C-M-I-T Abstracts Wednesday 6 September

Parallel Panels Session A

Panel 1: Inter-genre Inter-national: Artists in Collaboration

Anne-Marie Creamer Anne-Marie Creamer is a British artist whose work experiments with cinematic forms using video, drawing, literary texts, filmed staged scenarios, and live voice-over. For Anne-Marie stories are always complexly entangled in place. She exhibits at venues such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Sir John Soane's Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum and Kunstvereniging Diepenheim. She has programmed events with Cubit Gallery and Parasol unit foundation, and she was co-curator on ‘Kome til deg i Tidende– a meta newspaper’, with the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum. More at http://amcreamer.net/

In this panel, four artists will discuss the challenges, complexities, and rewards of international collaboration—a process that may be especially difficult but also especially fruitful when the pairs of artists did not know each other before beginning to work together. Anne-Marie Creamer, a British artist, who “over the years [has] come to prefer the title ‘storyteller,’” and Laura-Gray Street, a poet from Virginia, will talk about their collaboration on the cinematic possibilities of poetry and place, story and structure—who tells the stories of place and how? They will also address the challenge of exploring landscape and the narrative of landscape while residing on different continents—and how a trans-Atlantic collaboration creates its own landscape of narrative. Barbara Howey, a British painter, and Ann Fisher-Wirth, a poet from Mississippi, will consider how their paintings and poems address cross-cultural aspects of damaged landscapes in the American South and Britain. Their presentation will span various personal, political, and historical aspects of their encounters with trees within landscapes that have been marred by pollution, flytipping, and neglect. The poets will also give brief readings from their work, and (if possible) the visual artists’ work will accompany the readings on PowerPoint.

Ann Fisher-Wirth, Ann Fisher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems is Dream Cabinet (Wings Press 2012). With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP 2013). Ann’s collaborative

manuscript Mississippi with the

photographer Maude Schuyler Clay will appear from Wings Press in 2017. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards. She has been granted residencies at The Mesa Refuge; Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Hedgebrook; and CAMAC/Centre d’Art, Marnay, France. In April 2017 she will be Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College, Virginia. A Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she teaches and directs the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi. Also she teaches yoga in Oxford, MS. http://annfisherwirth.com is sorely in need of an update. Barbara Howey Barbara Howey is an artist based in East Anglia in the UK. Her work centres on contemporary painting within differing projects. She is currently guest editor of The Journal of Contemporary Painting on a double issue exploring the idea of Commitment in Painting, to be published later in 2017. She has also recently curated an exhibition focusing on contemporary figurative women painters called Real Lives - Painted

Pictures. (2016-2017). Her recent painting project focuses on how urban and rural landscapes merge in a terrain of alienation, waste and dereliction. She was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2014 and is exhibiting in a 3 Museum tour to China as part of the Contemporary British Painting group (2017). More at http://barbara-howey.co.uk

Laura Grey Street Laura-Gray Street is author of Pigment and Fume (Salmon Poetry) and Shift Work (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks), and co-editor with Ann Fisher-Wirth of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP). Her work has appeared in Blackbird, The Colorado Review, The Notre Dame Review, Poecology, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Street holds an MA from UVA and MFA from Warren Wilson. She is associate professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. More at www.lauragraystreet.com

Panel 2: ‘Managed’ spaces

William Welstead Interpreting Natural Heritage: Collaboration between science and the humanities

Rachel Dowse The Streams Run Both Ways: Sense of place in a man-made natural landscape

Paul Wilson ‘Not-yet’: raising the book, re-writing voices of Utopia

Panel 3: Writing meat: flesh-eating and literature since 1900

Rachael Allen ‘A Grain of Brain’: Poetically Resurrecting the Cow

Sean McCorry ‘Soylent Green is People!’: Anthropophagy and Population Ecology

John Miller The Literary Invention of In Vitro Meat

Panel 4: Digital media

Lykke Guanio-Uluru Lykke Guanio-Uluru is Assistant Professor of Literature at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the author of Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer (2015), published by Palgrave Macmillan. Dr Guanio-Uluru has published several articles in peer-reviewed international journals. She teaches multiple courses in literature, digital aesthetics and adaptation, and is the editor of the Nordic Journal of Child Lit Aesthetics. Professional affiliations include the Nordic Network of Narrative Studies, the Ethics Programme at the

Digital media, artist and plant: James Cameron’s Avatar – A Cure for Plant Blindness? Digital media, artist and plant: James Cameron’s Avatar – A Cure for Plant Blindness? John Charles Ryan (2016) notes that “plants constitute the vast majority of the world’s living things” since “the global bio-mass (phytomass) might be one-thousand times greater than animal biomass (zoomass), although estimates are highly variable and measuring techniques unreliable” (41). In contrast to their prevalence, plants gain relatively little cultural attention – perhaps because we simply do not see them. J. H. Wandersee and E. E. Schussler (1999) have conducted extensive research into this phenomenon, labelling the human condition of not seeing and therefore not appreciating plants, as “plant blindness”. An innovative blend of computer generated images and live action filming in stereoscopic 3D, the world’s highest grossing film to date[1], James Cameron’s Avatar, features the vibrant and memorable flora of the alien moon Pandora, rendered with the hyper-reality of computer games’ aesthetics. Drawing on Ryan’s (2016, p. 41) distinction between the extrinsic (plants being acted upon) and intrinsic (plants acting) capacities of plants, this paper analyses the narrative function of plants in Avatar. Discussing the role of plants in relation to Cameron’s new

University of Oslo, the research programme Nature in Children’s Literature, ENSCAN and DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association.

media techniques, the paper asks whether the central role of plants in Avatar combined with their graphically vivid rendering may serve as a cure to ease the human condition of plant blindness, or whether their augmented reality looks make real world plants even less notable in comparison.

[1] Not adjusted for inflation. See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/.

Bronwin Patrickson PhD in Computer Game Design from Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. Currently working as an Mobility/Interactive media/Travel Writing researcher and tutor at University of Leeds.

Mobilising the Environmental Imagination in Hybrid Landscapes Smartphone technologies are turning landscapes in to blended environments, enriched with GPS enabled data-scapes and the virtually enhanced behaviours of 3D graphical characters. By mediating environmental connectivity these technologies can transform the experience of being in nature to one of virtual distraction, but they can also promote that experience by making it easier to navigate and harder to ignore. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has persuasively shown how technology transforms the experience of bering in nature. In the context of the industrial revolution, he argued that train travel offered a heady cocktail of speed, spectacle, ease and affordability. The tourists aboard these trains that quickly criss-crossed the countryside might have revelled in the passing view, but always from the vantage point of their train windows. During the industrial era it was the train and the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks that filtered the traveller’s experience of the passing countryside. Jørgensen extended this thinking to examine the experience of the natural world in a digital age, where trains may well be classed a slower, more traditional travel option. Digital technologies, by contrast, can make something akin to a close reading of the environment accessible for home viewers via the (surprisingly popular) extended broadcast of footage collected from web cameras attached to slow moving ocean liners, for example. Jørgensen challenged the notion that technology necessarily implies speed, or spark and argued instead that mediation is a way of making connections.

Now there are numerous mobile phone applications that also promote independent travel options like driving (using

collated, socially reviewed travel guides like Roadtrippers), walking (e.g. the personal tracker MapMyHike, the flora identifier Leafsnap, the virtual treasure hunt network, Geocaching and social networking services for adventure travellers like Yonder), cycling (the fitness tracker, MapMyRide, or Strava, the application that allow athletes in different locations to compete against each other virtually), running (the narrativised running game, Zombies Run!), or simply playing in nature (with the mobile game that challenges players to collect, fight and exchange geolocated, virtual creatures, Pokémon Go).

In this paper I explore Jørgensen’s notion of mediation as a process for making connections in light of these sorts of social, location based travel applications. By comparing these popular applications with some of their forerunners created by experimental locative artists, such as Mapping the Commons (2010) which sought to map commonalities of life in Athens, as opposed to place-marks, or the free iphone application WalkSpace that allows users to recreate Bloom’s walks in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in alternate destinations around the world, I consider what mainstreaming might mean in terms of mobile emplacement within landscape and how creative digital activists might continue to agitate for enchantment, whilst also potentially making environmental care a commonplace context.

Dr Bradon Smith Bradon Smith is a Research Associate at The Open University, with interests in the representation of climate change and energy in contemporary literature. My doctoral research looked at contemporary popular science writing and representations of science in contemporary British fiction and drama. From 2007-2010 I co-convened the Cultures of Climate Change research group at CRASSH, University of

Breaking the Grid: computer games as sites of ecological reflection In this paper I will argue that computer games have the potential to offer spaces for ecological reflection, critique, and engagement. However, in many computer games, elements of the games’ procedural rhetoric limit this potential. In his account of American foundation narratives, environmental historian David Nye notes that the ‘second-creation’ narratives that he identifies “retain widespread attention [...] children play computer games such as Sim City, which invite them to create new communities from scratch in an empty virtual landscape…a malleable, empty space implicitly organized by a grid” (Nye, 2003). I will begin by showing how grid-based resource management games encode a set of narratives in which nature is the location of resources to be extracted and used. These grids are certainly lines that restrict, rather than enable ecological thought.

Cambridge. Since then, I have held positions at the Open University, the University of Edinburgh and as an AHRC Knowledge Placement Fellow at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). I am currently working on the AHRC funded Stories of Change project, a part of the cross-council Connected Communities theme, and in particular leading on the Energy Generation strand. A special issue of the journal Resilience, which I am editing with Prof Axel Goodbody, on ‘Stories of Energy: Literary, Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives’ is forthcoming in 2018.

I will then examine the climate change game Fate of the World (2011), drawing it into comparison with game-like online policy tools such as the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change’s 2050 Calculator, and models such as the environmental scenario generation tool Foreseer. I will argue that while both may be narrowly successful in generating engagement with climate change and resource issues, in other ways their effect may be disempowering: firstly, they emphasise the scale and complexity of environmental problems; secondly, the prioritise technocratic top-down policy responses at the expense of changes on the level of individual behaviour. I then turn to examples of digital games and playing strategies that offer more plural and open-ended engagement with environmental concerns. The on/off-line game World Without Oil (2007) encouraged players to respond to a fictional oil crisis, generating sustained and solution-focussed engagement. Examples of ‘expansive play’ also reveal ecocritical playing strategies in the sandbox-game Minecraft, a game which may initially seem to take the logic of resource extraction to its extreme. Finally, I look at David OReilly’s off-beat game-animation Mountain (2014), which in its unflinching mountain removes the agency of the player, and mocks the ‘nature as resource’ model of the games previously discussed. Instead Mountain invites an ontological reconsideration of the player’s relationship with the non-human.

