Program for Eco-Emotions on Earth

This series of works explores the cultural and emotional relationships between humans, plants, and soil through the lens of funerary practices. Drawing on the cultural history of Norwegian cemetery landscapes from the 19th century onwards, and the contemporary uses of funerary flowers and plants, the project examines how plants mediate grief and memory, as well as ideas of death, transformation, and rebirth.

The emergence of the cemetery as a landscaped “garden of mourning” reflects a shift in how death is situated within nature: from exclusion and social hierarchy to contemplative, aesthetic environments where plants “speak” a silent language of loss. Flowers and trees function symbolically and materially, linking human bodies to the soil as a site of decomposition, regeneration, and continuity.  In this way, earth takes on the role as an active participant in human rituals and emotional ecologies.

Karen Aarre is a Norwegian/British visual artist, born in London in 1972. She is currently living and working in Oslo, Norway. She has studied at Faculdade das Belas Artes (Faculty of Visual Arts), University of Lisbon, Portugal, and at De Vrije Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten (The Free Academy of Visual Arts), the Hague, the Netherlands. She also holds a doctorate (DPhil) in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK, and has several years of experience working as a documentary film maker prior to her artistic career.

Observations and interpretations of nature play key roles in the geosciences, and in geology in particular. Patterns and textures, shapes and colors represent building blocks of knowledge. Still, only parts of the observational basis is usually used actively for scientific studies and reporting. In this presentation and exhibition, I will explore using printmaking to dig deeper into the geological observations – especially those that remain poorly documented and keep getting forgotten.  

Henrik H. Svensen is Professor in geology at the Department for Geosciences, University of Oslo, and leader of the VICCO Centre for carbon storage research. His main research interests are related to geological processes and their links to cycling of elements, and the couplings between the lithosphere and the atmosphere. He has also been part of the cross disciplinary Gardening the Globe project led by Kyrre Kverndokk at UiB. Henrik has written popular science books and the most recent was about how to understand the various rock types in Norway (Et land av stein. Kagge forlag). He has been making prints since he inherited a printing press in 2019, and is a member of the Association of Norwegian Printmakers.

This talk presents our curatorial work for the Riddu Riđđu festival exhibition Visualizing Arctic Voices, shown at Davvi Álbmogiid Guovddáš / Centre of Northern Peoples in Olmmáivággi in 2024. The exhibition brought together historical images of and by Arctic Indigenous peoples that had been uncovered within various colonial archives, and displayed these alongside contemporary works by Arctic Indigenous artists. Through its choices of content, storytelling and exhibition design, Visualizing Arctic Voices examined Indigenous experiences of and creative responses to coloniality and extractivism, and the ways in which art, knowledge and history can be taken back to heal and enrich Arctic Indigenous communities and cultures today. Within this overall framework, our talk focuses on two pairings of historical material and contemporary artistic intervention: the fragmented traces left in colonial archives by the Inughuit individuals Qalaherriaq (d. 1856), and ‘Alnayah’ (late 19th/early 20th C.), and the commissioned artistic responses to their stories realized for the exhibition by Bolatta Silis-Høegh (b. 1981, Kalaaleq and Latvian). Using our curatorial work and thinking for Visualizing Arctic Voices as a springboard, we offer reflections on the ways in which exhibitions might productively activate emotive responses the contemporary ecological crises and its roots in colonial extractivism.

Jérémie McGowan is a designer, artist, musician and researcher based in Tromsø / Romsa. He exhibits, curates and teaches internationally. Originally from Wilmington, NC, USA, Jérémie has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2011), and has worked as director of Northern Norway Art Museum (Tromsø), senior curator at the National Museum (Oslo), and director of the PhD Program at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design / AHO. Jérémie is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at UiT / The Arctic University Museum of Norway. His current projects include Arctic Armpit, a one-man punk band launched in 2021, and Real. Arctic., a multimodal art and archival project created and produced together with Amund Sjølie Sveen / NORDTING in locations across the Arctic.

Ingeborg Høvik is an Associate Professor of Art History at UiT the Arctic University of Norway and manager of the research collective Arctic Voices. Ingeborg's research concerns Sámi and Greenlandic Inuit art and visual culture and the art and visual culture of European colonialism in the Arctic region in the long nineteenth century. Together with Sigfrid Kjeldaas, she guest-edited the double special issue 'Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone' for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2023) and in 2024 she curated Riddu Riđđu’s exhibition Visualizing Arctic Voices and edited the accompanying catalogue (Davvi Álbmogiid Guovddáš, 2024). Her most recent publication is a series of textbook articles (2025-26, Fagbokforlaget) on Sámi duodji and art for use in the Norwegian high school. 

In the eco-philological approach to medieval Icelandic saga literature that I have been developing over the past fifteen years or so, the starting point is our place in the world, and narrativised perception(s) of it. What topographical and environmental particularities influenced the formulation of saga narratives and the production of physical manuscript witnesses containing these texts? Equally, how, in the case of the Íslendingasögur (since these stories’ settings were familiar to those who copied and read them), has the physical surface of the landscape, like a manuscript book, transmitted these narratives to audiences over time? The ways that the twin material surfaces or “supports” (to use a codicological term) of landscape and parchment/paper have interacted over time, and been engaged with by those who copied and consumed this literature, constitutes a complex and dynamic process that evolved over many hundreds of years. This process was primarily an Icelandic phenomenon for the first few centuries, but later spread beyond the shores of this small North Atlantic island as saga literature became known elsewhere in the world.

