The Anthropocene: from Boundaries to Bonds
The Anthropocene: from Boundaries to Bonds info
The Anthropocene: from Boundaries to Bonds. Interdisciplinary Crossovers in Knowledge Development
YouTube live transmission of second day of the conference: 20 OCT 2023: link
Conference Date: 19-20 October 2023
Conference venue: University of Science and Technology, H-14 building, Wrocław, Poland
Our conference aims at investigating the potential of inter/trans/multidisciplinary alliances in research on the Anthropocene and the importance of such disciplinary border-crossings for producing knowledge that can not only meet the challenges of the scientific kind, but also be transferrable to the social sphere. The Anthropocene defies the cognitive, imaginative, affective and ethical systems underlying our perception and understanding of reality. We propose to see the knowledge on/of the Anthropocene as a borderland where many turning points (crises) meet and coalesce. Such a perspective exposes the necessity to think beyond the dualisms of science/humanities. The project seeks spaces for mutual inspirations and new bonds between systems, methods and classes governing science and knowledge.
In particular, we invite crossing disciplinary boundaries. While expert knowledge remains at the core of examining the Anthropocene, its resultant commitment to devise guidance for policy makers and to develop social awareness based on verified knowledge requires involvement from other fields of expertise. Scholarship tackling the Anthropocene spans, apart from earth sciences, social science, the humanities, human geography, and other disciplines. By bringing together scholars from many areas of research inquiry, the seminar aims at exploring the possibility of inter- and multidisciplinary scholarly work on developing accountable knowledge that needs to be subsequently translated into social and cultural narratives. How do we cooperate across the boundaries within academia, in politics and social organizations as we strive to address the Anthropocene?
That the Anthropocene poses an unprecedented challenge urging political action at global and local levels has been already evidenced by activists, NGOs, political groups and researchers across the world. Governance models so far have been involved in the crucial conflict between the harshness of data forecasting catastrophic scenarios and the fear to decrease consumption and extraction of resources. How do we create new ways of relating (intra- and interspecies) and turn the shattering experience of boundary-crossing into active bond-making through science, politics and various forms of activism?
We want to explore what narratives are being developed to provide viable solutions at the level of politics and governance, including institutions for educating society and expanding the civic sense of responsibility and new planetary awareness. What new lexicons are being developed to accommodate the cognitive, ethical and ontological challenges of the planet in crisis? What new forms of thinking, doing and telling do we need to create a new semiotics of crisis, catastrophe, accountability, agency, and hope that cannot be contained within the known paradigm of human mastery of the earth? How do we confront the limits of our understanding and devise new ways of sense-making in light of (rather than despite) the Anthropocene? How to promote knowledge based on the idea of reciprocity?
ORGANIZERS:
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- Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre, Faculty of Letters, University of Wrocław
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- Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub
PARTNERS:
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- Academy of Young Scientists and Scholars
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- Academia Europaea Hubert Curien Fund
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- Saxon State Ministry of Justice, Democracy, European Affairs and Equality
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- University of Wrocław
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- Wrocław University of Science and Technology
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- Erasmus Mundus International Master: Children’s Literature, Media & Culture
Program of the conference can be dowloaded here (as of 10 Oct, 2023).
Main topics:
The topics and questions below, by no means exhausting the range of concerns, encourage an inter- and multidisciplinary reflection on the Anthropocene. We invite individual presentations, thematic panels and roundtables on the following:
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- The geopolitics of modernization: capitalist (Capitalocene) and socialist (communist) models; extractivism and coloniality
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- Cartographies of Anthropocene-generated displacements
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- Anthropocene(s) in critical thought, arts and cultural narratives: apocalyptic narratives; ecomodernism and narratives of hope; the role of art in imagining better futures; the Anthropocene art
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- Social temporalities (political, cultural, etc.) and planetary (geological) temporalities
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- Programs promoting climate care: forms of intervention, the appealing value, viability of plans, translationality/transferrability of premises
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- Local struggles and resilience: decarbonization, transition to renewable energy, grassroots and cross-border practices of sustainability and restoration
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- Anthropocene pedagogies: how and what to teach about the Anthropocene to various socialand age groups?
