Lycanthropic Entanglements (ASLE-UKI)

In early September, I attended the ASLE-UKI Postgraduate & Early Career Researchers conference in Edinburgh.  Hosted this year, by the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Edinburgh, the conference invited papers in response to the theme – Arts of Noticing: Attention and the Environment.

My paper, Lycanthropic Entanglements: Rewilding Responsibly After Attentiveness, questioned how species reintroduction may be approached in a responsible manner, by considering “what comes after Attentiveness?”. Influenced by the work of E. Giraud and their text What Comes After Entanglement? (2019) alongside T. Van Dooren et al., 2016 paper Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness, the paper addressed how the figure of the Wolf may be treated in a post-attentive, conservation driven era if rewilding attempts took place in the UK. By considering the cultural allegories synonymous with the animal, the notion of the ‘aesthetics of response-ability’ (Lehmann, 2009) was used to help question performative perception, before utilising Haraway’s 2016 ‘response-able’ call to action to discuss potential approaches to making oddkin. By borrowing the term ‘feral’ from A. Tsing et al.’s recent publication The Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene (2024) the Wolf was presented as the protagonist, whilst the human is forced ‘into the entanglement of human and nonhuman trajectories.’ (p.11) Throughout the paper there is the presentation of a triangulation of three axioms – Rewilding > Response-able action >The Feral Animal.

You can read the full paper, or view video documentation of the presentation on the relevant project page.

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From attending the conference and discussing my work with others who are delving into the messy world of more-than-human entanglements, a number of interesting conversations took place. Cross overs were found with researchers writing poetry about insects, or discussing the material assemblage of peat bogs, for example. From the questions asked during my panel's Q&A, along with attending other's papers, and the exceptional key note speakers (Alycia Pirmohamed & Eva Haifa Giraud), I was left with three main questions to turn towards my research...

1. Is a Wolf charismatic, uncharismatic, or do they fall somewhere between the two?

2. What would the ghost of an extinct Wolf look like?

3. How do I speculate? What form does this take and why?