In this keynote talk, I will consider the place — or places — of emotion in this process. The manuscripts themselves are charged ideological objects that stir emotion in personal and in collective contexts, and that have moved from place to place over time. Similarly, responses to Iceland’s landscapes — perhaps above all, Iceland’s saga landscapes — are invariably conditioned by personal and collectively-shaped expectations and emotions that, in turn, colour locals’ or visitors’ expression of the perceived relationship between past and present, story, and place. Drawing on various sources that give insights into how Icelanders and visitors to Iceland have engaged with and responded to manuscripts preserving the sagas, and to saga-sites, I hope to contribute to eco-emotion studies more widely, as well as to contribute to this exciting, emerging area of research within medieval Icelandic studies.

Emily Lethbridge is rannsóknardósent / Associate Research Professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík. Her research areas include Icelandic manuscripts and the transmission of medieval Icelandic narratives, landscape and place-name studies, reception studies (especially travel writing on Iceland) and digital humanities. Field-work has been an important part of her research practice for many years, and engagement with local communities around Iceland (see, e.g. the short films “Memories of Old Awake” and “Getting to Brákarey”). She is PI of the Kvennaspor: Unearthing and Foregrounding Women in Icelandic Saga Landscapes research project (https://kvennaspor.is/). Her monograph Land of Rocks and Sagas: An Eco-Philological Approach to the Sagas of Icelanders will be published by ARC Humanities Press in 2026. Emily’s research profile is online at https://iris.landsbokasafn.is/en/persons/emily-lethbridge/publications/.

Christian Hummelsund Voie (University of South-Eastern Norway): “‘And the Earth Lay under the Outcome’: Healing and Befoulment in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever”

While readings of Stephen R. Donaldson’s foundational fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (1977 – 2013) have tended to view the series as a psychological odyssey of redemption, to an ecocritical reading the primacy of the environment eclipses even the protagonist’s moral evolution. Donaldson explores the Land with an eye for nuance and sensuous immersal that borders on nature writing. Physicality is centered, as sensual embodiment, but importantly also as a porous point of intermeshing between land and person, where the vitality of each inflects the other, focalizing matters of health and ability. The people of the Land of whatever species are inherently relational in their participatory attunement to their animate environment and its Earthpower, the vital pulse of the Land, which thrums through its soil, becoming the wellspring of both power and vulnerability as the earth serves as the medium through which either health or foulness is dispensed. Drawing on ecocriticism, David Abrams’ eco-phenomenology from The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) and eco crip theory, this paper explores Donaldson’s fantasy setting of “the Land” as a “disabled ecology,” and the ways that the remedial relationship to earth and health that is the central stake of the series models an eco-crip emphasis on relational repairment.

Radvilè Musteikytè (The University of Turku): “‘Attuned to Loss’: The Rhetoric of Solastalgia in Richard Powers’ Bewilderment and Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters”

This paper presents two works of speculative fiction that reflect on the devastation of the Earth: The Moonday Letters (Kuunpäivän kirjeet 2020, published in English in 2022) by Finnish author Emmi Itäranta and Bewilderment (2021) by American author Richard Powers. I argue that both contemporary novels invite readers to engage with “solastalgia” – a sense of distress caused by witnessing environmental change in a familiar place. The evocation of solastalgia as a readerly affect that attunes readers to the topical issue of environmental loss is explored by employing James Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative, particularly his and Matthew Clark’s model of three narrative components (the mimetic, the thematic, and the synthetic). Accounting for both their content and form, my threefold analysis identifies the many similarities shared by the seemingly different novels: their Earth-centeredness, the theme of loss and its rescaling from personal to environmental, as well as storyworld-internal worldbuilding that repeatedly interrupts the progression of both narratives. This reading highlights how these novels participate in the same fight for refiguring environmental degradation as a matter of personal importance. With this paper, I aim to contribute to broader discussions about the variety, functioning, and functions of Anthropocene fiction.

Peter Degerman (Mid Sweden University): “Earth Ritual: The Negotiation of Boundaries in Euripides’ Bacchae”

This paper reads Euripides’ drama Bacchae as a play about the relationships, dependences and antagonisms of different life forms in the context of the earth. A central assumption is that the tragedy discusses several embodied crises; a central one being that of environmental change. Through the character of Dionysus, associated with various boundary transgression, the human and more than human bodies radically transforms the space in which the action takes place as well as they themselves being transformed by this space. While the desires that drives the play includes the urge to control the landscape, the landscape as a space of action points to the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things. In this respect the earth is both a giver and a destroyer of life, shaping the emotional responses of the characters in the play. Bacchae is thus staging the ritual as negotiation of boundaries between culture and nature, between human and non-human, between polis and physis.

Josh Burgoyne (University of Oslo): “‘Sukku þeir Skrælingar í jǫrð níðr’: Vínland, the Vínlanders, and Human Entanglements with Earth”

The Vínland sagas, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, recount the Norse settlement of Iceland and Greenland before turning westward to describe voyages to Vínland (North America) around 1000 CE. Unlike most Íslendingasögur, which are primarily driven by legal and social conflict, these tales are propelled by humanity’s relationship with these three regions. This study examines how the narratives cast Vínland and its native inhabitants, pejoratively labeled skrælingar, as participants in an interwoven assemblage unsettled by the Norse arrival. The sagas repeatedly align the Vínlanders with the landscape: their dwellings are mistaken for hillocks, they emerge from beyond a cape to trade, and, when pursued, sink into the earth to escape. This alliance is further reinforced rhetorically through the use of verbs and metaphors which depict the Vínlanders as natural forces, likening them to scattered coal on water or a swift stream. By analyzing these recurring motifs and rhetorical strategies through the lens of assemblage theory, I thus argue that the Vínland sagas conceptualize human and nonhuman agencies as relational and mutually implicated rather than discrete; collaboration with the landscape is ultimately key to the Vínlanders' victory, while the Norse are cast out of Vínland's garden after they fail to assimilate.

