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Connections beyond Humanities: Understanding Relatedness in a Changing World

March 21, 2025, from 9am to 5pm

Education Centre ED2-103 and ED2-123

 

Keynote Speaker: Dr Sarah Krotz (º£½ÇÉçÇø) – Enlichenment: Nourishing Slowness and Symbiosis in the Anthropocene  [ learn more ]

Special Address: Dr Hongbing Yu (Toronto Metropolitan University) – Semiotizing into ‘(Post-)Anthropocene’: Connecting Peirce’s Semiosis, von Uexküll’s Umwelt, and Sebeok’s Modeling  [ learn more ]

 

9 am	Welcoming Remarks - ED 2-103
9:15 - 10:15 am	Special Address - ED 2-103 Semiotizing into ‘(Post-)Anthropocene’: Connecting Peirce’s Semiosis, von Uexküll’s Umwelt, and Sebeok’s Modeling Hongbing Yu, Toronto Metropolitan University
10:15 - 10:30 am	BREAK
	Session A1 - ED 2-103 Consumption, Transformation and Exchange	Session B1 - ED 2-123 Eco-intersections in Literature
10:30 am	“Somehow it All Comes Back to Coal”: Analyzing Post-Apocalyptic Energy Regimes in The Hunger Games” Samantha Buryn	“Cereus Epistemologies: Living Wildness and Making Oddkin in Cereus Blooms at Night” Jason Purcell
10:50 am	“Consuming Green: Documentary, Endangered Species, and the Deadly Entanglements of Consumer Society in Patrick Rouxel’s Green (2009)” Alex Ventimilla	“Land, Water, and Light, Oh My: An Textual Conversation on Indigenous Futurity and Joy between Jordan Abel's Empty Spaces and Matthew James Weigel's Whitemud Walking” Celina Loew
11:10 am	“Twisting towards Freedom: Transformation as Liberation in Suzette Mayr’s Moon Honey and Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk” Hilary Caplan	“Space and Migration within a Patriarchal Economy- An Observation on Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811)” Youeal Abera
11:30 am	“The Economy of Furry Sticker Gifts and Exchange” Eduardo Salinas Lactaoen	“Photosynthetic Futures” Charis St. Pierre
12 noon - 1 pm	LUNCH BREAK
	Session A2 - ED 2-103 Eco-Translation	Session B2 - ED 2-123 Humans, Nature and Art
1 pm	“Eco-Translation and the Non-Human: Reimagining Borders in The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” Iheoma B. Joakin-Uzomba	“Curation and Control: Wildlife, Risk, and Art in Zones of Ecological Tension” Danika Brockman
1:20 pm	“Ecological Translation: Water as a Root Metaphor in Chinese Contemporary Dance” Zhuohao Li	“Resonance Beyond the Human: The Universal Language of Affect in Trance Music” Uthman Khan
1:40 pm	“Eco-Semiotics as Method: Exploring More-than-Human Knowledge Gathering” Dauren Kaliaskar, Daria Testo and Laura Elidedt Rodriguez	“Tattooed Women & the Embodiment of Artivism” Maëlle Weber
2 - 2:15 PM	BREAK
	Session A3 - ED 2-103 Negotiating Human Identity	Session B3 - ED 2-123 Digital Humanities
2: 15 pm	“‘This Ain't My First Rodeo’: Cowboy Romances and Ecofeminism” Julianna Wagar	“Digital Beings and Counter-Individuals: Posthuman Counter-Societies in Science Fiction” Seifollah Ramezani
2:35 pm	“Gardens as Sites of Negotiation for Queer Freedom in H Nigel Thomas’s Easily Fooled” Alex Mortensen	“Imagining Connections: Virtual Reality for Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Anthropocene” Allyson Lynch
2:55 pm	“Fluid Boundaries: Queer Death and Mourning in ‘A Permanent Freedom’” Anyi Luo
3:15 - 3:30	BREAK
3:30 - 4:30 pm	Keynote Address - ED 2-103 Enlichenment: Nourishing Slowness and Symbiosis in the Anthropocene Sarah Krotz, º£½ÇÉçÇø
4:30 - 4:40 pm	Closing Remarks

download program as a pdf

download the full presentation abstracts as a pdf

 

Keynote Address 

Enlichenment: Nourishing Slowness and Symbiosis in the Anthropocene  

Dr Sarah Krotz (º£½ÇÉçÇø) 

Abstract: This talk reflects on the modes of attention that lichens inspire, asking how and what we might  learn from these slow-growing, collaborative examples of “neglected biodiversity” (Zonca, 2022) in a time  of ecological crisis. Guided by the practices of habitat studies – an approach to literary scholarship that  decenters the human – I trace a literary ecology of “enlichenment” thought that foregrounds the ways in  which writing is not just a “close reading [of] the world” (Feder, 2021), but a collaboration with it. Attending  to lichens, I suggest, can be a radical act of noticing, of slowness and symbiosis that help us to imagine  beyond anthropocene cultures of speed and individualism and toward the infrastructures that support life  on this planet. 

Bio: Sarah Wylie Krotz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and  Director of the Centre for Literatures in Canada (CLC) at the º£½ÇÉçÇø. Her research considers  the spatial and ecological entanglements of language and literature. The author of Mapping with Words:  Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, 1789-1916 (U of Toronto P, 2018) and co-editor (with Bruce  Erickson) of The Politics of the Canoe (U of Manitoba P, 2021), she is currently working on a book of  literary habitat studies tentatively titled Everyday Natures: Literary Ecologies of a Prairie Habitat. Her  recent articles, including an essay on reading and teaching in the North Saskatchewan River Valley  (“Outside Words”, Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 2023), work  to deepen our understanding of Canada’s complex literary ecologies, and the possibilities they open up for  rethinking our relationships with the land.

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Special Address  

Semiotizing into ‘(Post-)Anthropocene’: Connecting Peirce’s semiosis, von Uexküll’s Umwelt, and  Sebeok’s modeling 

Dr Hongbing Yu (Toronto Metropolitan University) 

Abstract: In this talk, I will bring together three key anti-anthropocentric concepts in contemporary  semiotics—Charles Peirce’s “semiosis,” Jakob von Uexküll’s “Umwelt,” and Thomas Sebeok’s  “modeling”—to propose an analytical framework I call “critical cognitive semiotics.” By bridging  biosemiotics, cultural studies, cognitive sciences, and wellbeing, this framework offers a nuanced approach  to understanding meaning-making beyond the human sphere. Ultimately, it provides fresh insights into how  we might constructively address ecological challenges and crises.

Bio: Dr. Hongbing Yu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures  at Toronto Metropolitan University. Specializing in comparative cultural studies and comparative  philosophy, he has published extensively on language, communication, cultural memory, cognition,  biosemiotics, and education. Alongside Zhang Jie (Nanjing Normal University), he has developed the  Cultural Semiotics of Jingshen (精神⽂化符號學), a new theoretical perspective that explores the semiotic  dimensions of mental wellbeing and beyond. Dr. Yu’s current research focuses on social ritual, mythical  thinking, and the cognitive dimensions of Chinese philosophy and religion, particularly Taoism and Zen  Buddhism. A former President of the Semiotic Society of America, he is currently a Vice President of the  International Association for Semiotic Studies.

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