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- Affective Anthropocene: anxiety, grief, mourning, denial, hope
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- Indigenous knowledges as models for sustainability and environmental justice struggles
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- Planetarity of ecological imagination and thought vs. globalism of consumer markets
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- New ontologies: ecological catastrophe as an example of “hyperobjects”; materials and their processes; interdependencies of life and non-life; non-human (more-than-human) agencies and the possibilities of new relationality for the human, the non-human and more-than-human
Keynote speakers:
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- Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
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- Professor Orit Halpern, Technische Universität Dresden
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- Professor Sean Hand MAE, University of Warwick
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- Professor Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer, Case Western Reserve University
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- Professor Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham
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- Professor Valerio Lucarini MAE, University of Reading
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- Professor Mark Williams, University of Leicester
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- Professor em. Jan Zalasiewicz, University of Leicester
Scientific Board:
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- Professor em. dr. Lars Walløe MAE, University of Oslo
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- Professor Göran Bolin MAE, Södertörn University
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- Professor dr. hab. Ewa Domańska, Adam Mickiewicz Uniwersity
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- Professor dr. Orit Halpern, TU Dresden
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- Professor Mark Jackson, Bristol University
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- Professor dr. Mirja Lecke, University of Regensburg
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- Professor Valerio Lucarini MAE, University of Reading
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- Dr. inż. Marta Rusnak, PWr, Academia Iuvenum
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- Dr. hab. Marta Tomczok, Prof. Uniwersytet Śląski
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- Prof. Mark Williams, Leicester University
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- Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre: dr. hab. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, MAE; dr. Urszula Lisowska; dr. hab. Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice, prof. UWr; dr. hab. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, prof. UWr; dr. hab. Agnieszka Helena Duffy, prof. UWr; dr. hab. Katarzyna Majbroda, prof. UWr
Organizing Committee:
Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre, Faculty of Letters, University of Wrocław:
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- dr. hab. Dorota Kołodziejczyk
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- dr. Urszula Lisowska
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- dr. Joanna Banachowicz
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- dr. hab. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, prof. UWr
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- dr. hab. Agnieszka Helena Duffy, prof. UWr
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- dr. Małgorzata Kolankowska
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- dr. hab. Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice, prof. UWr
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- dr. hab. Katarzyna Majbroda, prof. UWr
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- Anna Maciejewska
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- Ewelina Adamik
Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub:
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- Anna Jarosz
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- Katarzyna Majkowska
Important information:
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- There is no conference fee.
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- The Organizers may offer a small travel refund to a limited number of PhD students and emerging scholars.
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- The conference will take place at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Wrocław is a beautiful city in south-west Poland.
Opening of the Conference | Room: Sala Dziekańska (H-14)
• Prof. Arkadiusz Wójs, Wrocław University of Science and Technology; Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub
• Dr. hab. Maciej Cesarz, University of Wrocław
• Prof. Lars Walløe, University of Oslo
• Prof. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, University of Wrocław, Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre
Plenary session (Keynotes 1) | Room: Sala Dziekańska (H-14)
Chair: Dorota Kołodziejczyk (University of Wrocław)
Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)
The Anthropocene and the Historian
Coffee break
Plenary session (Keynotes 2) | Room: Sala Dziekańska
Chair: Mark Jackson (Bristol University)
• Orit Halpern (TU Dresden)
Resilient Futures
• Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham)
Children, Young People and the Anthropocene
Interdisciplinary perspectives | Room: TBC
Chair: Lars Walløe (University of Oslo)
•Hannah Sellers, Angharad Evans, Rachel Holmes, Juan Carlos Berrio, Richard Jones, Stefano De Sabbata, Andy Neilson, Moya Burns, Mark Williams, (University of Leicester)
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding Resilient Woodlands in an Anthropocene Landscape.
•Scott Bremer (University of Bergen)
Healthy Food and Sustainable Agriculture: Towards Transformative Practices
•Marta Tomczok, Paweł Tomczok (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Local Struggles and Resilience: Decarbonization, Transition to Renewable Energy, Grassroots Practices – the Case of Upper Silesia
Philosophy I | Room: TBC
Chair: Mark Williams (University of Leicester)
• Audronė Žukauskaitė (Lithuanian Culture Research Institute)
Organism-Oriented Ontology Against the Anthropocene • Richard Sťahel (Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Self-Limitation as the Principle of Environmental Democracy: Towards the Starting Points of the Political System of the Demographic and Climatic Regime of the Anthropocene
Arts and Media I | Room: TBC
Chair: Joanna Banachowicz (University of Wrocław)
• Oleksandr Zabirko (University of Regensburg)
The Affective Landscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Domesticating Nuclear Disaster in a Video Game.