Panel 5: Aquapelagic poetics

Ros Ambler-Alderman

‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’: Juliana Spahr and the poetry of erosion In ‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another’ (2011), the American poet Juliana Spahr invites us ‘to gather, to change, and to consider sea’. In considering the sea throughout her poem Spahr brings to bear a preoccupation with ecological connectedness and complexity. Not only are ideas of the sea and its ecosystems explored within the work, but Spahr's formal choices such as repetition and variation also allow her to model and hence to think through both ecological and linguistic connectedness and contextualisation, hashing, erosion, and growth, in a way that both interrogates and extends the ecological science with which she engages. As Joan Retallack

has pointed out, the poem itself ‘adopts nature’s manner of operation (the hashing part)’. Yet at the same time as Spahr draws these deep connections between text and world, she also critiques the analogical and metaphorical patterns of our thinking. This paper explores this dichotomy, asking how Spahr uses a shifting perspective from sea to land to reveal how our representations of the world, whether literary or scientific, construct our notions of the phenomena they purport to describe and so shape our behaviour towards the natural world.

Pippa Marland Pippa Marland is a Research Fellow on the 'Land Lines: Modern British Nature Writing' project at the University of Leeds. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge collection Walking, Landscape and Environment and is currently preparing her monograph Ecocritical Island Studies for publication.

‘Archipelagic refraction: reading the Docklands through the Western Isles in Stephen Watts' Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds’ Stephen Watts’ experimental prose work Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds was, according to the notes which preface the main body of the text, "Written late 1980s/ Found 2012/ Typed onto laptop July 2013". The narrative's frequent shifts between London's Isle of Dogs and the Western Isles of Scotland, along with the fragmentary, 'found' nature of the writing, provide a sense of creative slippage between the two landscapes and the characters who inhabit them, and effect a form of internalised archipelagraphy which brings a new dimension to archipelagic and literary island studies. This paper explores the work's deep rooted social-ecological dimension, in which the devastation of working class communities and collective cultural memory which follows the decline of the dockyards and the re-development of the Isle of Dogs during the 1980s is refracted through Watts’ reminiscences of living on the island of North Uist. Throughout the text there is a flexibility to the term ‘island’ such that it sometimes refers to the Isle of Dogs, sometimes to the Scottish Western Isles, sometimes to London, and sometimes to the entire landmass of Great Britain. However, at the heart of this unstable, shifting terminology is a consistent sense of 'island' values – the sense that despite economic hardship in both rural and urban contexts, the ‘island’ stands against the discourses of ‘improving modernity’ and promotes the nurturing of cultural memory and the value of individual human lives.

Mandy Bloomfield ‘Oceanic Poetics: All at sea with Charles Olson’ This paper explores American post-war poet Charles Olson’s engagement with the sea. Olson looms increasingly large in

the histories of avant-garde poetics, and in our present moment his work is being returned to with renewed force in ecopoetic practice and criticism. The presence of the sea in Olson’s thinking and poetics has been noted, but not reflected upon in any sustained way. I will argue that a recalibration of attention to this aspect of his work gives us both a new view of Olson and it also demonstrates the value of emerging ‘blue’ ecologies for ecocritical thinking more widely. I will examine Olson’s ‘oceanic poetics’ in his Maximus Poems. In this long poetic series Olson's engagements with the sea enable an investigation of the long history of 'domination of nature' rooted deep in American culture, and also environmental degradation in his own present moment. But the sea is also an object of philosophical contemplation in this work; Olson values the way that encounters with it provoke epistemological and ontological uncertainty, and a sense of unhomeliness that unsettles both human hubris and too-cosy notions of dwelling. I will also show that the influence of ocean thinking can be detected in his influential ‘open field’ model of poetics. If, as Robert Creeley put it 'form is never more than an extension of content,' then the presence of the sea in Olson's poetic methods might be detected as a shaping force in formal as well as thematic terms.

Parallel Panels Session B

Panel 1: Landscapes: perceptions and (mis)entanglements

Helen List A Dud Metaphor – Page onto Land There is a single spatial construct, the rectangular frame of the page which artists employ, (take artist’s books for example) also designers upon a flat plane, and which within the book is furthermore the essential underpinning to scholarship itself; providing the self-contained backdrop for the flow of text and of our literacy. It is a visual or tactile cross-disciplinary construct in this respect, one which Derrida pins down in his book The Truth in Painting, however in relation to the environment it is not so much a truth as complete falsehood, a dud metaphor and bad translation, one without an application within our understanding of landscape. After all, in the aftermath of a Deleuzian de-territorialisation we might more profitably understand our interaction with environment as the drawing of trajectories through the field of activity, and in the context of a multiple and post-human perspective, perceive ourselves as one player interacting

with multiple others – swarms, flocks and vegetation - within this sphere. However this paper is interested in working against the grain, in exploring the very falsehood, the transfer of an inappropriate construct, the isolating boundaries of the frame, that are derived from another field of our intellectual and creative activity. The suspicion is that this framing metaphor is found more frequently hidden within our understanding of our environment than our intended affirmations would allow. Hence the inter-disciplinary emphasis of this 2017 ASLE-UKI conference provides an opportunity for drawing out and questioning the applications of such a framing. In approaching the task, the paper will draw upon a localized case-study of the division and ownership of land, the means by which it is subject to property law and to management in situ. It will also examine the patterns of land-use, agricultural, commercial and residential which are in operation here. Evidence from a human geographical and legal framework is thus reviewed in the light of those expectations set up within the spatial constructs of the literary and intellectual framing model. In the creative environment the frame is the arbiter of an absolute freedom that operates within its ruling lines, yet in the material environment it is a fragile and mutable reminder of our limitations. The paper will seek to draw out and explore the elements of this disjuncture.

Andrew Jeffrey I am a practice based Creative Writing PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University writing about encounters with non-human animals in particular landscapes. Recent poems have appeared in ‘Matter’, ‘Route 57’ and ‘Plumwood Mountain Review: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetics’ and I have had work exhibited at the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield. I have written book reviews for ‘The Goose’ and am a peer reviewer for ‘The Dovetail

Moss Valley Entanglements For the past year I have been visiting The Moss Valley in Sheffield on a weekly basis to write on site, concentrating on writing about the non-human animals I have encountered. Moss Valley is part of Sheffield's green belt, containing Ancient Woodland classed as a Site of Special Scientific Interest; it is also used as a site for agriculture, permaculture and animal husbandry and is part of the area designated as suitable for fracking. As such it is a site characterised by a number of competing discourses: environmental, scientific, economic, managerial and political. I will present and perform writing which uses open form poetry, found text, poetics, journal entries and literary criticism; it works with spatial layout to ensure that each genre of writing is visibly entangled by encounters with other discourses and genre. The layout enables the writing to explore The Moss Valley as a site of processual encounter as well as allowing contestation of the various discourses which aim to delimit and control the site. It also aims to encourage the reader to be involved in the generation of

Journal’. I teach hybrid critical/creative Literature/Creative Writing undergraduate modules on Experimental Writing and Literature and the Environment. I previously worked in a Sustainable Development role. My blog is: cowyidentity.wordpress.com

meaning by connecting with the text in different ways, giving a sense of the writing’s involvement in wider cultural meanings. The poetry consists of writing relating to particular animal encounters that also draw upon found text. Literary criticism considers the work of Colin Simms, Maggie O Sullivan and Helen MacDonald. Poetics considers the writing’s relationship to ecocriticism, projective verse, discourses concerning the site and Animal Studies. The entanglement of these strands generate the tension which results in the creation of further new work, I aim to disclose this process and involve the reader in it.

Joanne Lee Joanne Lee is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. She is an artist, writer and publisher of the Pam Flett Press, a serial publication essaying aspects of everyday life. The Pam Flett Press has appeared in PROGR-Fest, PROGR - Zentrum für Kulturproduktion, Bern, Switzerland; Offprint, Tate Modern and KALEID London, an exhibition showcasing the best books by European-based artists. Rosemary Shirley Rosemary Shirley is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research centres on everyday life and visual cultures, with a particular emphasis on rural contexts. She is interested in how the

Six Stories about Litter With its multiple causes, varied material substance, persistent mobility and enduring legacy, litter is a subject to which the terms Cross Multi Inter Trans readily apply. It is – literally – hard to pin down, and as such necessitates an approach in which shifting forms of attention are enabled through the application of critical lenses from different disciplinary traditions. Across the last year we have been developing an on-going research dialogue about the litter that affects the locations in which we live – a Peak District village on the commuter rail line into Manchester, and a Sheffield suburb where the urban frays into amenity woodland. Drawing upon our backgrounds in art practice, art history, design, cultural and discard studies, and a particular conceptual focus on ‘the everyday’ in rural and urban contexts, we have variously pursued individual archival research, gathered the user comments from local news sites and forums, walked alone and together, journeyed to fly-tipping hotspots and abandoned waste transfer stations, photographed our regular commutes, picked litter, and come together to talk through our critical studies and practical experiences. Our larger project is concerned with the multiple ways such material is generated, how it is and might be ‘read’, and what/how it signifies to those who create or subsequently encounter it. It attends to the microcosm of specific local sites as a means of approaching larger global contexts. For the conference we propose a creative-critical panel in the form of a walk through which six stories will be told about litter. It begins with – and re-enacts – the phenomenon of World War II ‘litter trails’, when enemy

English landscape can be explored through discourses of modernity. This has led her to write about topics as diverse as litter, motorways, folk customs, scrapbooks and the Women’s Institute.

communications were discerned in the scattered materials found across the English countryside. It continues with the distribution of a printed broadside pamphlet itemising comments on local news reports about litter for the anxieties they reveal about ‘foreignness’. A bin is used to reflect on the creation of the Keep Britain Tidy campaign. Experiences of poo bags discarded by dog walkers produces a lexicon of nouns and verbs for the practice, and poetry of a sort. Stephen Willats’ art practice considers ways in which littered paths problematise questions of land ownership/custodianship. Finally, drawing and photography describe the anti-aesthetic of shattered, slumping, soggy rubbish met with on pavements during daily journeys to work. The 30-minute walk will use rooms/spaces in proximity to the conference venue (since we are based locally the route can be researched and prepared in advance): we are keen to keep thinking very literally in motion. The conference context will enable us to essay (in the sense of being a trial, test or experiment) a constellation of ideas through narration and theoretical analysis, and in the form of visual, verbal and oral artefacts; we will end in a location where we can have 20 minutes dialogue with those who have walked with us. In recognition of the conference theme and the multiplicity of our inquiry, this presentation seeks to produce complexity, in order to accord littered landscapes the richly creative-critical possibilities they require.