Hannah Perleth (Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen–Nuremberg): “Care and Land in Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan”

The word Ædnan means land, the earth and my mother in Northern Sámi. Linnea Axelsson chose it as the title for her 2018 epic poem which follows two Sámi families through life and its changes during the 20th and into the beginning of the 21st century. In this paper I want to characterize the relationship between Sámi and the land under the aspect of care. Ædnan thematisizes the forceful migration of the Sámi and the consequential loss of land, as well as the destruction of land by large mining companies. According to Petra Broomans, the elder generations react more with nostalgia, while the youngest generation in Ædnan chooses activism to regain their lost Sámi heritage (Broomans 133). My research interest lies in the way care shapes the (emotional) relationship between land and the Sámi. Land offers comfort to the characters in Ædnan, while Sámi simultaneously advocate for it, protest for it, go to court for the lands they inhabit (referencing the Girjas case). The analysis of Ædnan reveals such advocacy and the offering of comfort to be central notions of care for Sámi.

Isi de Paula (Lund University): "To Sing the Earth into Being: Yoiking the Body-Territory in Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan”

Ædnan is an old Northern Sámi word that means land, ground, earth. In Linnea Axelsson's epic poem with this title, the earth is the element that unites several generations of Sámi families under a century, from the 1910s to the 2010s. Ædnan represents the paths followed yearly by the semi-nomadic reindeer herders, and the landscape that suddenly becomes estranged as they are forcibly displaced southward by the states of Sweden, Finland and Norway. Ædnan is the territory exploited in the name of the development of these nations, but it is also the territory that the families feel emotionally connected with as their culture and language are increasingly erased. As the fight against extractivist exploitation lasts until the present, the newer generations must negotiate their identities and sense of belonging to the territory. For this paper, I propose a reading of Ædnan through the concept of "body-territory" — a concept that has been popularized among indigenous movements to name the idea of inseparability between human and territorial bodies within these cosmologies. As I aim to show, the meaning of "body-territory" is specially evident in the poems, and in Sámi culture in general, through the practice of yoik (singing into being).

Chen Cui (University of Lausanne / University of Oslo): “Soil, Stone, and Sorrow: Material Ecologies of Grief in the Middle English Pearl”

This paper examines how the Middle English dream vision Pearl articulates grief through the agency of matter, presenting mourning as an experience embedded in the material earth. While Pearl has often been interpreted primarily as a theological allegory culminating in the vision of the New Jerusalem, the poem’s opening situates emotional experience within a dense network of earthly materials: soil, vegetation, and precious stone. The narrator laments the loss of a “pearl” that has fallen into the ground, and his grief unfolds in intimate proximity to the garden landscape. Drawing on material ecocriticism, particularly the work of Serenella Iovino and Stacy Alaimo, this paper argues that the earth in Pearl functions not merely as symbolic setting but as an active participant in the poem’s emotional narrative. The garden operates simultaneously as grave, ecological environment, and site of affective encounter. The narrator’s bodily contact with the soil—lying upon the ground where the pearl was lost—triggers the dream vision itself, suggesting that grief emerges through material relations between body, earth, and buried object. The poem further develops this material poetics through the contrast between the earthly garden and the radiant landscape glimpsed across the river. Instead of abandoning matter, the heavenly vision reconfigures it through luminous stones, flowing water, and transformed ground. Attending to the narrative agency of soil and mineral matter, this paper argues that Pearl presents grief as an ecological experience shaped by the vibrant material environments that hold the dead and mediate human attachment to the earth.

Mokh Hilda (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3): “Storied Mountains: Earth as Affective Matter in Hoda Barakat’s Malakūt hādhihi al-rḍ (Kingdom of this Earth)”

This paper reads Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat's Malakūt hādhihi al-arḍ (Kingdom of This Earth, 2012) through the framework of material ecocriticism, drawing particularly on Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann's concept of “storied matter,” which posits that the material world is not a passive backdrop but an active co-producer of meaning, memory, and affect. I argue that Barakat's Lebanese mountain landscape functions precisely in this way: as a porous, layered terrain whose physical transformations across a century of wars and displacements generate, absorb, and transmit the emotional lives of the Maronite community it sustains. The paper develops three interconnected readings. First, it examines how the mountain terrain operates as storied matter, with the snow, stones, and seasonal rhythms of the Lebanese highlands acting as narrative agents that carry and release collective trauma. Second, drawing on Stacy Alaimo's concept of transcorporeality, it traces the porous boundary between the body of the land and the bodies of its inhabitants—most notably Salma—demonstrating how the dispossession of land and the silencing of female experience are figured as a single wound. Third, it explores the novel's affective register through the lens of solastalgia, the grief generated by environmental loss experienced in place, showing how this concept structures the narrative arc from the father's fatal blizzard to the final dissolution of the family's territorial attachment. By situating Barakat's work within a material ecocritical and ecofeminist framework, while placing it in dialogue with postcolonial ecocriticism, the paper contributes to an emerging conversation on affective responses to land in non-Western literary traditions and proposes telluric mourning as a productive analytical category for Arabic fiction.