• Tijana Rupčić (Central European University, Austria)
Facing the Sixth Extinction: Exploring the Idea of Environmental Collapse and Technology in Dystopian Video Games.
• Kamil Lipiński (University of Białystok)
Eco-film Criticism on the Basis of Water Poisoning in Gasland.
Philosophy II | Room: TBC
Chair: Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham)
• Mark Horvath (Eszterházy Károly Catholic University in Eger), Adam Lovasz (Eötvös Loránd University)
Against Ecological Authoritarianism: Towards a Critique of “Planetary” Politics
• Camilla Bernava (University of Naples “L’Orientale”)
Ecological Remarks on a Planetary Dimension. From the Biosphere to Geophilosophy
• Giovanni Fava (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Towards a Transcendental Geology: a Merleau-Pontyan Reading of the Four Theses by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Ecocritical Perspectives in Social Science and Humanities | Room: TBC
Chair: Scott Bremer (University of Bergen)
• Molly Desorgher (University of Leicester)
Ethnographic Stratigraphy for the Anthropocene
• Justyna Stępień (University of Łódź)
More-than-human Water. Critical Poetics of Liquid Ecosystems
• Anna Barcz (Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw)
The Role of Storytelling: the Anthropocene in the Cartography of the Future (following the Rivers)
Ecocriticism and Literature I | Room: TBC
Chair: Mirja Lecke (University of Regensburg)
• Helena Duffy (University of Wrocław)
The Animals Counterattack: Anti-militarism and Animal Agency in Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s Kurzgeschichten:
The Deed (1950/1958) and The Manoeuvres (1952)
• Alina Strzempa (University of Regensburg)
Literature and Industry: Re-thinking Regional Literatures by Bringing the Anthropocene to the Donbas and Upper Silesia?
• Izabela Poręba (University of Wrocław)
Every leaf defines its limits. All roots have their histories: Colonial Violence Against Nature in Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Coffee break
Roundtable 1 Room: Sala Dziekańska
What Does It Mean to Apply Evolutionary Thinking into the Research of the Anthropocene?
Chair: Onerva Kiianlinna (University of Helsinki) & Jerzy Luty (University of Wrocław)
• Tomi Kokkonen (University of Helsinki)
Why Understanding Anthropocene Requires Understanding Human Evolution ?
• Dirk Vanderbeke (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena)
Human Nature and Environmental Disaster in John Brunner’s “The Sheep Look Up” and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise.
• Jan Verpooten (KU Leuven)
From DNA to AI: Evolution of Information in the Anthropocene.
Ecocriticism and Literature II | Room: TBC
Chair: Dorota Kołodziejczyk
• Joanna Soćko (University of Silesia)
Out of Book. Meditative Literature in Environmentally Oriented Installations
• Debajyoti Biswas (Bodoland University), John Charles Ryan (Southern Cross University/Notre Dame University Australia)
Solastalgia and Poetic Resilience in the Environmental Imagination of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
• Ewelina Adamik (University of Wrocław)
How Do We Write About the “Anthropocene Water”? Hydrofeminism in the Poetry of Małgorzata Lebda
Ecocriticism and Literature III | Room: TBC
Chair: Katarzyna Więckowska
• Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice (University of Wrocław)
Bonding with the Nonhuman in Olga Tokarczuk’s Recent Prose
• Joanna Małgorzata Banachowicz (University of Wrocław)
The Role of Literature in Imagining Better Futures: Olga Tokarczuk’s and Orhan Pamuk’s Novel Prize Lectures
• Małgorzata Kolankowska (University of Wrocław)
Translators in the Anthropocene
Roundtable/Panel 2 | Room: TBC
Beyond the Anthropocene: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches Across Literature and Theory
Chair: Joanna Soćko (University of Silesia)
• Katarzyna Więckowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)
More-than-Human Entanglements: Literary Expressions of the Tree World.
• Tomasz Dobrogoszcz (University of Łódź) Decentering the Anthropos in the Fiction of Magdalena Tulli and Andrzej Stasiuk.
• Tymon Adamczewski (Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz)
Vibrant Textualities: Material and Speculative Poetics of Contemporary Eco-minded Literature and Theory.