Panel 2: Chartered waters

Simon Read

Diverse communities, familiar territory: Conflict and congruency over natural resource management This year I was invited to contribute to a research project CALCNR (Community based adaptive learning in management of conflicts and natural resources in Bangladesh and Nepal) exploring ways to mitigate conflict over water resources caused by changing weather patterns as a result of climate change. My role is to launch an arts initiative to reflect upon the achievements with teams of artists in both countries and to continue to have an overview until the completion of the project in November 2017. Although this may seem exotic, in truth my direct input was limited to two days in each country, which included a formal

briefing on the case study sites and their associated problems, discussing the role of the arts in the projects, meeting the arts teams, briefing them and making a case study site visit. As with many interdisciplinary projects, it is often assumed by a partnership that the role of the arts is to package the research in a way that makes it more digestible, whereas in truth it is certain to have a more parallel existence. For this presentation I will discuss my approach to this project and put it into the context of other projects that I have been conducting closer to home on the East Anglian Coast. I will discuss similarities and equivalence, not only in the social dynamic of conflicting interests, but also in how communities organize themselves to overcome them. It is encouraging that similar conclusions are reached in widely dissimilar communities facing natural challenges that threaten social stability, reassuring me that whatever I may learn from one geographic environment, can provide lessons in another.

Judith Tucker Judith Tucker is an artist and academic, her work explores the meeting of social history, personal memory and geography; it investigates their relationship through drawing, painting and scholarly writing. She is senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. She has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad. Recent exhibition venues include London, Sheffield, Cambridge and many other regional galleries throughout the UK, and further afield Brno, Czech Republic, Vienna, Austria, Minneapolis and Virginia USA and Yantai, Nanjing and Tianjin in China. She is

co-convener of the Land2 and of Mapping Spectral Traces networks and is part of Contemporary British Painting, a platform for contemporary painting in the UK. Tucker also writes academic essays which can be found in academic journals and in books published by Rodopi, Macmillan, Manchester University Press, Intellect and Gunter Narrverlag, Tübingen. Harriet Tarlo Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic with an interest in landscape, place and environment. Her publications include Field; Poems 2004-2014; Poems 1990-2003 (Shearsman 2016, 2014, 2004); Nab (etruscan 2005) and, with Judith Tucker, Sound Unseen and behind land (Wild Pansy, 2013 and 2015). She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) and special poetry editor for Plumwood Mountain 4:2 (2017) https://plumwoodmountain.com/. Critical work appears in volumes by Salt, Palgrave, Rodopi and Bloodaxe and in Pilot, Jacket, English and the Journal of Ecocriticism. Her collaborative work with Tucker has shown at

galleries including the Catherine Nash Gallery Minneapolis, 2012; Musee de Moulages, Lyon, 2013; Southampton City Art Gallery 2013-14; The Muriel Barker Gallery, Grimsby and the New Hall College Art Collection, Cambridge, 2015. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

Zoe Skoulding

Janette Kerr Jo Millett

Panel 3: Growing

Richard Kerridge Richard Kerridge is a nature writer, ecocritic and writer on critical animal studies. Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, (Chatto & Windus, 2014) his nature writing memoir, was adapted for BBC national radio and broadcast as a Radio 4 Book of the Week in July 2014. It was described by James McConnachie in The Sunday Times as “a minor classic.. exquisite” and by Helen Macdonald in The Financial Times as “moving, careful, humane and beautifully written”. Other nature writing by

Fear and Comedy in the New Nature Writing I would like to give a reading of some new nature writing, part of a book currently in preparation, a sequel to Cold Blood. This new book is concerned with moments of fear that occurred during visits to various nature reserves. I would introduce the reading with discussion of two relationships that are important in this developing work and in the 'New Nature Writing' more generally. The first is the relationship between anthropomorphism, considered as a fundamental and necessary part of our discovery of meaning in the non-human world, and an impulse that runs counter to anthropomorphism: the impulse to imagine the 'umwelt' or perceptual field of the non-human creature. How can these two impulses come together in descriptive nature writing? Can their relationship be dialectical rather than inhibitingly antagonistic? In this opening discussion I will draw upon Timothy Clark's Ecocriticism at the Edge and Wendy Wheeler's Expecting the Earth, among other theoretical sources. My focus will mainly be upon the practical questions - questions of technique - that such a dialectic might pose. I will illustrate these questions with reference to such practitioners as Karen Joy Fowler and

Richard has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing.

Philip Hoare. The other relationship I will discuss, with reference to the same authors, is that between monologue and dialogue in nature writing - between the narrator's voice, used for description or analytical discussion, and the voices of other people who appear in the works.

Finn Dobson Finn Dobson is a spoken word poet who is studying for a Masters in Gender, Sexuality and the Body at the University of Leeds. They are planning a practice-based dissertation exploring, through autoethnography, the ways performance poetry can be used as a tool for liberation, resistance, and knowledge building for queer people. Their poetry predominantly addresses social justice, often from an autobiographical stance, exploring themes of queerness, disability, mental health, and trauma survival, amongst others. Joanna Dobson Joanna Dobson is studying for an MA English by Research at Sheffield Hallam University. Her thesis examines four bird narratives from the mid-twentieth century, asking what they reveal about contemporary

Growing on the Edge: Poetry and co-becoming on a Sheffield allotment The emerging field of multispecies studies encourages a wide range of approaches to knowing and understanding others and seeks to answer the question ‘What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty?’ Multispecies scholars start from the premise that ‘all organisms are situated within deep, entangled histories’ and engaged in ‘rich processes of co-becoming’ (van Dooren et al 2016). They encourage the development of practices of deep attentiveness as an urgent response to the multiple ecological crises of our age. Such attentiveness, which opens ways of better understanding the complex, consequential relationships that constitute the web of life, are also common to many forms of artistic practice. In this paper, performance poet Finn Dobson and their mother Joanna Dobson, a nature writer, will explore the ways that jointly cultivating a Sheffield allotment has influenced both their creative practices and also their understandings of what it means to coexist with multiple others both on and beyond the allotment. An allotment is a rich space for such an exploration, existing as it does in the liminal spaces between private and public, and wild and cultivated. Both Finn and Joanna have a particular interest in the relationship between mental wellbeing and engagement with the more-than-human world, and this paper will consider the role that involvement with non-linguistic signifying systems such as birdsong and plant scents can play in the recovery of humans who may, as a result of trauma, be struggling with disruptions in their relationship to the normative symbolic order. How can poetry express such a deep disconnect with language itself, and how might the more-than-human world facilitate this?

anxieties around human identity. She is also working on a book that combines memoir with nature writing to explore the role that the more-than-human world can play in giving traumatised subjects a way of expressing the unspeakable.

The paper will also discuss the intra-familial kinds of co-becoming that can result from the shared cultivation of a piece of land, and within that the significance of the food that that land provides for the family. Entanglements between children and their parents often need to undergo a painful process of disentanglement as the child matures and seeks to establish a separate identity: can the more-than-human world play a role in effecting a healthy separation and reconnection? This paper will include short performances of Finn’s poetry and readings from Joanna’s nature writing.

Samantha Walton I am an AHRC ECR Leadership Fellow on the project Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Connecting Health and the Environment through Literature (2016-2018). In 2016, I was an Environmental Humanities Research Fellow at IASH, The University of Edinburgh, and from 2015-2017 I held a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award and follow-on funding for the project Landscaping Change. I co-edit the ASLE-UKI journal, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Narratives of sustainability and green healthcare The connection between human wellbeing and the natural environment is a pervasive theme in 20th and 21st century literature. However, there has been no significant scholarship that addresses nature-wellbeing connections in modern writing. In my current research project I examine literature that reflects on human-nature relations at several key moments between 1914 and the present day. This paper will present an overview of the preliminary findings of this research, beginning with an analysis of post-WW1 accounts of warfare as devastating to nature and the human (Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier; Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song; Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse) and concluding with a discussion of New Nature Writing focused on relations between local environments and the mental health of the author (Richard Mabey, Nature Cures; Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk; Jean Sprackland, Strands). This latter period corresponds with the rise of ‘green care’ approaches in health and the growth of scientific studies of nature-wellbeing relations. Green care has emerged in the context of worsening environmental crisis, which environmentalists have linked to (amongst other factors) disconnection from first-hand experiences of nature. In order to address this disconnection, the UK charity The Wildlife Trusts has launched a campaign for a Nature and Wellbeing Act, which would enshrine the protection of nature in law. At the present moment, they are seeking to form a scientific evidence base to support their campaign. My research addresses this policy context, and asks whether

literary studies may offer ways of extending, reformulating, problematising or critiquing the characteristic construction of the nature-wellbeing relationship within green care policy discourse and nascent green care legislation. While extensive research into environmental factors in illness and healing has been conducted in social and scientific fields, environmental humanities scholars have been sceptical about the common-sense assumption that nature is healing, or indeed that ‘nature’ can be used as an unproblematic term for defining the non-human. Indeed, within environmentalist discourse and psychological research, ‘nature’ is frequently named but rarely adequately defined. For example, the current UK campaign for a Nature and Wellbeing Act depends on the formation of an evidence base linking contact with healthy ecosystems and living nature to human wellbeing, and yet medical studies also suggest that simulated natural sounds and scenery can improve patient recovery time and experiences of pain in equivalent levels to ‘real’ nature. As economic and environmental efficiency drives take place in tandem in the NHS in an era of austerity, decisions that concern the ‘value’ of nature become increasingly fraught. The paper will therefore address the conference themes by examining the meaning of ‘nature’ in academic and medical discourses pertinent to green care and nature-wellbeing research. When such complex and ambiguous terms as ‘nature’ and ‘wellbeing’ are at stake, what are the obstacles to interdisciplinary work, and how can the environmental humanities help foster cross-disciplinary understanding and collaboration?

Eirini Boukla Eirini Boukla is an artist and lecturer. She makes use of a variety of mediums, that often merge, to explore the possibilities of contemporary drawing practice and ideas of authenticity and originality. Her main research interests are drawing, collage, the

Scattered recollections, a reflection on 'Bal n vodi' One can say that an artist’s work is usually held together by a particular style, medium and material. Oscillating between abstraction and representation and circumnavigating processes of tracing and a notion of the already worked, my practice quotes a multiplicity of styles that focus on graphic strategies that reread, rework and reanimate precepts of image-making. Similarly, in considering the writing here as a kind of an ‘uttered’ tracing, this is an experimental attempt that explores a postproduction like editing of found text and voices. Endeavouring to construct a poetic vocabulary that

practice of tracing, ideas of authenticity and semiotics. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Recent and selected past exhibitions include;Drawing Dialogue, DalgaArt, Craiova, Romania. Pushpin, Zverev Museum, Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow. Printmaking Center & Olive Branch Press. Ithaca, New York. USA. Limerick/Berlin, Limerick printmakers gallery, Ireland. Thinking tools, FAFA Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Drawing Connections, Siena Art Institute, Siena, Italy. The Artful Scriptorium, Climate Gallery, New York. 8th International exhibition of women painters, Majdanpek Cultural Center, Serbia. Adaptive Actions, Campo AA, Madrid Abierto, Madrid, Spain. Contemporary Flânerie: Reconfiguring Cities, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, Michigan. The Last Book, National Library of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina. SIPF, Singapore International Photography Festival, Singapore.

perhaps forms new individual memories and in turn creates objective resonances. Making use of the spontaneous remembering of a multiplicity of writings embedded in my memories from my Greek upbringing, - while working between England and Greece on the ‘Bal na void’ film last year - I will imaginatively and hopefully usefully align an equivocal writing process with the meta-creativity of an editing process. Thus closer to the part of filmmaking which interests me more and nearer to my search for the discovery of new meaning within an already worked text.