Giulia Baqué (Tsuda University): “Consuming the Soil, Creating a Nation: Colonization, Economic Decline, and Affect in Kawasaki Akiko’s Redeeming the Soil (2019)”

The collection of short stories Redeeming the Soil (Tsuchi ni aganau, 2019) by Kawasaki Akiko describes industrial development and collapse in the northernmost island of Japan: Hokkaido. In the stories, the cold and hard soil of Hokkaido becomes the interface where practices of resource extraction, colonization, and search for economic development come together. The northern soil is, simultaneously, the repository of hopes for a better future and the witness to prolonged times of grief and mourning after the inevitable economic decline. The emotional affordances that connect the human settlers with practices of land use and production epitomize the discordant and contradictory emotions intertwined with a land that represents the often-violent struggles over national formation and internal colonization. The cultivated, farmed, and mined soil of the northernmost island of Japan turns into a space of state control and colonization in a series of stories that connect the colonial appropriation of border regions with the occupation of the soil and natural landscape. Redeeming the Soil, however, does not resolve the tension between colonial history, resource extraction, and the personal emotional connections to the soil felt by those whose livelihoods depend on the land. Instead, it presents a complex ecology of affects that reveals the rhizomatic entanglements of human and nonhuman histories.

What does it mean to think with animals—and what happens to thought, feeling, and psychic life when animals disappear?

This lecture traces the emergence of the human mind through long-standing encounters with animal life, foregrounding their emotional and psychological dimensions. Drawing on evolutionary anthropology and cognitive theory, it argues that imagination did not arise as an abstract faculty, but as an embodied and affective practice shaped by tracking, hunting, and observing nonhuman beings. These encounters were not only cognitive but deeply emotional: they involved attention, fear, empathy, desire, and forms of attunement that trained both perception and feeling. For millennia, animals functioned as partners in mind-making, enabling projection, fostering inference, and shaping inner worlds that became internalized as images, memory, and narrative.

From Paleolithic cave art to myth and storytelling, animals appear not merely as objects of representation but as agents in the formation of human mental and emotional life. The lecture then considers the long-term consequences of a historical shift in which animals gradually ceased to be interlocutors and became resources—an ecological transformation that also marks a psychological rupture. As multispecies relations thin out, so too do the emotional textures and imaginative capacities they once sustained.

In this light, the process of soul-making can be understood as inseparable from these more-than-human entanglements. What earlier narratives figured as arks—forms of gathering, holding, and carrying life across moments of crisis—can be read as affective responses to loss: attempts to preserve, within imagination and memory, a living plurality that is increasingly at risk. Rethinking imagination as a multispecies and emotional process thus reveals what is at stake today—not only biodiversity, but the very conditions that have shaped human thought, feeling, and psychic resilience.

Serenella Iovino is the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor in Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A philosopher by training, she is the author or editor of twelve volumes and over 200 essays and articles, and has contributed to the development of the environmental humanities through her work on ecocritical theory, environmental justice, human–animal studies, and landscape ethics.

Her publications include Material Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities (with Serpil Oppermann), Italy and the Environmental Humanities (with Enrico Cesaretti and Elena Past), and Ecocriticism and Italy, recipient of the MLA Prize for Italian Studies and the AAIS Book Prize. Among her books in Italian are Paeaggio civiles (2022), awarded a special mention at the Premio Mazzotti–Gambrinus; Gli animali di Calvino (2023), an expanded Italian edition of her Cambridge Element Italo Calvino’s Animals, winner of the National Prize for Science Communication (Section: Humanities) and the Green Book Award; and Ecologia letteraria (2006; new expanded edition 2025).

In a time of ecological crisis, we can find ourselves experiencing a complex relationship with shame, where direct culpability in harm is difficult to prove, but a wider sense of involvement is irrefutable. Primo Levi calls this "vaster shame," "the shame of the world." I wish to explore the relationship between Levi's 'shame of the world' and Elspeth Probyn’s insight that shame is a rupture that leads us back to connection. In this lecture, I will examine how Arthur Sze’s Into the Hush (2025) bears witness to the parallel calamities of language, species, and habitat loss, via the affordances of the hyphenated line-break, or dash, and the lyric sequence. In Sze's poems, the shame of these planetary harms gives rise to what Roland Barthes calls, "an inventory of shimmers," "glimmering moments" which constellate. Navigating grief, anger, and wonder, Sze’s poems perform a work very similar to shame, blurring the distinction between self and world, and giving rise to what Barthes calls “a style of being present to the struggles of my time.”

David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Anthropocene Poetics, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, and Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet, which was short-listed for the Wainwright Conservation Writing prize 2025 and the Saltire Non-fiction prize 2025. His work has been translated into ten languages.

Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir and Angela Snæfelsjökuls Rawlings (University of Iceland): “Home Turf: Unearthing Affects of Turfhouse Relations in Icelandic Ecofiction”

The Icelandic countryside is peppered with low earthen mounds—recent domiciles that have succumbed to the turf, peat, and stone from which they were built. For nearly a millennium, turfhouses were the de rigeur homestead for the Icelandic family, the last ones inhabited as recently as the 1960s. Although the turfhouse as a form of Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) was threatened by the late but rapid industrialisation of the country at the turn of the 20th century, this intangible cultural heritage remains through its encodement in fiction. As depicted in Icelandic film and literature, we will investigate affective, familial relationships to turfhouses and their remnants in the landscape. If the family is society-in-miniature, then learning about the family-within-their-ecosystems may offer scalar strategies to support future-family attitudes to embrace needed climate action policy. The paper is based on findings from the research project Fókus: Centring Families in Iceland’s Just Transition. Through the analysis of cultural texts and lived experiences of families from across the island, new and nuanced perspectives surface on social, environmental, and climate justice.