Roundtable/Panel 3 | Room: TBC
Imagining Interspecies Kinship, Earth’s Aliveness, and an Ecological Civilization: On the Cultural Work of Fantasy in the Anthropocene
Chair: Alina Strzempa (University of Regensburg)
• Marek Oziewicz (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities)
Planetarianist Fantasy: Confronting the Ecocidal Unconscious by Imagining Ecocentric Futures.
• Andrea Casals-Hill (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile)
Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City: a cast of unexpected storytellers.
• Tereza Dědinová (Masaryk University in Brno)
Hills in Her Bones and the Soul of Land in Her Head: Permaculture Ethics in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Series.
• Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak (University of Wrocław)
Confronting Double Death and Extinction in Children’s Literature of the Anthropocene.
Plenary session (Keynotes 3) | Room: Sala Dziekańska (H-14)
Chair: Göran Bolin (Södertörn University)
• Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Case Western Reserve University)
The Inner Life of the Planet: Earth System Science in Moral Time
• Mark Williams (University of Leicester)
Cities Frame our Unsustainable Relationship with the Natural World in the Anthropocene
Philosophy III | Room: TBC
Chair: Magdalena Hoły-Łuczaj (University of Wrocław)
• Martin Ritter (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Becoming Earthbound
• Edward M. Guetti (American University, Washington, DC)
“Once Out of Nature”: Narrativity, Amerindian Perspectivism, and the Politics of an Anthropocene Aesthetics.
Arts and Media II | Room: TBC
Chair: Orit Halpern (Technische Universität Dresden)
• Dean Sully (University College London), Merry Chow (University College London)
Conservation as a Creative Response for “Rewilding” Museums in the Age of Anthropocene.
• Franziska Benger (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science)
New Local Alliances for Tackling the Crises (a showcase from Germany).
Ecocriticism and Literature IV | Room: TBC
Chair: Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice (University of Wrocław)
· Călina-Maria Moldovan (Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca)
Of Ice and Men. A New Materialist Reading of Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean
· Anna Maciejewska (University of Wrocław)
A Warning Against the Effects of the Anthropocene? The Vision of the End of the Earth in Mieczysław Smolarski’s The City of Light
· Inna Häkkinen (University of Helsinki/Institute of Advanced Studies Köszeg)
Situating “Care” within Permaculture Ethics in Energy Storytelling: Literary Imaginaries
Coffee break
Philosophy IV | Room: TBC
Chair: Agnieszka Hendsoldt (University of Opole)
• Katarína Podušelová (Slovak Academy of Sciences/ UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
The Anthropocene and a Problem of Human Trapped in the Dissonance of Social and Economic Being.
• Jacek Schindler (University of Wrocław)
The Agency of Things and the Subjectification of the Brand. A New Ontology Towards Late Capitalism
• Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Geopraxis: A Concept for the Anthropocene
Arts and Media III | Room: TBC
Chair: Tomasz Dobrogoszcz (University of Łódź)
• Čeněk Pýcha (Charles University in Prague)
Anthropocene Visuality Through the Lens of State-socialist Experience.
• Natalia Bielica (University of Wrocław)
Between History and Geology – Landscape as a Palimpsest.
• Justyna Hanna Budzik (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Between Pan and Close-Up: Landscapes of Home Movies.
Ecocriticism and Literature V | Room: TBC
Chair: Małgorzata Kolankowska (University of Wrocław)
· Laura Colombino (University of Naples “L’Orientale”)
Dazzling Mineral Traumas: Competing Aesthetics in J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World.
· Agnieszka Jagła (University of Łódź)
“Love is an intervention”: Loving the Planet in the Age of the Anthropocene in The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Bewilderment by Richard Powers
· Alina Mitek-Dziemba (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Reconceiving Translational Engagement in the Anthropocene.
Philosophy V | Room: TBC
Chair: Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Case Western Reverve University)
• Urszula Lisowska (University of Wrocław)
Starting with Bodies – Rethinking the Concept of “the World” in the Anthropocene.
• Agnieszka Hensoldt (University of Opole)
Reclaiming Cities for Living Beings.
• Bernhard Sylla (University of Minho)
Towards a Phenomenology of Eco-anxiety.