Panel 4: Pastorals: landscapes of transhumance

Paolo Palladino

Centaurs and Transhumance: On movement and modes of being together

Paolo Palladino is Professor of History and Theory in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He currently holds a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship in the Department of History and Theory of International Relations at the at the University of Groningen, and is working on a project relating to sheep, wool, landscape and connectivity. Annalisa Colombino Annalisa Colombino is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Regional Sciences at the University of Graz, Austria. She received her PhD in human geography at the Open University, working on the geographies of place marketing. Her current research interests bring together food studies and more-than-human biopolitics as she is looking at transhumance in Europe. She has published at the intersection of alternative food networks and animal geographies. Her most recent works include ‘Dead Liveness/Living Deadness Thresholds of Non-Human Life and Death in Biocapitalism’ (with P. Giaccaria); ‘Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016’; and ‘BREED CONTRA BEEF - The

This panel brings together historians, artists, geographers, theorists and literary scholars interested in the pastoral practice of transhumance: from the Italian transumanza, ‘crossing the land’, the term describes the movement of peoples and animals across cultural landscapes, political boundaries and ecological biomes. What is the status of the traditional twice-yearly migration for fresh pasture today? What is a flock of sheep, a docile collectivity or an innumerable swarm? How does transhumance help us to think about nomadic and/or posthuman mobility in terms of, but also against, the theoretical deployments of these concepts? Where do traditional human practices meet the limits of nonhuman life-worlds, and how might they be justly reconciled? This panel seeks to address these far-reaching questions across French, Spanish, Italian, British and North-American ‘naturalcultural’ landscapes in which transhumance is still, or has been, practised. Paolo Palladino and Annalisa Colombino, ‘Centaurs and Transhumance: Mobility, Identity and Bio-politics’. This paper focuses on TransHumance, a theatrical performance that the Théâtre du Centaure created in 2013, for the celebrations of Marseille as European Capital of Culture. It articulates a genealogy of the manifesto that was issued as part of this performance, tying it to both post-humanist investment in mobility and the transgression of all fixed identity, and a more traditional understanding of pastoralism as the repository of French national identity. Transhumance thus serves as a site of critical reflection on contemporary bio-political thought. Julia Tanner, ‘Post-humanising the Pastoral: Sweetgrass’s Swarming Sheep’. What happens when a flock of sheep numbers not dozens but thousands, and when this mass is moving through a landscape so vast that they look no larger than flecks of cotton? Such is the question raised by Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s and Ilisa Barbash’s film Sweetgrass (Castaing-Taylor and Barbash 2009), an ethnographic film of the last transhumant sheep drive across the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. It is this paper’s contention that Sweetgrass post-humanises the pastoral by rendering this most anthropocentric of modes ‘swarmic’, revealing the power relations and violence at its heart. Fernando García Dory, ‘Cultural Reflections on Pastoralism’. How does art reframe and reposition cultural understandings of pastoralist forms of life? This contribution will consider artistic practice where it interacts with ‘agri-culture’, from the Shepherds’ School (founded in Asturias, 2004) and organising a European Shepherds’

Making of Piedmontese Cattle’ in Emel J. and Neo H. Political Ecologies of Meat, 2015. She is currently working on two academic publications (invited) to introduce the ‘animal turn’ in the Italian geographical debate. She is co-leader with Ulrich Ermann of the project “(Un-)knowing Food”, funded by the Styrian Government, Austria.

Network (2012) for Documenta 13, to launching and coordinating a World Alliance of Indigenous Nomads. It will also offer an insight into more recent work in Bolzano, Alpine Italy, where artists and local stakeholders collectively generate, through the organisation INLAND, speculations on possible futures for pastoralism. Dan Eltringham, ‘Breeze, or Bird, or fleece of Sheep’: Pastoral Propagation and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Wordsworth’s Cumbria’. William Wordsworth’s ‘Grasmere Pastorals’, this paper argues, voice a materialist ecological poetics of nonhuman propagation and distribution that counters the anthropocentric assumption that the pastoral flock, enumerated and cared for, is only an analogy for human demographics. Secondly, the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (borrowed from ecology) suggests that Wordsworth’s shepherd figures, far from being idealised types, exercise a ground-level vernacular epistemology that roots them in the social-ecological dynamics of their human-nonhuman community.

Julia Tanner Julia Tanner recently returned from a fellowship at Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department and is now completing her PhD in ethnographic film and poetry at the School of English at the University of Leeds. Julia’s thesis investigates the aesthetics of the swarm and the ethics of perception in the works of three creative artists who are based at Harvard: the poet Jorie Graham and collaborators at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel.

Post-humanising the Pastoral: Sweetgrass’s swarming sheep

Dan Eltringham Dan Eltringham is a researcher and poet. He recently completed his PhD thesis at Birkbeck College, University of London, entitled ‘Tracking the Commons: Pastoral, Enclosure and Commoning in J. H. Prynne and William Wordsworth’. He has completed Visiting Fellowships at the John Ryland Research Institute, University of Manchester (2017) and at the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, Colorado State University (2015), where he contributed towards the research network ‘Learning from the Land’. He has critical work forthcoming on Peter Larkin and Peter Riley, and recent poetry has appeared in journals including Plumwood Mountain, Colorado Review, E-Ratio, Datableed, Blackbox Manifold, The Goose, The Clearing, Intercapillary Space and Alba Londres 6: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. His first poetry collection, Cairn Almanac, will be published by Hesterglock Press in 2017. He co-edits Girasol Press and co-runs Electric Arc Furnace, a new poetry readings series in Sheffield.

‘Breeze, or Bird, or fleece of Sheep’: Pastoral propagation and traditional ecological knowledge in Wordsworth’s Cumbria

Carol Watts

Occupations of Pastoral

Carol Watts is a poet whose practice includes site specific work, drawing, sound and other media, sometimes in collaboration. Her sequence Zeta Landscape, responding to the landscape and husbandry of sheep on a Welsh hill farm, was anthologised in part in The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Her most recent poetry collections include Sundog (Veer Books) and Dockfield (Equipage), and she is currently exploring inundation and immunologics, where the south downs meet Brighton's Kemptown. She is Head of the School of English at Sussex University.

Panel 5: Liminalities

Helen Moore Helen Moore is an ecopoet, socially engaged artist and activist based in NE Scotland. She has an MA (with distinction) in Comparative and General Literature from Edinburgh University, and her ecopoetry is published internationally. Her debut collection, ‘Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins’ (Shearsman Books, 2012), was described by Alasdair

ECOZOA: Revisioning the Anthropocene The current geological epoch, named the Holocene, encompasses the growth and impacts of industrial civilisation on our planetary ecosystems. Given these impacts, which have global significance for the future evolution of all living species, a new term ‘Anthropocene’ was proposed in 2000 by Paul Crutzen & Eugene Stoermer to denote the present time interval. However, critics say that this reinforces an anthropocentric perspective, and deprives us of an inspiring vision for a new ecological age. ECOZOA, Helen Moore’s acclaimed second collection (Permanent Publications, 2015), responds to this critique, drawing on the work of the late American eco-theologian, Thomas Berry, who proposed the alternative ‘Ecozoic Era’, denoting a new age where we live in harmony “with the Earth as our community” (The Great

Paterson as being “in the great tradition of visionary politics in British poetry.” Her second, ‘ECOZOA’ (Permanent Publications, 2015) has been acclaimed by John Kinsella, as “a milestone in the journey of ecopoetics”. Helen’s work is already taught in some British and Australian universities, and she shares her work widely – in 2016 a recording of her work were featured at Sydney Environment Institute’s symposium, ‘Hacking the Anthropocene’. Her literary readings are characterized by elements of performance poetry and sometimes percussion or musical accompaniment. She also collaborates with film-maker, Howard Vause, and their award-winning poetry films feature during Helen’s performance.

Work, Our Way into the Future). ECOZOA also references the central tensions within William Blake’s mythology. In witnessing the onset of the industrial revolution, Blake saw how ‘reason’, personified as ‘Urizen’, a patriarchal figure wielding his compass, had come to dominate Western consciousness. In The Four Zoas Blake indicates the near annihilation that occurs when Albion is subject to urizenic tyranny. The remaining ‘zoas’ – ‘Tharmas’ (the body), ‘Luvah’ (the heart) and ‘Urthona’ (the imagination), which together constitute both the universal human and the ancient land of Britain –– are nearly destroyed. Significantly, it’s the imagination, embodied as Los, the prophet/blacksmith, and Jerusalem, the feminine embodiment of forgiveness, who resist, and secure Albion’s redemption. Writing from within modern Western culture, where alternatives to global capitalism are rarely envisioned and the popular imagination has been colonised by notions of apocalypse, Helen suggests the psycho-emotional terrain that underpins the creation of a sustainable society, and celebrates alternatives, adaptations and the reciprocal restoration work that may yet secure an inhabitable world for future generations. As Berry reminds us, the Ecozoic Era is a phenomenon “we must will into being”.