Maxim Shadurski (University of Siedlce): “The Pastoral at the Threshold: The Anthropocene Event in Jim Crace and Melissa Harrison”

Recent debates describe the Anthropocene as an ongoing event, rather than a geological epoch. Yet this formulation raises a difficulty. In philosophical accounts associated with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, an event entails a cognitive break in how a situation is understood. Anthropocene discourse, by contrast, often names a transformation that unfolds unevenly and whose consequences remain only partially recognized. The question therefore arises whether the Anthropocene can generate an affective rupture from which renewed human-Earth interactions might emerge. This paper examines how contemporary pastoral fiction engages this problem. Conventionally, pastoral idealizes human-environment relations from the perspective of an outsider looking nostalgically towards rural life. Jim Crace’s Harvest (2013) and Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley (2018) instead appoint those who work the land to narrate transformation from within. In Harvest, enclosure dismantles a village organized around common land. In All Among the Barley, the drought summer of 1933 unsettles agrarian continuity. Drawing on the concept of timescape together with situated narratology and Bakhtinian chronotopes, the paper argues that both novels reorient pastoral temporally. Rather than nostalgia for a lost rural past, both novels register anxiety about an uncertain future. They stage threshold situations where environmental emergency becomes legible, while leaving open the extent to which affective reorientation towards Earth can emerge.

Sylvie Dagallier (Sorbonne University): "What a Nordic Valley Tells the World: Earthbound emotions in Two Norwegian Fictions"

Norwegian literature has long oscillated between travel narratives and more intimate, locally grounded forms. Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, whose protagonist circles the globe before returning to his native valley, exemplifies this tension between outward movement and homecoming. In the context of climate disruption, however, contemporary authors reconfigure the trope of travel through an ecological prism: discovery no longer requires crossing continents but may take place within the few kilometres surrounding one’s home, and renewed attention is granted to the local.Focusing on two contemporary Norwegian novels—Maja Lunde’s Drømmen om et tre and Guri Sørumgård Botheim’s Høgfjellsmeldinga—this paper explores how specific local territories are represented and characterized by boreal imaginaries. Such representations foster processes of identification and mobilize eco-emotions in shaping emotional responses to climate change. The Earth appears as a place of spiritual belonging, both protective and requiring protection (Næss 1998; Latour 2017), within an ecological and ethical framework. The emotions felt by the Norwegian characters echo those of a broader human community (Spivak 2003). Yet, place is never isolated. By staging encounters between global flows and local settings, these fictions highlight the frictions and interconnections that define our contemporary world (Heise 2008; Tsing 2005).

Sara Louise Gjelsvik West (University of Oslo): “Forest Imaginaries and Literary Value in Kaite Paterson's Future Library Project”

The paper suggest different points of departure for an ecological axiology of literature through a case study of Katie Paterson’s long-term art project Future Library (2014–2114). Focusing on two author essays written for the project, by Karl Ove Knausgård and Judith Schalansky, the paper examines how ideas of literary value are articulated in light of climate crisis and ecological uncertainty. The theoretical framework combines Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s relational theory of value – understood as contingent, situational, and socially produced – with Yuk Hui’s concepts of recursivity and contingency as structural features of organic, technological and cultural systems. My readings emphasise how forests are imagined to operate simultaneously as material substrate for books, as ecological systems, and as metaphor and model for literary value. The paper argues that Future Library stages and reshapes the conditions under which literature is valued, and that it points toward an ecological axiology in which the value of literature is inseparable from its reliance on the Earth's forests, long temporal horizons, and the fragile, contingent life systems that sustain both books and readers.

Joni Foster (University of Oslo): “Modern Earth, Medieval Runes: Cross-Temporal Ecological Awareness"

Engaged with both to positive and negative effect, the runic script proves to have an ambiguous identity in modernity. Recently however, runic medievalisms have been employed as a means through which ecological awareness can be explored. ‘Microbial Runestones’ is an ongoing project lead by the University of Latvia which combines runological and art historical perspectives so to ‘celebrate microbes that have laid the foundations for life as we know it and continue to maintain balance on planet Earth’ through the production of runestones. This paper aims to engage with the project’s current output corpus and consider how the Late-Viking Age runic script which they employ proves to both complicate and aid ecological awareness in modernity. This core discussion will be deepened through a comparative study between late Viking-Age runestones such as Sö 179 (which has been used as inspiration for ‘Microbial Runestones’) and the modern runestones created by the project. Essential to this analysis is how these runestones, both late Viking-Age and Modern, engage with the land in which they are placed. How does the earth relate to the script and how can location and language choices engage the public with ecological concerns? I argue that the way in which we choose to engage with the earth through language placement, in both medieval and modern times, speaks towards the ecological mentalities of the time.

