associate Editor of the journal He is an associate professor at the ANU Ms. Kylie Lingard is a PhD candidate at Environmental Humanities. College of Law, and an associate director of the Australian Centre for Agriculture and the Australian Centre for Intellectual Law. Her PhD, sponsored by the Cooperative Thom van Dooren is a Senior Lecturer in Property in Agriculture (ACIPA). He holds a Environmental Humanities at the University of Research Centre for Remote Economic BA (Hons) and a University Medal in Participation, seeks to identify and develop New South Wales. His most recent research literature, and a LLB (Hons) from the focuses on ethics and extinction and can be legal and institutional mechanisms that found in his forthcoming book Flight Ways: Life Australian National University. He is a support diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia member of the ANU Climate Change Islander interests in the commercial University Press, May 2014). He is also co-editor Institute. He has published widely on development of native plants. Kylie is also of the international, open-access, journal copyright law and information technology, the Unit Coordinator for Indigenous Natural Environmental Humanities. patent law and biotechnology, access to Resource Issues and the Law at the medicines, clean technologies, and University of New England. Her research Kate Wright is a postdoctoral research fellow traditional knowledge. His work is archived at the University of New England, Armidale. interests include legal methodologies, at SSRN Abstracts and Bepress Selected participation mechanisms, self-determined Wright’s research is focused on exploring ways of Works. living ethically in a mixed community of humans development strategies and the legal and nonhumans at a time of radical recognition of Indigenous peoples human environmental change. Her current project rights. involves developing a community garden in Dr. Sally Norton is Director of the collaboration with Armidale Aboriginal community Australian Grains Genebank at Horsham in members and conducting a collaborative Victoria. The genebank exists to acquire, multispecies ethnography of the site. Ms Leanne Liddle is a scientist, lawyer conserve, characterize, and distribute grain and proud Arrernte Aboriginal woman from crop genetic resources to scientists, Central Australia with strong practical breeders and other users in Australia and experience within the arid region. Leanne worldwide for plant breeding and research. currently lives in Adelaide where she works The facility provides for Australian with the Department of Premier and Cabinet UNE Seed Colloquium cooperation in the global system of as the Manager for government programs on genebanks in accordance with international the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjata PANEL MEMBERS: DR MATTHEW agreements controlling the conservation, lands and the West Coast. She previously RIMMER, DR SALLY NORTON, MS distribution and use of genetic resources. worked for the South Australian Department SUE SCHEELE, DR SHASHANK for Environment and Heritage within a unique environmental project called Kuka MAURIA, MS KYLIE LINGARD, MS Ms Sue Scheele is an ethnobotanist with Kanyini that used the intimate and valuable LEANNE LIDDLE, DR STEPHEN Landcare Research, a NZ Crown-owned knowledge of Aboriginal people to retain both research institute. Her research focuses on FORBES, DR RUTH HAWTHORN, plant and animal species in the environment cultural uses of New Zealand native plants, married with western science. Leanne has DR PETER CUNEO particularly weaving plants. She manages a also worked for the United Nations and national collection of NZ flax (Phormium) The aim of the colloquium is to identify UNESCO. She has years of experience as a varieties and the Nga Tipu Whakaoranga challenges associated with cultural interests board member on several NRM boards as database on traditional uses of native plants. and seed bio banking; recognise agreed well with the non- government organisation, Sue is interested in issues relating to access principles; and, contribute to defining ways Bush Heritage Australia. Leanne is and benefit sharing of biological resources of moving ahead with how indigenous particularly interested in utilizing practical and is a member of an advisory group interests in seeds should be protected. traditional knowledge and skills with western (currently in recess) to the government on science to manage the landscape and her The panellists have been asked to work developing a domestic regulatory framework expertise lies in Aboriginal use of fire. through the following questions: related to bio- discovery. 1.Do we need to acknowledge cultural interests when bio-banking seeds and using Dr. Stephen Forbes is Director of the Dr. Shashank Mauria is Assistant them in research processes? Botanic Gardens of South Australia. Stephen Director General (Intellectual Property and views botanic gardens as the scaffolding for 2.Can cultural interests travel with a seed Technology Management) in the Indian exploring our relationship with the plants throughout such processes? Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). that transform light into our life on Earth. ICAR is an autonomous organisation within 3.Can current legal mechanisms, such as Stephen has utilised the Gardens and diverse the Indian Ministry of39 Agriculture. His intellectual property, be used to deal with partnerships to contribute plant-based abstractsprogram solutions to urban environmental and social Additional Contributors issues through programs including sustainable landscapes, green infrastructure and community capacity building. Stephen The ANU Apiculture has also utilised the Gardens’ collections and knowledge in plant conservation programs Society (hive tour, Saturday and was responsible for South Australia’s lunchtime) biodiversity conservation policy, No species loss. Stephen currently chairs the South The ANU Apiculture Society is a student led Australian Environment Department’s initiative focused on bees and beekeeping. Aboriginal Reconciliation Committee and is a The project aims to develop and maintain a strong advocate of partnerships to explore sustainable enterprise producing honey from the application of Traditional Ecological hives located across the campus. In doing so Knowledge. Stephen has worked with the we wish to emphasise and enhance values of Watarru community in the Anangu local community, social justice, and Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands on sustainability. Through beekeeping and the the successful Kuka Kanyini project. conscientious pursuit of ecologically sound Stephen is Chair of the Council of Heads of production and distribution practices, we aim Australian Botanic Gardens and of the to augment and enhance a sense campus Australian Seed Bank Partnership and has community. The group seeks to further published widely in the cultural history of discussion and understanding of a range of plants, biodiversity conservation and urban issues relating to sustainability such as landscape management. biodiversity, ecosystem services and food systems. Join the Apiculture Society for a brief tour of the hives and a discussion about Dr. Ruth Hawthorn is currently our activities on campus. researching “Seed Banks: The Risk and Loss of Value in Plants” for the CRC REP, involving a case study of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP). Approaching this from an environmental humanities perspective, Ruth is interested in how cultural value (Traditional Knowledge about plants and their role in healing, ritual and myth, for instance) may be “washed out” in current seed-banking procedures which privilege scientific commodification. Schemes such as the MSBP’s “Useful Plants Project” address this very issue and indicate a significant shift Somebody’s Aunt from Kew’s historical colonial practices to the MSBP’s current work that is more Performs CARRYING CAPACITY (Saturday respectful towards indigenous populations lunchtime) and open to questions of cultural memory. A performance by an ensemble of dancers known for their mix of movement, music and voice in public spaces. Dr. Peter Cuneo is Manager – Natural Heritage at The Australian Botanic Garden This dance work thematically explores both Mount Annan, where he is responsible for our planet’s capacity to support life and our conservation planning and natural area capacity to support our planet. The dance management. He also manages the seed begins with a procession of the seasons. bank program at the Australian Plant Bank Choreographic Director: Jane Ingall. Dancer- (located at Mount Annan), including the Choreographers: Anne Embry, Julie Rickwood, partnership with Kew’s Millennium Seed Sandra Kay Lauffenburger, Sue Andrews, Bank. Peter has been closely involved in the Susan McGrath, Jane Ingall horticultural development of The Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan since it opened www.facebook.com/SomebodysAunt in 1988. His research interest is the weed ecology of invasive African olive, which is a problem weed at the Garden. He has written several research papers on this species as part of his PhD (by publication) with Macquarie University.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Elspeth Probyn, whose article ‘Shame in the Habitus’ was a point of inspiration for this conference. The conference organizing committee would like to thank the staff of the ANU Humanities Research Centre: Debjani Ganguly, Colette Gilmour, Tom Ford (now at the University of Melbourne) and Josh Wodak. Also at ANU, we thank Emma Arnold, Paul McLay and Mark Cameron. We are very grateful to many people at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, particularly Lucy Burnett, Hamish Carr, Anne McKendry, Jessica Scott and Erika von Kaschke. Philippa Maddern was extremely supportive of the decision to combine the CHE ‘Shaping the Modern’ collaboratory for 2014 with the ASLEC-ANZ biennial and Stephanie Trigg has been characteristically generous with her support of, and enthusiasm for, this event. Thanks are due to Melissa Langenbaker, Paul Martin, Mark Perry and Mark Shepheard at the University of New England. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of UNE’s Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law, as well as Ninti One: the CRC for Remote Economic Participation. From ASLEC-ANZ, we thank Sarah Edwards, Emma Nicoletti, Evelyn Tsitas and the many postgraduate volunteers who will be working in different ways during the conference. From the University of Melbourne, we thank Alanna Myers, Lilian Pearce, Susan Pyke and Hayley Singer, as well as Stephen Daff. From the Australian National University, we thank Emma Davies. We are grateful to Tim Collins and Reiko Goto Collins, and particular thanks to Andrew Denton, whose beautiful photographs appear in this programme.

Tom Bristow Charles Dawson Grace Moore Linda Williams Josh Wodak

41 CAMPUS MAP - THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

1 - University House, Conference Accommodation 120 - Sir Roland Wilson Building, Conference Venue