Ron Milland

Applied Tentacularity: Collaborative Poetics for the Post-Anthropocene A paper exploring the possibilities for interdisciplinary thinking can find many inspiring sources for collaboration in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. One such provocation is Haraway’s assertion that “we are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who will erupt to avenge crimes against the earth.” A focus on lichen is appropriate since it is – from the perspective of humans – among the least noticed of life forms, lacking in any discernible form of defense, movement, or much of any other trait humans generally associate with being “alive”. As another writer has put it, lichen is “not dead, exactly, just very still for a very long time”. In likening us to lichen, Haraway is calling for a perspective shift – away from human exceptionalism. We need to engage in a “nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the

muddle”. This reaches beyond humans merely studying or classifying other species. New relationalities with our fellow “critters” requires transcending our own false sense of superiority, for the Furies can strike us down as easily as any other creature on this planet. Collaboration in this sense is active, not passive, and entails more than the usual efforts to ‘think outside the box’: it requires the praxis of what Haraway would call “tentacularity”. Simultaneous with Haraway, several other scholars invite us to similarly ‘stay with the trouble’, though from differing perspectives. In Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency, Sam Mickey asserts that “the human is also a problem. If thinking is thinking of being, in the double sense of the genitive – thinking about being and from being – then thinking is not oriented around the human. It is oriented around the clearing in and as which the human being comes to be, the dwelling of abode of human existence, the spheres of being-in. In that sense, existentialism is not a humanism”, and coexistentialism – or ecological coexistence – entails an intrinsic departure from human exceptionalism. Mickey’s “spheres of being-in” is collaborative in nature – as well as with and within Nature – rendering coexistentialism a kind of tentacularity applied by other means. In this “time of unprecedented interconnectedness” Roy Scranton – another scholar whose thinking is nearly simultaneous with Haraway’s – points out that humans do not need to learn how to sustain a permanently limited civilization. The Anthropocene is where we need to learn “how to die” – particularly from the perspective of human exceptionalism – and therefore stay with the trouble by letting the “emergency emerge…which means becoming vulnerable to the overwhelming reality of other beings.” Like lichen. This paper will engage in an exercise of meta-collaboration in an effort to apply tentacularity, initially, on the level of critique. In exploring Haraway in comparison and contrast to other scholars, this analysis will adhere to the environmental humanities a new sort of scholarly foreground useful for pedagogical application. This presentation will, then, employ ecopoetics to render yet another cross-disciplinary perspective for negotiating the Post-Anthropocene.

Vera Fibisan Veronica Fibisan’s areas of interest include ecocriticism, ecofeminism

The Shoreline as Creative Space in the Anthropocene in Mark Dickinson’s Tender Geometries and Littoral The shoreline has long been a subject in poetry and fiction alike; however, with major changes in society and lifestyle,

and coastal radical landscape poetry. Her research focuses on the intertidal zone and her PhD is a practice-led creative and critical project on the UK shoreline, where she spends significant time. She has published creative work notably in CAST and The Sheffield Anthology.

more and more creative voices are being heard in the field of environmental humanities, contesting, challenging and reshaping this marginal space. The Anthropocene, as the proposed geological era in which we currently are, is a debated subject in terms of its impact, and as linked to poetry it has lead to the creation of radical landscape poetry, which is best illustrated in Harriet Tarlo’s anthology The Ground Aslant. Mark Dickinson, a writer whose work is found in this radical landscape poetry anthology, explores these issues in his latest collection, Tender Geometries, published in 2015 by Shearsman, in which the human and the more-than-human battle for space at the boundary between land and sea. Dickinson’s previous collection, Littoral, also explores this controversial landscape, and the creatures who inhabit it. This paper addresses writing in the Anthropocene with a focus on the shoreline, as a key space for the production of radical landscape poetry, by looking at Dickinson’s two collections. These will be balanced out with extracts from my creative work, which addresses many of the same issues as Dickinson’s. I aim to provide a dialog between the various texts explored in terms of their approach of a costal anthropogenic universe. Inner and outer spaces play a key part in the restructuring of the perspective of the shoreline in an attempt to provide a balanced view of it in a contemporary world. Human geometric precision found in coastal buildings and development blurs the water’s architectural capacity which throughout time has carved an imprecise landscape, one also subjected to other elements. Dickinson’s two collections are illustrative of these ideas, and challenge not only the concept of the Anthropocene, but also that of the radical.

Dr Camilla Nelson Dr Camilla Nelson is a British language artist and researcher based in south west England. She has a PhD in Performance Writing and her work explores the intersection of human and other-than human organisms and environments in page-based poetry,

World Processing: human and other-than-human language production as a mode of perception in Translating the Coal Forests Translating the Coal Forests (2015) is a collaborative bookwork created by Steven Hitchins and Camilla Nelson. Hitchins copied pages of F. J. North’s Coal and the Coalfields in Wales (1931) and suffused them with mud and silt and left them to deteriorate in a South Wales coalfield swamp. After a couple of weeks the remaining text was retrieved. Hitchins used OCR text recognition programs to take casts or moulds of this remaining text. He then sent these translations to Nelson. Both Hitchins & Nelson worked on

installation and performance. Her current focus is Reading Movement, a series of movement language solo and collaborative works, whose script was long-listed for The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers in 2016. Her first full poetry collection, Apples & Other Languages (Knives Forks and Spoons), long-listed for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize in 2015, is out now. Camilla is founding editor of Singing Apple Press, a small independent press that produces hand-crafted, limited edition poem-prints, books and other objects. She is associate researcher for RANE (Research in Art, Nature & Environment). Dr Steven Hitchins Dr Steven Hitchins lives in Rhydyfelin, Pontypridd. His publications include Bitch Dust (Hafan, 2012), Real Radio (Gwasg CAD Press, 2014) and The White City (Aquifer, 2015). He has performed at the Hay Poetry Jamboree in Hay--on--Wye, Poets Live in Paris, the Bath Arts Fringe Festival and the North Wales International Poetry Festival. He runs The Literary Pocket Book small press, publishing experimental poetry in

the remaining letter combinations delivered by coal swamp decay and text processing software to create their own ‘translations’ or ‘transformations’. Nelson pulped and reformed the material remains of the coalfield swamp texts into new pages. Hitchins then printed the dual translations onto transparent pages and arranged them to sit side by side in recto/verso arrangement for comparative consumption, overlaying the coalfield texts’ remains. The intersect and overlay of digital and material texts manifest the palimpsest process of construction. The text forms: steadily, dimity. Translating the Coal Forests (2015) manifests a process of material, digital and interpersonal translation. This paper discusses the construction of Translating the Coal Forests (2015) in relation to Peeter Torop’s account of translation as a process of draft-making, of translating one text into another, in any form (or combination) of textual, metatextual, intertextual, or extratextual translation. Torop references Robin Allott’s claim that ‘semiosis in some sense is perception’ (1994, own emphasis), leading him to talk of the ‘perceptual unity’ of human culture (2003:280). This reading of the perceptual nature of translation coincides with Maturana and Varela’s view of cognition:

[…] every act of knowing brings forth a world […] All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing […] this bringing forth of a world manifests itself in all our actions and all our being […] there is no discontinuity between what is social and what is human and their biological roots. The phenomenon of knowing is all of one piece […]. (1987:26-27)

The perceptual unity of human culture is ‘of one piece’ with what is perceived to be other-than human by virtue of this infinite process of exchange between and within organisms and environments. Human perception is made up of, or supported by, the ‘distributed’ perceptual exchange between media that Torop dubs the ‘infinite process of total translation’ (2003: 271). Torop is particularly thinking about the production of human culture, but this process of translation does not stop, and cannot be stopped, at the margins of what is considered to be human culture (if such a boundary is even clearly discernible). This paper uses the construction of Translating the Coal Forests (2014) to suggest that this continuous process of textual, metatextual, intertextual and extratextual translation describes the way in which human perception is continually informed and

miniature origami editions: literarypocketblog.wordpress.com

constituted by the other-than human in its world/word-making.

Parallel Panels Session C

Panel 1: Animal representation

Timo Maran Timo Maran is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interests include ecocriticism and semiotic relations of nature and culture, Estonian nature writing, zoosemiotics and species conservation, semiotics of biological mimicry. His publications include Readings in Zoosemiotics (ed., with D. Martinelli and A. Turovski, 2011), Semiotics in the Wild (ed., with K. Lindström, R. Magnus and M. Toennessen 2012), Animal Umwelten in a Changing World. Zoosemiotic Perspectives (with M. Tønnessen, K. Armstrong Oma et al., 2016), Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and

Dark Umwelts, Semiocide and Modelling with Imaginary Forests A number of problems in nature conservation are related to anthropocentrism. Human-centred environmental discourses tend to become self-sufficient and lose their contact with the semiotic processes in the wild. Anthropocentric views have also been shown to overemphasize the conservation of species more similar to us at the expense of stranger organisms (Heise 2016). There is a great number of invertebrate, fish, reptile and amphibian species that live and go extinct without reaching human awareness, forming what may be called “dark umwelts”. Further, the web of interrelations between umwelts of different species in ecological systems has a complexity far beyond the grasp of our reasoning. Human negative effects on other species are physical (competition over habitats, hunting and other means of population regulation) but they also have a semiotic aspect that can be called “semiocide” (Puura 2013) – a hindrance to or destruction of communication channels, sign systems and significant places that other species use. Semiotic destruction appears to be related to the lack of normal semiotic relations, that is, to humans’ inability to perceive other species as communicating subjects or to communicate with other animals. The crucial question here appears to be the availability of cultural models (Maran 2014) that would

Semiotics of Biological Mimicry (2017). He serves as a co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biosemiotics (Springer).

allow understand umwelts that are different and strange for us. To overcome the indifference towards more distant species we would need modelling strategies that would put the criteria of comparison outside of the human realm. Some examples of such modelling are critical anthropomorphism (Rivas, Burghardt 2002), multispecies ethnography (Kohn 2013) and experiential ontologies of animal species (Rattasepp 2016). Here I would like to provide an additional approach by taking the metaphor of forest for the basis of modelling. In an ecological sense, a forest is characterized by the extensive presence of decomposers, detritus food changes and organic matter in different stages of decay. As a semiotic system, forest is unlimited, de-centralized, regenerative, and self-organizing. Being a complex and open system, a forest resists formal reasoning and provides space for imagination. Using forest as a cultural model in nature conservation may help to shed more light on dark umwelts as rational knowledge becomes here accompanied with imaginary powers. As paradoxical as it may seem, nature conservation would benefit from the support of artistic and literary practices as these have tools to work with the possibility of life forms beyond our reason and facts.