Kristen Mills (University of Oslo): “Baile Binnbérlach mac Búain and the Botany of Desire”

The Middle Irish text Baile Binnbérlach mac Búain recounts how Baile and Ailinn fall in love from afar and attempt to meet but are tricked and die from grief; a tree grows from each of their graves. The harvested trees are used to make poets’ tablets on which are written stories, and when the two tablets are brought together at a feast, one tablet springs upon the other and they entwine ‘like the honeysuckle round a green branch,’ inseparable. The conjoined tablets are kept as treasure in the royal storehouse until its destruction by fire. This text takes the motif of entwined plants growing from lovers’ graves, as found in the Tristantradition, and gives it a unique twist: here it is wooden objects crafted from the trees that are joined, not the living trees themselves. Scholars of animal studies have argued that medieval Christian culture constructed the category of the human in contrast with that of the non-human animal; this narrative asks us to consider what role plants might play in identity construction. This paper examines how Baile Binnbérlach mac Búain blurs the categories of human, plant, and object by depicting romantic love as persisting through the processes of death, decay, growth, and shaping as a material object.

Abdelhafid Jabri (Mohammed I University): “Emotions and Morality in Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba's Feral”

In this paper, I discuss how Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba’s Feral (2024) critiques the anthropocentric perspective of Canadian forestry by denouncing the systematic abuse of the natural world while endorsing an eco-just life. Using an environmental philosophical lens, I explore the clashing motivations between a utilitarian worldview, seeking to satisfy the greatest good for the greatest number of people and an ecocentric worldview, aiming to preserve the wilderness for its own sake. The emotionally charged vengeful act in the novel serves as a turning point, challenging readers to consider their ethical obligations when legal systems fail to protect nature. Ultimately, Feral unveils the moral complexities of human interaction with nature.

Alexandra Ilina (New Europe College): “Injured Bodies and Wastelands in the Grail Story”

This paper will focus on the relationship between the royal body and land, both in terms of the earth and the kingdom in the Grail story, focusing on the axis fertility-infertility in Chrétien de Troyes’s Fisher King from Perceval ou le Conte du Graal. The text carefully explores wastelands, like the Gaste Forest and the desolate lands of the Fisher King. The author’s Prologue evoking the fertile seed and the fertile earth at the beginning of his unfinished romance turned out to be prophetic: his story was immensely popular and no less than three Continuations were written shortly after his death. The Grail legend became explicitly Christianized and so did the figure of the Fisher King, a keeper of the Grail whose mysterious wound is directly linked to the devastation of his kingdom. Should his wound heal, the barren land would be restored to its previous, fertile state. Chrétien offers no explanation, but the Continuations do. This paper will explore Chrétien’s sources, both from a historiographical perspective (the links between royal bodies and their lands) and an anthropological one (the continuity between the human body and the earth).

Inna Häkkinen Sukhenko (University of Helsinki): “‘Behind Every Stone and Cactus’: Lithic Reciprocity in Betty Webb’s Desert Wind”

The presentation introduces Betty Webb’s Desert Wind (2012), that situates its detective storyline in the irradiated deserts of Nevada, marked by uranium mining and atomic testing. Melding the conventions of crime fiction with ecological and historical inquiry, Webb’s novel transforms the desert into an active interlocutor in moral and environmental investigation, by emphasizing the narrative’s terrain (composed of shivering stones, windblown sand, and sub-surface contamination) as one, exposing the mutual entanglement of human ambition and the earth’s material consciousness in the Age of Uranium (Lewis 2012, 193). This presentation intends to outline ‘lithic reciprocity’ (inspired by Molm 2007, 2010, 2021) within Desert Wind's narrative as the illustrator of mutual ecological dynamic between humans and the lithosphere. Webb’s novel highlights that the radioactive landscape does not merely absorb human exploitation, but it responses, resists, and reconstitutes human experience through geological agency, by illustrating an ecological dialogue rather than domination. The presentation also emphasizes Webb’s depiction of the desert via appealing to ‘uranium dualism’, which illustrates a tension, fusing geological awareness with the aesthetic and ethical ambivalence of the radioactive element, simultaneously enables technological luminosity and disseminates death. This uranium dualism functions as a narrative principle organizing the novel’s imagery, where the lithosphere expresses itself not through the protagonists’ perception but through affective atmospheres. Via appealing to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Latour’s actor-network theory, Iovino & Oppermann’s Material Ecocriticism, Westphal’s geocriticism and energy humanities’ frames (Szeman & Wenzel, Goodbody) the presentation contributes to interpreting the irradiated stony desert as an agentive narrative field via contextualizing uranium as both material and metaphor for the contradictions of energy modernity. Bringing these frameworks together, the presentation stresses that Webb’s Desert Wind becomes a paradigmatic text for theorizing ‘lithic reciprocity’ as a relational model wherein the amalgamation of the stone’s endurance, uranium’s vitality, and human ethical imagination reconsider geology not as the inert past but as a present interlocutor of the Nuclear Age.

Zack Abrams (University of Oslo): “‘Older than bones. Older than life itself’: How We Write Mountains to Reflect our Eco-emotions"

Mountains are madness, elation, obsession, wonder, fear. Formed by volcanoes, glaciers, or shifting tectonic plates, mountains are sacred places or extractive sites, abundant or barren, both driving and preventing adaptation and evolution. How, then, do we write them in fiction? When Oliver Gant first sees “Altamont” (Asheville, North Carolina) among the Blue Ridge in Look Homeward, Angel, he sees joyous possibilities: “In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their enormous cup, he found sprawling out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of four thousand people…His heart lifted” (Wolfe 7). When Demon Copperhead sees that same Blue Ridge range, he feels alternately happy, and hemmed in, insignificant, unable to escape. In this talk, I will use close readings to illustrate how authors like Wolfe and Kingsolver use mountains as multifaceted reflections of their characters’ emotions and eco-emotions. I will then incorporate some creative writing exercises and photographs to get participants thinking and writing about how mountains overlap with or represent emotions in their own lives—especially climate change-affected emotions—and the works they study.

