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.

Friday 31st October – Jess Wilson

Title: Walking Distance, or But Did It Change You? Meaning-making, narrative, and narrative breakdown on Te Araroa

ZOOM LINK FOR TALK // 9am WA, 10:30 NT, 11am QLD, 11:30 SA, 12pm NSW/Vic/Can/Tas, 2pm NZ

Abstract: In October 2019, Jessica Wilson set out to walk Te Araroa, Aotearoa’s 3000km national tramping track. This talk recounts the project that emerged from that journey, a hybrid memoir interweaving the story of one American’s hike down New Zealand with findings from interviews of other walkers, analysis of social-science research on long trails, close readings of other trail memoirs, and thumbnail histories of the land. It asks: How do we create and perform narratives to give meaning to our lives? What does it mean to perform mythologized journeys over real, sometimes extensively civilly-engineered, landscapes–landscapes possessing their own dense and unrelated histories (including histories of colonialism and disenfranchisement)? What’s our investment in creating such trails? What does it mean that those of us who engage in such putatively “universalized” performances do so in vastly different, hyper-specific bodies–bodies that have both practical and cultural implications for how we move through our stories and our world? Given that only a fraction of walkers embarking on through-hikes are likely to finish, what happens when our narratives fail us? Is it possible that long trails may help unify indigenous and settler peoples, visitors and locals? And what happens when you throw a pandemic into the mix?

Speaker bio: Jessica Wilson is a writer, editor, teacher, and performer from the USA, currently daylighting in the world of government policy. She’s taught in writing, literature, and media and communications at Te Herenga Waka / Victoria University of Wellington; nonfiction writing and business communication at the University of Iowa; playwriting for the Combined Efforts writers group in Iowa City; creative writing and theatre at the Deerfield Academy Summer Arts Camp; and introductory fiction for New Zealand’s Creative Hub. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and in 2025, her Creative Writing PhD thesis for the International Institute for Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka was named to the doctoral Dean’s List for excellence. Her writing has appeared in Best Travel Writing, Best Women’s Travel Writing, the Seneca Review Online, Alligator Juniper, New Fairy Tales, Swamphen, and more.

Wednesday 17th September – Arielle Walker

Title: Gathering, tending: The poetic storywork of (re)weaving place-connection

Abstract: Our ancestral craft and storytelling practices offer pathways towards repairing ruptures embedded in settler-colonial amnesia and dislocation, (re)weaving relationships with community and environment. In my research, poetic storywork offers a means of integrating, understanding, and sharing the experiences of reconnecting to ancestral knowledge. I gather invasive weeds and native plants from ancestral waterways, working with them as dyes, inks, fibre materials, and poem-fragments that metaphor the complex relationships between ourselves and our more-than-human kin. These making-rhythms ebb and flow over the seasons, as different plants bloom and retreat, affecting material tones and textures and the stories that unfold from them. 

I will discuss the ongoing project rongoā, which stitches together a series of fibre-pieces, coloured by natural dyes from the healing plants of Aotearoa, Scotland, and Ireland, in conversation with poem fragments that story the plants and their places of belonging. Alongside, I share the work of fellow poets, artists, and writers whose works reveal resonant experiences of disconnection and re-connection to the land. Together, we consider how (re)growing a multi-sensory and ceremonial knowledge of tidal, seasonal, and celestial cycles, gathering from and tending to the environment, leads to a deeper intimacy and relation with place. 

Speaker bio: Arielle Walker is an Aotearoa New Zealand-based artist, writer and maker, working at the intersections of her Taranaki Māori and Scottish/Irish Pākehā whakapapa. As a current Postdoctoral Research Fellow with AUT University’s RAU Textiles Research, her practice seeks pathways towards reciprocal belonging through textile storytelling and ancestral narratives, weaving in the spaces between. Her writing can be found in AUP New Poets 9 (AUP, 2023), Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin Random House, 2023), and No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2022), as well as journals such as Pūhia!, Tupuranga Journal, Sweet Mammalian, and Lieu Journal.