Helen Billinghurst Helen Billinghurst is an artist and doctoral candidate at the School of Humanities and Performing Arts, Plymouth University. Her research explores how experiential walking can inform (and be informed by) an expanded painting practice. She is interested in journey as story, and how selective use of materials can be used to mediate between the landscape and the space of the studio. Helen is an associate lecturer at Plymouth College of Art, and Plymouth University,

A Bestiary for the Anthropocene On the southern edge of Dartmoor, where three roads meet, there is a tiny church dedicated to St Petroc, who was a tamer of wolves. Three miles walk down hill towards Plymouth, a pack of captive wolves is enclosed in a wildlife park. A mile further, and Wolf Minerals is tearing down the hills for tungsten, in the largest open-cast mine in Europe. In Hertford, the sign of the stag is everywhere; prancing across the county council logo and splashing through a rotary club plaque. The hooded crow, corvus cornix was once so abundant on Royston Heath that it was known as the Royston Crow. Corvus Cornix can now be followed as a tourist trail of brass miniatures up Royston High Street, and observed as mascot of the local rugby club. In this paper, I explore the shifting dynamic between humans and animals by discussing how images of animals have increasingly come to represent aspects of human ontology, rather than non-human nature as an absenting of other species. Since the industrial revolution humans have used representations of animals as a way to

and leads workshops at a variety of community and festival events. She is a nominated member of the ‘Land2’ artist’s research group, a committee member of ‘Smooth Space’ artist-led initiative, and a member of the ‘Walking Artist’s Network’ .

affiliate the nature of their own being with that of the absence of the creatures around them; pub signs are one example: ‘White Hart’, ‘Red Cow’, ‘Black Bull’. Now, when the Centre for Biological Diversity suggests that we will lose between 30 to 50 per cent of all species by the middle of this century, we are surrounded more than ever by images of animals. From corporate logo, to the cartoon creature, images of animals are used to sell us things, and for our entertainment. Rather than as objective beings, I will address these as products of Capitalism and the Society of the Spectacle. Drawing from theorists such as Guy Debord, John Berger, Tim Ingold and Donna Haraway, I discuss the tradition of the ‘Bestiary’ as muse, examining how a range of artists and poets have responded to this theme. I relate how my own practice as research, as a walking artist with an expanded painting practice, has struggled with the question: ‘How do we imagine a Bestiary for the Age of the Anthropocene?’. Perhaps a bestiary that challenges the concept of Anthropocene, and seeks to put the other species closer to centre stage?

Nadhia Grewahl I am a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University of London researching representations of the environment and nonhuman animals in contemporary American and Native American fiction. Through the use of ecocriticism, my work focuses on literary ecology, ecomaterialism, transcorporeality, interspecies ethics, and the permeable boundaries between the human and the nonhuman.

On the ‘Disassembly Line’ of the Human and the Nonhuman: storying hybrid forms Set in 1978, David Vann’s Goat Mountain (2013) follows an unnamed eleven year old male narrator on a hunting trip in Northern California. The novel is set within a desert-like wasteland, which is used to bring to light the vulnerability of the environment and acts to destabilize the human/animal divide. Exploding with poison oak and pine needles, the mountain is described as a veined muscle, the trees as charred meat, and the landscape as bleeding. Using the work of Stacy Alaimo, John Gamber, Tim Morton, Heather Sullivan, and Cary Wolfe, this paper will demonstrate how Vann creates a ‘new reflexivity’ between species and environment through the blurring of the human and the nonhuman. Trans-corporeality is evoked as strange, dangerous, and transformative as the human body becomes less-than-human. Breaking down the human/nonhuman binary, human and nonhuman animal bodies and the environment become zones of intra-action down to a biological and fluid level. Instead of just illustrating green imagery associated with ecocriticism, Vann’s narrative transforms bodies and the landscape into scenes of red imagery. Therefore, creating a material connection between organs, vessels, vertebrae, roots, and stomata. This illuminates the fluidity between the human and the

nonhuman using the toxicity of poison oak and the fleshy material of the buck corpse. Through images of monstrous mutation and metamorphosis, the partial fusion of bodies is illustrated as a ‘choreography of becoming’ animal. Creating a synthesis of species, the boy’s bleeding skin becomes part of the environment and buck’s body throws down roots. This suggests that the boy’s body and the buck become one, like two plants which have grafted together. Exploring a California chaparral ecology, this paper will investigate how the human and nonhuman are illustrated in terms of hybridity, injury, and toxicity.

Panel 1: Artists’ books and mapping

Laura Donkers Laura Donkers is an artist based on the Isle of North Uist. She is a PhD candidate at Duncan of Jordanstone at the University of Dundee, where she also received her MFA in Art, Society and Publics. Her research is entitled ‘Considering local experiential knowledge through ‘slow residency’ artistic actions, aiming at ecological change’. She graduated from Moray College UHI with a BA (Hons) in Art in 2011. She is the director of Earth | Environmental Art Hebrides. Most recently she was Artist-in-Residence at DRAWinternational in Caylus, Mid-Pyrennes Regions, France. Over the past year, her practice has been located in New Zealand. She is a member of PLaCE International (UK). Jan Johnson Jan Johnson holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2010, she was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Drawing. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Duncan of

Jordanstone College of Art and Design at University of Dundee in 2015-16, with her project, “On Stitching in Scotland: Stories, Schemes and Contingencies of a Gendered Material Practice.” Johnson is a Part-time Professor of Practice at Clark University in Worcester, MA, and is also the coordinator of the International Summer Art Experience at DJCAD. Her work has been shown throughout the US, and internationally in Greece and the UK. She is a member of PLaCE International (UK).

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s poetry includes: oh-zones (Knives Forks and Spoons), Rivering (Oystercatcher) and Swims (Penned in the Margins, forthcoming 2017). Criticism includes: A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities – The Gift, Poethics and the Wager (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming 2017). A reviewer for the US journal The Constant Critic, she studied English at Oxford and Royal Holloway, London, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University. Her forthcoming book, A Dictionary of the Soil, is supported by Penguin/Random House’s WriteNow scheme. She has spoken about the soil and read from her Dictionary on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking. Rebecca Thomas In 2005 Rebecca Thomas completed a Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London, having previously studied at St

Martins School of Art (1987-1990) and Birkbeck College, University of London, where she completed a postgraduate diploma in Arts Management in 2000. Rebecca has exhibited her paintings and video works widely, most recently at the Politis Gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus (Against Lethe, 2013) and at the Mile End Art Pavilion, London (The Geographical Self, 2012), East Street Arts, Leeds (Close to Home), and taken part in a range of publicly funded projects and academic conferences throughout the UK and abroad, notably at the Universities of Coventry, Dundee, Leeds and Southampton City Art Gallery. She is a member of Print to the People, a printmaking co-operative in Norwich, and is currently working on a series of artist’s books.

Panel 2: Deluge

Tara Gulwell I am from South Wales and (will be by the time) a final year undergraduate at the University of East Anglia studying American literature, with a focus on ecocriticism and African American studies. I (will have) recently arrived back in the UK from a year living, studying and researching in New Orleans, Louisiana. I plan on continuing my studies in

A Hurricane Named Katrina: Reimagining Nature in a Deconstructed Cityscape On 29th August 2005 Hurricane Katrina rolled into the Gulf Coast and decimated much of the region. The subsequent levee failures in New Orleans, Louisiana, created the most catastrophic American environmental crisis this century has so far seen. Yet the environmental humanities, ecocriticism in particular, has been slow in responding to Katrina. This project aims to remedy that omission. As the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation continue to deteriorate, understanding cultural responses to acute natural disasters will be paramount to the future of studying literature and the environment in the twenty-first century. Through a synthesised analysis of the non-fiction essay collection Do You Know What It Means to Miss New

postgraduate work, in particular exploring relationships to nonhuman environments in African American writing. I also write for online magazine ‘The Norwich Radical’ where I mainly cover Welsh, American and environmental politics.

Orleans?, the most circulated contemporary photographs and local art collected from a year of primary research in the city, I investigate the role of a destroyed urban landscape in representing trauma and vice versa. In exploring these texts and images I also treat the hurricane itself as an ecological subject, though the framing of Katrina as a “natural disaster” will become problematized through the course of this study. The cultural productions of New Orleans must also be contextualised within its unique racial and environmental history that largely differs from American history as a whole. Utilising theoretical elements from ecocriticism, sociology, media studies, postcolonial studies and New Orleans studies, this paper presents a vision of Katrina that encapsulates the magnitude of the cultural response it caused. This study concludes that Hurricane Katrina offers us a tragic example of a violent “natural” force that elucidates a crisis of the modern urban space. Furthermore, displaced elements of the natural world colliding with human creations often serve as a representation of the chaos and trauma of the city, as in the cases of houses in trees and the “bathtub ring” around the city due to flooding. Water is also a large motif in these works, I argue that Katrina is an example of a racialised, environmental violence in America through the comparisons of the African diaspora with Katrina diaspora, and the hurricane with the middle passage.

Dr Justin Sausman Reservoir noir and drowned villages: Ladybower Reservoir and Berlie Doherty’s Deep Secret This paper explores the representation of dam and reservoir construction in Britain during the early to mid-twentieth century. It focuses on rural valleys and isolated communities, often in the north of England and Wales, that were flooded to create water supply for distant cities. The story of these ‘drowned villages’ as they are frequently (and emotively) referred to have been traced in several local histories and are often commemorated through information boards at the sites themselves. It is however only relatively recently that a number of novels have appeared focusing on this topic such as Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002) and Peter Robinson’s In A Dry Season (1999) among others. A number of common threads unite these novels, leading Peter Robinson to name them ‘reservoir noir’. They often blend sensational plots with an elegiac or nostalgic return to the past, while also focusing on the struggles of small communities, the impact of industrialisation on the rural landscape, and the revelation of past secrets hidden beneath the waters of the flooded valleys, frequently

expressed through metaphors of haunting. This paper, reflecting the location of the conference, focuses on Berlie Doherty’s historical novel Deep Secret (2010) based on flooding of the villages of Ashopton and Derwent during the construction of Ladybower Reservoir in the Peak District National Park between 1935 and 1943. The paper asks why the novel should focus on this topic in the context of the present moment focusing on a) the symbolic weight attributed to the relatively insignificant (in terms of size) villages as emblems of environmental exploitation and the clash between industrial modernity and rural communities; b) the novel as a response to contemporary discussions of wildness and ‘re-wilding’ in nature writers such as Robert MacFarlane, George Monbiot and William Atkins; c) the novel as a counter narrative to nostalgic constructions of rural life and a reminder that apparently ‘natural’ landscapes have a human history. Drawing on work by cultural geographer John Wylie, the paper adopts a theoretical framework in which the act of walking around the reservoir constructs a narrative of the past. By focusing on architectural remains in the landscape and the story presented to visitors to through interpretive boards, the paper moves beyond more traditional textual sources to situate the novel in the context of the landscape today as well as the past that is the focus of its plot. To explore these questions the paper reflects the conference themes by crossing boundaries: between the temporal, situating the novel’s imagined history in the context of campaigns against the dam during the 1930s; between national boundaries, reflecting on the novel in the context of ongoing protests against reservoir construction worldwide today; and between the textual and geographical, drawing on cultural geography and tourism studies to read the way in which the cultural construction of the landscape today is haunted by its sunken past in the novel.