Stefano Rozzoni (University of Bergamo): “Nesting Environmental Awareness: Practices and Future Trajectories of the N.E.S.T. Framework”

This paper presents selected results and future trajectories of the N.E.S.T. Research Network – Narratives for Ecological and Sustainable Transition(s) that empirically examines how narratives foster ecological awareness and strengthen affective engagement with glocal manifestations of climate change in different European areas. Specifically, the project develops “nesting” as both a theoretical lens and a methodological framework, implemented through literature-based workshops structured around four interconnected steps – Narrating, Embodying, Sensing, and Transmitting – that link the use of texts in educational contexts with local environmental issues. My presentation examines a workshop series conducted with approximately 300 senior high school students in the Po Valley (Northern Italy), a region where intensive land use, industrial activity, and urbanization lead to severe pressures on local ecosystems. The workshop combined literary excerpts on atmospheric pollution (Dickens, Gaskell, Armitage) with participatory exercises encouraging students to relate literary representations to their personal feelings and experiences of their local environment. Findings indicate an informative and emotional impact towards local issues, pointing toward a renewed understanding of “literature in context” that connects literary texts with the environmental challenges experienced within local communities. Looking ahead to the project’s future developments, the presentation also illustrates a prototype poetry-generation software that integrates air-pollution data, literary sources on pollution, and generative AI. Designed for use within educational workshop settings, the software translates environmental pollution data into poetic language, with the aim of encouraging experiential and creative engagement with glocal ecological issues and critical reflection on them.

Timo Maran (University of Tartu): “Grounding as Writing Strategy, An Emotional Regulation and Semiotic Process”

Emotions related to the environment are essential for developing empathy and a connection with the non-human world. However, they are also linked to more problematic topics such as climate anxiety, and solastalgia. Drawing on the ambiguity of eco-emotions, this presentation focuses on the concept of 'grounding' as a conceptual tool and a practical approach. The aim of grounding is to connect thinking and emotions with broader regulatory processes and feedback loops of nature-cultures, thus overcoming problems stemming from self-closure. In my talk, I will introduce grounding as a creative writing and literary strategy, as well as a method in mindfulness and physical exercise. I will pay particular attention to the semiotic interpretation of grounding as the process by which the 'semiotic self' becomes interconnected with the multivocal semiotic realities of the earth (Sebeok, 2001; Maran, 2010). The presentation will explore various types and strategies of literary grounding, using examples from the translations of Jaan Kaplinski (2011), a renowned Estonian poet, essayist, and environmental philosopher.

Oana-Maria Cojocaru (New Europe College): “Sacred Land, Affective Experiences: Place as Actor in Byzantine Hagiography”

Byzantine hagiographies—specifically miracle accounts—are among the most emotionally charged texts of the medieval world, documenting the fear, wonder, and hope of communities gathered around sacred sites. While scholarship often treats these emotions as responses to the divine, this paper argues that the landscape itself is an active producer of affective experience. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, I propose that the shrine’s topography and the landscape of pilgrimages are participants that shape emotional life. By analyzing a few hagiographical narratives from the 9th to 11th centuries, I aim to show how the physical earth—as walked and venerated land—mediates the relationship between the devotee and the material world. By shifting attention from purely human responses to the interaction between bodies, sacred places, and material environments, the paper highlights how Byzantine hagiography constructs a shared affective relationship with the land itself. In doing so, it offers a premodern perspective on how literary texts represent the agency of earth and its role in shaping emotional responses to place.

Stefka G. Eriksen (University of Oslo): “The Extended Energy of Earth in Old Norse Literature”

Current debates on the agency of things in Old Norse culture highlight the ability of many objects to shape and negotiate the development of social relationships in narratives, independently from the human agents, but often through a dynamic exchange of agency with the materiality of the object and the qualities of the crafter. This has been discussed extensively with regard to, for example, the sword Tyrfingr, a ‘protagonist’ in Hervarar saga ok Heiðriks, which has the power to kill every time it is taken out of its sheath, and which possibly gets this power both from the dwarfs who made it and from the raw material that was used to shape it. In this paper, I will expand on this topos by providing additional examples of the symbiosis between the raw material provided by earth, the object that is shaped from it, and the crafter who has created it. Examples of such symbiotic creations may be given from narratives about pre-Christian times, as well as from traditional Christian narratives. The aim of the paper is to highlight the variety of instances where the extended energy of earth impacts the surrounding social ecology and to discuss whether the dynamics of such interactions change with the Christianization of medieval Scandinavia.