Arts and Media IV | Room: TBC
Chair: Čeněk Pýcha (Charles University in Prague)
• Agata Kowalewska (University of Warsaw)
Feralizing as an Alternative to Rewilding in the Anthropocene.
• Piotr Skubała (University of Silesia in Katowice), Dr. Magdalena Ochwat (University of Silesia in Katowice), Anna Kopaczewska (Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Katowice)
Thinking with Nature. On (New?) Symbiotic Stories
Education 1 | Room: TBC
Chair: Agnieszka Powierska (State Academy of Applied Sciences in Włocławek)
• Václav Sixta (Charles University in Prague)
The Anthropocene in the History Textbook?
• Eliška Fulínová, Karolína Pauknerová (Charles University in Prague/Czech Academy of Sciences)
Teaching (about) the Anthropocene: Experience with Piloting a Micro-credential Anthropocene Summer School in Prague.
Lunch break
Arts and Media V| Rroom: TBC
Chair: Justyna Hanna Budzik (University of Silesia in Katowice)
• Zofia Kolbuszewska (University of Wrocław)
Anthropocene and Forensic Imagination: Crime, Arctic Gothic and the Nordic Ecological Uncanny in TV Crime series Jordscott and Fortitude.
• Sonia Front (University of Silesia in Katowice)
A Network of Connections Rippling Through Time – Human Time and Deep Time in the Haven Series.
• Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak (University of Wrocław)
Slow Violence and Slow Journalism: Drawing Indigenous Transgenerational Trauma and Bond-Making in Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020).
Education 2 | Room: TBC
Chair: Václav Sixta (Charles University in Prague)
• Suzanne van der Beek (University of Tilburg)
Re-imagining Children in the Anthropocene.
• Agnieszka Powierska (State Academy of Applied Sciences in Włocławek)
Why do Children Have to Act? A Repetitive Film Motif of Children Rescuing Non-human Animals
• Vera Verboom (University of Amsterdam)
Learning From the Kadars: How Children’s Literature Can Productively Navigate the Anthropocene?
Roundtable/Panel 4| Room: TBC
How to Escape from the Anthropocene: Entanglements of More-Than-Human Bodies and Technologies in Contemporary Performative Arts?
Chair: Göran Bolin
• Mateusz Borowski (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
Bodies Between Scales in Performative Arts.
• Mateusz Chaberski (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
More than Individuals, Less than Multitudes. Bodies after the Anthropocene.
• Filip Ryba (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
Being with Crisis and Necessity of Shifting Around: The Lebanese Example.
• Małgorzata Sugiera (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)
Escaping from the Anthropocene (in the Company of Spiders, Monarchs and Digital Technologies).
Roundtable/Panel 5 | Room: TBC
Challenges and Tensions of the Narratives from the Affective Anthropocene
Chair: Urszula Lisowska (University of Wrocław)
• Magdalena Hoły-Łuczaj (the University of Wrocław)
Uneasy Hope: on the Need to Appropriate Being Torn.
• Silviya Serafimova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Climate Change Worry and Eco-anxiety as Emotional Motivators for Multi-species Justice.
• Patryk Szaj (Pedagogical University of Kraków)
Opening Futures Through the Work of Mourning.
• Forrest Clingerman (Ohio Northern University)
Relating Oneself and the Other in the Anthropocene.
Roundtable/Panel 6 | Room: TBC
Children’s Literature and Culture Scholarship in/of the Anthropocene: Towards New Bonds and Crossovers
Chair: Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, (University of Wrocław)
• Marnie Campagnaro, (University of Padua)
• Macarena García-González, (University of Glasgow)
• Irena Barbara Kalla, (University of Wrocław)
• Suzanne van der Beek, (University of Tilburg)
• Aliona Yarova, (Malmö University)
Roundtable/Panel 7 | Room: TBC
Biocultural Evolutionary Aesthetics as an Interdisciplinary Study
Chair: Dirk Vanderbeke (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena)
• Piotr Sękowski (Medical University of Łódź)
Troubles With the Concept of the Art Instinct.
• Onerva Kiianlinna (University of Helsinki)
Divide into Empirical and Philosophical Aesthetics in the Age of Anthropocene.
• Jerzy Luty (University of Wrocław)
Is Art an Adaptation? Testing Evolutionary Aesthetics’ Hypotheses in Tribal Population.
Summary of the Conference/ Discussion | Room: Sala Dziekańska (H-14)