Astrid Bracke Astrid Bracke's monograph, Climate Crisis and the Twenty-First-Century British Novel, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017. She writes on twenty-first-century British

The ethics of the Anthropocene: Characterisation and narrative perspective in postmillennial British flood novel The proposed paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of climate crisis and explores the questions four postmillennial British flood novels pose about who gets to survive, who is to blame and who the innocent bystanders are when the effects of climate crisis materialize. Anthropocene flood novels, I'll show, are shaped by the consequences of ethical dilemmas, and provide a space in which to think through the ethics of climate crisis.

fiction and nonfiction, ecocriticism and narratology and has published on polar and climate crisis narratives, econarratological approaches to climate fiction, contemporary flood narratives, and science and ecology in Ian McEwan's novels. Her work has appeared in English Studies, ISLE and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. She is currently working on chapters for the Palgrave Handbook in Literature and Philosophy, Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness (Palgrave) and The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan.

The paper moves towards the intersections of literary ecocriticism and philosophy by foregrounding characterization and narrative perspective as two lenses through which the ethics of climate crisis are explored in Antonia Honeywell's The Ship (2016), Megan Hunter's The End We Start From (2017), Clare Morrall's When the Floods Came (2016) and Ali Shaw's The Trees (2016), in which a waterless flood is described. Characterization is a key means of presenting moral issues in these works, particularly once familiar societal structures disappear. Narrative perspective, especially the first person, enforces the sense of exceptionalism inherent to flood stories, in which typically only the happy few survive. Similarly, contemporary climate crisis affects different peoples and regions disproportionally, often favouring those who are well off in the first place. Postmillennial flood novels, then, are productive sites in which to think through the ethical and moral as well as the narrative possibilities and limitations of imagining the Anthropocene. In turn, the paper provides a reflection on the novel in the Anthropocene that extends and challenges existing scholarship on the role of narratives in a time of climate crisis.

Panel 3: Eco-mystic poetics

Jonathan Butler Jonathan Butler completed a doctoral dissertation on historiographic metafiction at the University of Toronto in 2000. His research interests have moved on to metarhetoric and ecocriticism. A grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan led to interviews with prominent ecopoets John Burnside, Don McKay, and Tim Lilburn at key landmarks informing their poetry in April, 2015. Two of those interviews will

Geopoetic Musings on the Phenomenological Trail: Stone Age thinking in the poetry of Don McKay This paper will explore the metaphorical enquiries Canadian poet Don McKay makes in many of his poems through the use of what I playfully call “stone-age thinking,” drawing on both literary strategy and traditional philosophical modalities of knowledge and being, epistemology and ontology. By using geological time to reframe and reimagine both human narrative (autobiography mostly, in McKay’s case) and ecological sensibility, McKay’s poetry succeeds in eroding a great deal of the hubris of analytic thought and the ungrounded posturing of taxonomic confidence behind much of our destruction of our own inherited environment. Invoking the philosophical subfields of phenomenology, epistemology, and ontology, McKay’s poetry is an interdisciplinary art of informed and inquiring discourse, offering the committed reader a chance to both know the world anew and reimagine a more modest place in it

appear in Brick, A Literary Journal (Canada) later this year. Recent publications include “Narrative, Orality, and Native-American Historical Consciousness: The Critique of Logocentrism in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks” in Tamkang Review (2016), while a forthcoming article, “Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano and the Drunken Discourse of Literary Solipsism” will appear in University of Toronto Quarterly in early 2017. He teaches American Literature, Theory and Criticism, and Creative Writing in the Department of English Literature, United Arab Emirates University, in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.

through the juxtaposition of temporal scale: human time placed alongside geological time. Such a change in scale yields important insights—and brings about, I would argue, the ontological destabilization required for the kind of repositioned sense of self and understanding of the human role in climate change so direly needed today.

Chad Weidner Chad Weidner is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Roosevelt, an undergraduate faculty of Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. He has recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Environmental Humanities under the guidance of Rosi Braidotti, and has published on ecocriticism, the Beat Generation, and Dadaist film. He is the author of The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind (Southern

Magnifying the Mystery: Denise Levertov and the Mystical Ecopoetics of Nature This 20-minute paper presentation addresses one of the core themes of the conference call in studying the transnational and transcultural aspects of the Beat Generation. While Denise Levertov was a British poet that has received some recognition from scholars, the contributions of transnational women of the Beat Generation still require much more attention. Moreover, with few exceptions, the environmental humanities has neglected the work of Beat writers completely. Recent developments make clear that ecocriticism has opened itself up to a more comparative and transcultural orientation that "recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries" (Adamson and Slovic 6). The field of Beat studies has undergone a similar transnational shift (Grace and Skerl 2012, Fazzino 2016). Thus more transnational work is crucial to the continued development of both ecocriticism and Beat studies. Furthermore, ecocritical studies seem to privilege certain kinds of texts with obvious environmental potential, and

Illinois University Press, 2016).

largely avoid the many challenges posed in handling avant garde texts. And when we think of the Beat Generation, we tend to think of certain texts by specific authors. However, important questions remain. Can ecocriticism be deepened by engaging experimental transnational texts? Can scholarly activities help reconcile the many aesthetic questions the avant-garde demands? It is against this background that this paper will examine the ways in which the work of Denise Levertov connects to environmental discourse. Through application of contemporary ecocritical concepts, this paper will challenge both the typical subjects of ecocritical research and common assumptions about the apparent hegemonic composition of the Beat Generation. Although Denise Levertov is largely overlooked by Beat scholars and by environmental critics, examination of representative examples of her work highlights mystical connections to nature. This paper will therefore examine representative excerpts from Levertov's works to divulge some of the ways her writing engages in environmental discourse.

Marianne Røskeland Marianne Røskeland is associate professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). She is part of the research group ‘Nature in Children’s Literature: Landscapes and Beings – Fostering Ecocitizens (NaChiLit)’ <http://blogg.hvl.no/nachilit/> at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). Research interests: Aesthetic, ecocritical, and didactic aspects of literature, both children’s literature and general literature. Reading and writing research.

Picturing Nature in Poems by Tor Ulven In my project I study three untitled poems by the Norwegian author Tor Ulven in light of ecocriticism, literature teaching and the visual aspects of literary language. In rhetoric tradition the term “ekphrasis” refers to describing something so vividly that the listener or reader picture it. This image-creating process is crucial both to literary experience and to how literature may affect the reader (Kittang 1998, Karlsen 2011, Mendelsund 2014). Emotions and intuition are as essential to decision making as rationality (Khaneman 2011), and the internal images contribute to emotional engagement, for example in dealing with environmental change. Central questions are: How are the human and the non-human represented in these poems by Tor Ulven? How can we explain the visual image-creation process? (What are these images like, how do they work, and how are they related to visual perception and to pictures in culture?) Finally, how can focusing on internal images and visualization support high school student’s comprehension of both the poems and the environmental issues at stake? A central theme in Ulven’s work is the human being embedded in the environment. I will argue that his poems can be interpreted as both ecophenomenological and environmental, combining intense awareness, precise

descriptions and profound defamiliarisation. They therefore are well suited for my project. The cross- and multi-aspect lies primarily in the focus on the visual aspects of language, and on the importance of inner images in an ecocritical perspective. Also a videoperformance of the poems (Pedersen & Ulven 2013) are of interest and may widen the scope. I draw on theory from different research areas, such as ecocriticism (Garrard 2012, Lidström & Garrard 2014, Haraway 1987, Westling 2014) theory on aesthetic experience, reader response criticism and literary instruction (Iser 1978, Rosenblatt 1994, Sjklovskij 1991, Mitchell 1984), research on visual perception (Gibson 1978) and on visuality in literature (Mendelsund 2014). I also apply analytical tools developed by the research group Nature in Children’s Literature: Landscapes and Beings – Fostering Ecocitizens (NaChiLit) at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL).

Panel 4: Eco-fiction

Dr Jenny Bavidge Jenny Bavidge is Senior Lecturer and Academic Director for English Literature at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

David Almond’s Wildernesses This paper continues a conversation which David Almond has opened up in ecocritical contexts about his own work and its representation and creation of ‘necessary wildernesses’. I wish to explore the ecophilosophies at work in David Almond’s children’s and YA fiction. which melds gothic and realist writing with politics, myth and spiritual exploration. Almond’s books for children are notable for their explorations of empathy and love and their own ethics of care for their readers. His ‘bibliotherapy’ keeps faith with some aspects of some types of pastoral as a place of healing and recuperation of childhood wonder or teenage spirit. However, his writing also consistently recasts the models of encounter and testing found in the traditional narrative structures and poetics of young people’s literature which work to place them and judge them, or their proxies, against the natural world. Almond’s work, with its strong sense of place and affinity with the north-east of England, stretches from a mythically-inflected Northumberland coast to the ex-mining towns around Newcastle, and tracks his characters’ journeys towards self-knowledge through edgelands and liminal places (back gardens, beaches, abandoned industrial sites). Within these settings, Almond’s stories are full of transformations, becomings and hybrid forms (paper to animal, man to angel) and breaks in the

surface of the everyday opened by grief, desire or growing up. Almond’s work builds on a distinctive tradition of dark pastoral in children’s/YA fiction (Swindells, Garner, Cooper) and I will track these affiliations, but also argue that Almond’s work is currently creating a distinct ecocritical poetics suited to the complex situation of children’s encounters with the Anthropocene. I will discuss Almond’s fictions (Skellig, Kit’s Wilderness, Song for Ella Grey) and his graphic novel collaborations with Dave McKean (Bird Mouse Snake Wolf, The Savage). The paper will focus on close-readings of sections of the novels in order to examine how these thematics make themselves felt in the details of the prose, and how an ethics of noticing or witnessing the emotional lives of children is matched to a concentrated ecological attentiveness.

Koichiro Ito I have been a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland) since 2015, when I was thrilled and delighted to meet some of you and give a presentation at the conference. I have been educated at the University of Victoria, Canada as well as Chiba University, Japan. I received my master's degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2011. I have read Modernist novels, Canadian literature, and ecological drama. Previously, I gave a presentation at the international conference of the Joseph Conrad Society in England in 2009 as well as at the ASLE biennial conference in the United States in 2011 and 2013. I plan to pursue a doctoral

The Posthumanist Vision of the City in Jose Rivera’s Marisol Recently, some scholars in animal studies and posthumanism have revitalized the theme of zoopolis. Drawing upon urban theorist Jennifer Wolch’s idea of zoopolis, Stacy Alaimo argues that “[i]n one sense zoopolis demands an entirely differently outlook from citizens, city planners, park administrators, architects, and landscape architects, and landscape architects. In another sense, however, the concept may incite a recognition of the creatures that are always already in our midst” (2016). Alaimo highlights the necessity for urban environments to be reimagined as multi-species habitats. In the field of dramatic literature, Una Chaudhuri challenges this project that “seeks to imagine the city as a space of shared animality, an eco-system capable of supporting the lives, pleasures, and freedoms not only of its human citizens but also an expanded population of members of other species” (2017). Their scholarly works remind me that the representation of nonhuman animals in relation to human life and urban areas is still intriguing and deserves more critical attention. In this vein, Jose Rivera’s drama Marisol (1992) offers an opportunity to reconsider the precarious relationship between human and nonhuman characters in the context of the postmodern city. Through interactions between several human characters and the nonhuman character of the Angel in Marisol, Rivera describes the sensational and chaotic world of metropolitan New York just before the new millennium, creating a unique portrayal of urban life.

degree in English with a focus on modern and contemporary drama, ecology, and animal studies. Currently, I am teaching English in the Faculty of Global Studies at Musashino University in Tokyo, Japan.