Cécile Narjoux (Université Paris Cité): “The Grammar of the Fault Line: Earth, Affective Shock and Syntactic Fracture in Contemporary French Narratives”

Traditionally associated with stability, grounding and dwelling—or, in Bachelard’s terms, with the “reveries of repose” or of “will”—the earth may tremble and become invested with other affects and imaginaries. It then appears as a matrix of affective and formal dislocation. Contemporary French narratives of natural disaster reflect this shift, correlating seismic catastrophe with the expression of intense emotion. Drawing on, among others, Nina Bouraoui’s Le Jour du séisme (1999), Laurent Mauvignier’s Autour du monde (2014), and Laurent Gaudé’s Danser les ombres (2015), this paper examines how seismic events inform—in the etymological sense of “giving form to”—powerful emotions linked to the movement of the earth and the chaos it produces. These texts also render perceptible a form of ecological anger displaced onto the elements themselves rather than directly expressed by the characters. Rather than treating the earth as a thematic motif, I propose a stylistic approach showing how fracture operates at both microstructural (syntax, enunciation) and macrostructural (temporal configuration, narrative organization) levels. In these narratives, the earth ceases to function as stable ground and becomes a principle of stylistic and narrative dislocation.

Anamaria Schwab (Transylvania University): “Quiet Rage in D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl (1920)”

In my presentation I show that D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl (1920) progresses from extractivism and, consequently, a fundamentally unsustainable paradigm characteristic of England in the early twentieth century towards non-extractivism and sustainability. In doing so, I will discuss Alvina Houghton’s quiet rage as the defining affect accompanying the process. The violent image of “disembowelled coal” characteristic of the Midlands’ mining landscape at the beginning of the novel (Lawrence, 1978, Penguin) echoes in Alvina Houghton’s rage. Such insatiable aggression done to the earth is closely connected to the greed of her father and their community, as well as the devitalisation of Alvina and her mother. This is the context that triggers her anger. Alvina’s quiet yet easily perceptible rage recalls a telluric current that traverses the entire novel. It is fully felt in her rejection of England and her radical departure for Italy. In Italy, Alvina embraces the place’s specific paradigm of sustainability resulting from non-extractivism, even if they mean poverty and hardship. Her initial rage is here replaced by communion with the place’s own furious vitality. The theorists I would like to employ in my presentation, amongst others, are Bruno Latour, especially his Facing Gaia (2017), and Andreas Malm.

Emily Dixon (King’s College London): “The Sound of Earth: Horror and Transformation in the Soil of Medieval and Contemporary Borderlands” 

William Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman and the 1970s television movie Penda’s Fen share important features of their relationships with earth. Both consider the same earth-form, the Malvern Hills. Both texts’ heroes achieve personal translation after experiencing horror. These emotions’ source is the sound of the earth. This paper uses a hybrid medievalist/ecocritical methodology to examine the ways a medieval and a twentieth-century text portray affective relationships with soil, and how bodies and minds are transformed by interactions with earth. In Piers Plowman, Will enters his dreamworld when the sound of the Malvern Hills lulls him to sleep. A key dream-episode concerns the horror of starvation through infertile land and poor ploughing, introduced through the sound of a monstrous figure approaching. Six centuries later, David Rudkin and Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen re-finds medievalist horror in the same Malvern Hills, situating horror in underground bunkers and reanimating the medieval King Penda to rise out of the hillside. Stephen, a pianist, encounters these through hearing, while playing and listening to music and the landscape’s sounds. By closely reading the Malvern Hills’ earth and how it creates horror through sound, we can understand affective relationships across time, changing context and changing climate.

Catalin Taranu (New Europe College, Bucharest): “Subterranean Homesick Blues: Graves, Caves, and Affect in Old English Verse”

This paper reconstructs a poetics of ruined and subterranean space in Old English literature, arguing that underground and decayed places function as affective niches – environments that actively shape and sustain emotional states rather than merely reflecting them. Drawing on Colombetti's enactivist account of emotion and Latour's Actor-Network Theory, I examine how the Anglo-Saxon elegiac imagination entangles mourning, nostalgia, and landscape into assemblages that resist neat distinctions between subject and environment. Close readings of The Wife's Lament and The Wanderer anchor the analysis, with particular attention to the speaker's semi-subterranean hearh (grave/pagan sanctuary) and the eald enta geweorc (old works of giants) as sites of grief-laden or nostalgic encounter with a transformed earth. The Franks Casket Left Panel, associating underground enclosure with mourning, extends the argument into material culture. Across these texts and objects, subterranean and ruined spaces emerge as charged nodes in affective assemblages: places haunted by barrow-mounds and pagan residues that Anglo-Saxon culture never fully disenchanted, and whose uncanny persistence shaped the emotional textures available to early medieval subjects. Earth, in its ruined and subterranean forms, appears as a co-constitutive agent of human sorrow.

Hanne Bolze (University of Rostock): “Stones, Cairns, and Burial Pits: Entangled Place in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth”

In Sarah Moss’s climate novel Cold Earth (2009), the Arctic landscape of Greenland becomes a canvas for the characters’ evolving conceptualisations of self and place. Throughout the novel, multiple crises intersect: violence, disease, and climate change are remembered, experienced, and anticipated in past, present, and future. Against this backdrop, the plot follows a group of archaeologists excavating a Viking settlement, who become stranded in remote Greenland by a pandemic. The characters’ relationship with the land shifts from scientific detachment to embodied inhabitation. Initially, the Arctic site is conceived as uninhabitable, a mere object of study. Then, as tensions rise within the group, the characters project their anxieties onto the earth itself, experiencing it as a gothic, hostile force. And finally, the site is transformed into a living space, which the characters must inhabit in order to survive. These shifts challenge tropes of anthropocentric detachment and hostile environments, and explore a more complex, entangled relationship between characters and place. The characters’ evolving conceptualisation of the land maps the emotional contours of climate crisis – denial, anxiety, and hope – while reimagining crisis not as a distant catastrophe, but as recurring and ongoing reality.