ASLEC-ANZ ECR Speaker Series 2025

From July to October 2025, ASLEC-ANZ is hosting an online speaker series that showcases the work of early career and postgraduate researchers and creative practitioners working in the environmental humanities. Featuring 40-minute presentations from our speakers followed by Q & A with the audience, the ECR Speaker Series is designed to celebrate the work of emerging scholars and creative practitioners and bring together different people across the environmental humanities in what we hope is a welcoming and engaging space for discussion. All are welcome to attend. 

Details including Zoom links will be shared with ASLEC-ANZ members via the newsletter. Alternatively, you are welcome to email Rachel Fetherston(r.fetherston@deakin.edu.au) to request this information. 

Please find the details of past and upcoming speakers below. Recordings of past speakers can also be found below.

Wednesday 30th July 2025 – Jana Norman

Title: Multispecies encountering: Field notes from thinking with native oysters

Abstract: Six academics walk into a bar, in a region famous for its oysters, and order two dozen to share. What starts like a joke becomes an on-going multispecies encounter, a passionate immersion into the world of oyster-human entanglement. Encounters stop and start but have no beginning, middle and end; memory floods the present moment; new possible futures shimmer around the edges. Facts and feelings mingle; analysis and aesthetics talk long into the night; no one way of knowing wins. Knowledge emerges within encounter, like the seepage of the tide up through the oyster-strewn mud flats. In making space for encounter with/in oyster facts, feelings, experiences, memories, reflections, hopes: what sense-abilities of ecological relations as multispecies entanglement emerge? 

Speaker bio: Jana Norman is an Adjunct Research Fellow at UniSA Creative interested in the theory and practice of rethinking human-nature relations. Prior to joining the University of South Australia, Jana was an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2023-2025) at Deakin University. Her ADPRF project, “Mapping Shadows of the Bight: New Methodologies for Collaborative Futures”, produced a multi-disciplinary arts and humanities residency on the Far West Coast of South Australia. Jana’s current project is a multispecies study of the Australian native oyster. 

Wednesday 27th August 2025 – Elizabeth Smyth

Title: Saving rainforest birds: How literature and creative writing can stimulate new possibilities for research in other disciplines

Abstract: This seminar combines literary studies and creative writing to facilitate reflection on the risks of avian biodiversity loss due to feral cat predation in Australian tropical rainforests. The Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area is home to nearly half of Australia’s birds, some of which are preyed upon by feral cats. While the Australian Government’s Threat Abatement Plan for Predation by Feral Cats 2024 includes options for killing feral cats, various people campaign to protect them. This seminar draws on current literary research and creative writing to demonstrate how literary imaginaries can stimulate new approaches to environmental problems. While not a rainforest setting, the literary representations of birds in Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) reflect a common mid-twentieth century attitude towards birds. This is discussed, ahead of publication in a forthcoming essay collection, Georgic Gothic: EcoGothic, Antipastoral and Global Horror, edited by Sue Edney. In this seminar, Stow’s representations will be contextualised through readings of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” (1952) and J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967). The impacts of cats in Australia will be presented as a provocation for creative writers to step beyond raising awareness of environmental issues to instead activate imagination and craft to convey radically new solutions. A reading of short fiction, in which cat numbers are reduced through cultural change, will be used to model the role of imagination in stimulating new directions in feral cat control and hence for research in other disciplines. 

Speaker bio: Elizabeth Smyth is a research associate at the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing, James Cook University. She lives and works on Yirrganydji Country in Cairns, Australia. Her writing is published in Meanjin, JASAL, TEXT, New Writing, Tropical Writers anthologies, The Conversation, and Georgic Literature and the Environment. Elizabeth’s research explores ecocriticism, human-plant relationships, and literary representations of the Australian Wet Tropics. Recent publications include “A Bird’s-Eye View: Industrial Technology in Eco-Writing Research” in New Writing, vol. 22, no. 2, 2025 https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2025.2471747