Building on Cary Wolfe’s and Rosi Braidotti’s significant works, the paper will focus on the posthumanist perspective on the city in Marisol. I will explore how and why the nonhuman character of the Angel actively supports the sustainability of the planet in the face of environmental issues and species extinction. An interesting example can be found in Act 1 Scene 4 in which the Angel slips into the protagonist Marisol’s dream world to inform her that the universe is contaminated and angels are struggling to revitalize the universe: “The universal body is sick, Marisol. . . . Angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood.” The angels are more conscious of possible perils on a universal scale. The foundation of their actions and thoughts lies in the spirit of self-sacrifice. The angels stay true to their convictions and continually work to further their cause. Their strong and enduring focus on the reconstruction of the universe clearly contrasts with the fragile and distracted minds of humans, especially those in urban areas who are unfamiliar with their own neighborhoods. Taking into account the posthumanist vision, I will argue how Rivera’s dramatic world is interesting and imaginative in portraying the insensitivity and chaos of metropolitan cities everywhere by presenting a joining of the heavenly world and urban life.

Michelle Deniger Michelle Deininger is a university teacher in English Literature at Cardiff University. She teaches a range of nineteenth and twentieth century modules on the Pathways to a Degree programme for the Centre for Continuing and Professional Education. Michelle’s thesis, which she completed at Cardiff University in 2013, traced a history of women’s Anglophone short fiction in Wales and explores the role of ecofeminism in the history of the form. Her current projects include a book, co-written with Dr

‘Different Shades of Green’: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ecogothic Short Fictions There has been, to date, very little scholarship on the intersection between ecocriticism and the Gothic, to the point that Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s Ecogothic (2016) is recognised as one of the first substantial critical texts in this field. Smith and Hughes draw attention to the shared critical language between the Gothic and the legacies of Romanticism, arguing that the Gothic vision may be ‘more troubling’ because of its ambivalence, and that ‘nature becomes constituted in the Gothic as a space of crisis’.[1] This paper will define and analyse the emergence of the ecogothic in Elizabeth Gaskell’s short fictions, exploring the concept of ‘nature in crisis’ within the context of the Gothic imagination. Many of Gaskell’s Gothic stories weave together a keen interest in social justice with a critique of industrialisation, its impact on the landscape and, frequently, the female body. At the same time, Gaskell’s stories are fundamentally concerned with elements of environmental justice, including deforestation and the containment of nature in manmade spaces. This paper will consider the ways in which Gaskell’s ‘Lois the Witch’ (1859)

Claire Flay-Petty (Cardiff Met), entitled Scholarship and Sisterhood, which explores the links between the Welsh higher education system in the 1920s and women's literary networks. Natalie Rose Cox Natalie Rose Cox has recently completed her MA at Cardiff University, in which her dissertation was a study of the ecogothic in Daphne du Maurier’s short stories. She has co-authored a book chapter on the ecogothic in Elizabeth Gaskell’s short fictions (with Michelle Deininger), which will be published in Victorian Ecocriticism, edited by Dewey Hall. Natalie has recently been published in Planet: The New Welsh Internationalist with a piece on nation-shaping. Her field of interest lies in the Gothic and ideas of space and place, specifically in short stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, and is largely ecocritical, ecogothic, and ecofeminist.

explores and contests the damage wrought upon the landscape of New England in the time of the Salem Witch Trials. The overlaps and tensions between opposing spaces, which are explored in many of Gaskell’s Gothic fictions, are integral to her construction of fear, and are embodied in the invasive processes of deforestation and decay. This paper will uncover the ‘different shades of green’ (‘Lois the Witch’) that make up Gaskell’s ecogothic landscapes of fear and illuminate the ways in which Gaskell’s gothic short fiction engages with ideas of environmental justice, ecoterror and ecophobia.

[1] Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: Defining the ecoGothic’, in Ecogothic, ed Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 3.

Panel 5: Unbounded

Dr Lucy Collins Lucy Collins is a lecturer in English Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Harvard University, where

Moving Landscapes: Nature unbound in the work of Willie Doherty and Seamus Heaney The border as both a political and aesthetic construct plays an important role in literature and visual art from Northern Ireland. An expression of contested identities, and of the long reach of political division in Ireland, the border between north and south has environmental implications too, altering the relationship between land and human community in

she spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar, she teaches and researches in the area of modern poetry and poetics. She has published widely on modern Irish and British poetry – recent publications include Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool, 2015) and The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, edited with Andrew Carpenter (Cork, 2014)

fundamental ways. The militarised landscapes of the province are slow to change, and reflect the asynchronous relationship between natural and political worlds. By exploring work by two of Northern Ireland’s most significant creative artists, I will consider the ways in which poetry and photography engage with the concepts of border landscape through contingent and temporally challenging representations. Seamus Heaney’s treatment of landscape is often concerned with the role of language in shaping perception, as well as with the relationship between place and states of recognition and belonging. Willie Doherty also examines the ways in which the representation of landscape confronts the overlapping yet contested narratives of human and more-than-human worlds – the act of ‘unreliable witness’ that implicates the process of making in the realised image. In this paper I will explore how both these artists deepen our understanding of the temporality of landscapes and examine the relationship of the human subject to physical and imaginative boundaries.

Ann Carragher Ann Carragher is a practicing artist and lecturer of Fine Art. Her visual art practice is relative to numerous ‘typologies’- recent work addresses states of 'in-betweenness' and 'liminality', relative to the natural & built environment. She presents works that weave together notions of loss and lament, by exploring the ambiguous and allusive qualities that manifest (physically and psychologically) in the intersection between space, place, mobility and memory. Border’s, hinterlands and thresholds are a recurring theme, where the past, present and future are conflated, mediating on paradoxes between materiality and the evanescence.

Landscape, Liminality and Lament My current visual research explores the overlapping and interwoven histories of the landscape in and around the ‘South Armagh/ Louth Border’ (the territory between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, also known as the ‘Gap of the North’) close to the town of Newry, Northern Ireland, where I grew up. It is an inquiry into the cultural, social and political resonances of border experience –– through a practice-based investigation of identity, memory and place. My practice-based research engages with and attempts to deconstruct the historical, social and cultural elements that have shaped ‘The Gap of the North’. This project will also become increasingly relevant as the area will be significantly affected by ‘Brexit’, and the possibility and return of a hard border could have serious political and economic consequences; presenting the return to an atmosphere of oppression and mistrust, surveillance and control. Steeped in history and trauma, the political, physical landscape of the area, active, bloody and turbulent, is well documented and memorialized. Strangeness and fear exudes from the political human horror and mythological endeavours that are entwined in the fabric of the area; in the layers of colonial history and in the evidence of a once highly militarised panoptical zone by a dominant discourse of occupation, control and surveillance. However, the area is also synonymous with pilgrimage and ritual, religion is interwoven into the topography of the landscape and women’s position is mythical and apocryphal, fixed yet fluid, wavering somewhere between absence and presence. The concept of liminality is firmly rooted in anthropological and religious discourse, with recent emergence (The Spectral Turn) and application in socio-political and cultural studies. The pursuit of a female subjective voice informed by cultural modes of agency, power structures and fragmentation of identity is central to the study. The term “liminal” is applicable temporally as well as spatially, psychologically as well as physically - it is often discussed in terms of space, place, memory and identity, regarding transitional spaces, frontiers, border zones and contested territories. The site and place of

‘The Gap’ is central in unearthing and revealing forgotten subjectivities, whilst simultaneously providing fertile ground for the development of new visual strategies. The notion of liminality is a pervasive aspect of modernity in an increasingly globalised world, where boundaries are dissolved and identity is lost (Bhabha 2007), however liminality is also a pervasive aspect of Irish cultural identity as a legacy of colonialism and post colonial discourse (Holmsten, Nordin 2013) - where identity is complicated and ‘haunted’ by spectres of past trauma, displacement and diasporic experience, understood as a ‘case of strange dualism’ (O’Byrne 2015) and/ or ‘schizophrenic experience’, unable to reconcile the past with the present (O’Sullivan 2009).

Daniela Kato Daniela Kato is an associate professor of English at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan. Portuguese-born, over the past ten years she has taught at several universities in Japan and China, as well as participated in various projects of ecological restoration and community development. Her current research interests are intermedial in approach and revolve around landscape and environmental aesthetics. She is particularly interested in exploring the interface between contemporary literature, the visual arts and anthropology concerning landscape perception, transculturation, and women’s creativity and subjectivity, through the analysis of a variety of material practices such as writing, drawing, painting, sculpture and photography.

Contemporary Japanese Women Visual Artists Living in ‘The West’: Boundaries, landscapes, transculturations This paper will discuss work by contemporary Japanese-born women visual artists whose distinct experiences of living in Europe and North America have crucially shaped the innovative ways in which they engage with landscape and thereby negotiate multiple cultural and gender boundaries: Leiko Ikemura (Japan/Germany), Mimi Kato (Japan/US) and Junko Mori (Japan/UK), among others. My key concern is to demonstrate how the fluid “in-between” landscapes variously imagined by these artists are sites of negotiation and contestation with the potential to defy not only the orientalist discourses that have exoticised/infantilised Japan and its cultural products, but also the masculinist traditions of landscape representation – in the East and in the West – that have marginalised women artists (Adams and Robins 2001). To achieve this, I will bring together a number of strands of contemporary thinking around the traveling concepts of boundaries and borders (Boer 2006; Holm 2012), migratory culture (Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2011), as well as transculturation and its creative processes of cultural translation, which have been diversely probed by postcolonial critics (Bhabha 1993) and multispecies ethnographers (Tsing 1997, 2015; Satsuka 2015). Energising my discussion will be an intermedial approach (Elleström 2010) that seeks to do justice to these visual artists’ shared commitment to blurring aesthetic boundaries between different media – namely painting, calligraphy, sculpture, photography and performance. Such intermedial crossings are, I shall argue, an integral part of their crossing of other cultural and gender boundaries.