The Gendered Anthropocene Symposium

Program:

Thursday, April 10, 2025 

8.30 Registration 

9.00 Conference opening 

9.15-10.45 Panel 1 

Chair: Anna Kurowicka 

• Johanna Pelikan (Universität Hamburg), “Women Wielding Waste: Mina Loy's Feminist Waste Aesthetics”
• Tara Mehrabi and Wibke Straube (Karlstad University), “Unsettling Intimacies: On World-Making Practices with the Other in Minoosh Zomorodinia’s Installation Knots and Ripples”
• Oluwadunni Talabi and Paula von Gleich (University of Bremen), “Black Feminism and the Study of Water in the Anthropocene: Intersections and Points of Conflict” 

10.45-11.00 Coffee break

11.00-12.30 Panel 2 

Chair: Izabella Kimak 

• Anna Bark Persson (Umeå University), “Women Need Mars: Feminist and Queer Uses of Planetary Mars in 21st Century Science Fiction”
• Jade Arbo (Federal University of Pelotas) and Judith Rauscher, (University of Cologne), “Re-Imagining Scientific Inquiry: Affective Practices of Ecological Knowledge Production and Relations of Care in Becky Chamber's To Be Taught if Fortunate” 

12.15-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-14.45 Panel 3 

Chair: Ingrid Gessner 

• Isabel Kalous (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), “(Non)Motherhood in the Anthropocene: Negotiating Reproductive Decisions and Climate Change in Contemporary Women's Writings”
• Marinette Grimbeek (Örebro University), “Narrative Accretion and Overwhelming Anthropocenic Entanglement in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport”
• Christen Bryson (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), “Environmental and Nuclear Destruction: Mom Activists Fight Extinction” 

14.45-15.15 Coffee break 

15.15-16.45 Panel 4 

Chair: Anne-Marie Evans 

• Sandra Tausel (University of Alberta), “The Rise of Ecofeminist Children in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were”
• Méliné Kasparian (Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin), “Seeds of Change: Feminist Narratives of Environmental Degradation and Regeneration in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993) and The Guardians (2007)”
• Iryna Yakovenko (Borys Grinchenkov Kyiev Metropolitan University), “Geocritical and Biocultural Perspectives of Myrna Kostash's Creative Nonfiction”
• Jill Drouillard (Mississippi University for Women), “The Ice Age of Making Babies and (Pro)creating Nature in the 21st Century”

17.00-18.30 Keynote lecture

“Our” Dystopian Home: Privilege and Care in Domestic Anthroposcreens
Julia Leyda (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)  

Chair: Marie Dücker 

19.00 Conference dinner at Scandic Hotel Winn 

Friday, April 11, 2025 

9.00-10.15 Panel 5 

Chair: Christen Bryson 

• Anna Kurowicka (University of Warsaw), “No Future without Sex and Gender? Post-Human Apocalypse in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan”
• Katharina Wiedlack (University of Vienna), “Alaska in the Anthropocene and Feminist Storytelling”
• Abigail Fagan (Leibniz Universität Hannover), “Gendered Ideals, the
  Corporate University, and the Concept of Land as Property”

10.15-10.30 Coffee break 

10.30-11.45  Panel 6 

Chair: Abigail Fagan 

• Nicole Haring (University of Graz), “The Last Generation: Cherie Moraga's Prose and Poetry, the Chthulucene, and Intersectional Environmentalism”
• Marie Dücker (University of Graz), “Gender, Labor, and Environmental Precarity in the Anthropocene: An Ecofeminist Reading of Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)”
• Juliann Knaus (University of Graz), “Interweaving Ecosystems, Nature, and Blackness: Explorations of the Anthropocene in Zakia Carpenter-Hall’s Film-Poem ‘Human Ecologies’” (2021) 

11.45 Conference closing 

There will be a grab-and-go lunch right after the conference closing. 

 We thank our sponsors who have kindly made this symposium possible: Karlstad University, Karlstad Municipality, Åke Wibergs Stiftelse, and the European Association for American Studies (EAAS).