University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group

11/03/2026

Thursday 12th March: 4.00-5.15pm (in person lecture)

Venue: ORB 2.12 (O’Rahilly Building 2nd Floor, Room 2.12), UCC Campus

Kelly Salchow MacArthur (Michigan State University)

Engaging Visual Culture: Eco-Activism Through Graphic Design

Eco-activist design hopes to contribute to (and sway) the ongoing dialogue of environmental urgency that is often met with inaction. Utilizing powerful tools of visual communication, urgent responsibility rests on the shoulders of designers to prioritize critical topics through clear and inspiring messages for the public. Design can serve as the conduit between science and society, abstraction and clarity, singular work and collaborative systemic effort, and inaction and action. My teaching, research and practice over the past 20 years has explored various communication design strategies—humanistic appeals to reconnect oneself with nature, disturbing statistics meant to instigate response, logical calls to action, aesthetic presentation of biophilia, visualization through concrete poetry, community mapping in partnership with an ecological organization, making through green processes and foraged materials, etc. The body of work varies in method, message, and material—yet maintains the commonality of environmental principles and goals of resilience. This lecture will present an arc of environmentally focused creative research which aspires to demonstrate benefits and impact, while instigating future cross disciplinary collaboration and cooperation.

The lecture will lay the groundwork for a subsequent event which will take place on Thursday 26th March for Green Week, Haptic and Biophilic: Green Collage Workshop, jointly organised by the UCC Eco-Humanities Research Group and the UCC Green Campus Committee.

Kelly Salchow MacArthur is a Professor of Graphic Design at Michigan State University (MSU), a 2-time Olympic rower, a 2-time Olympian Artist, and a Member of the IOC's Culture and Olympic Heritage Commission. She is an Honorary Visiting Researcher in UCC's School of Education through to June 2026. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Bachelor of Science in Graphic Design Magna Cum Laude from the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Before joining the faculty at MSU, she taught at Kansas City Art Institute, RISD and The College of New Jersey.

Kelly’s graphic design practice and creative research focuses on environmental awareness, advocacy and action. Her work has been disseminated internationally through exhibition, design awards, conference, and publication, and is included in several permanent collections. She is President Emerita of the international design organization, United Designs Alliance and AIGA Detroit. She is a former member of the UCDA Design Educator's Advisory Committee, and CAA's Committee on Intellectual Property. Kelly initiated the AIGA Get Out The Vote: Empowering the Women’s Vote national poster initiative to commemorate 100 years of the women’s vote in 2020. She is a recipient of MSU’s Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Service for her green mapping projects with Monroe County.

11/11/2024

The next University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group lecture takes place as an on campus lecture on Thursday 21st November 2024 from 4.00-5.15pm (GMT).

It is an in-person lecture organized jointly by the UCC Eco-Humanities Research Group and the UCC Department of Classics.

M.D. Usher (University of Vermont):

"Umwelt and the Etymology of ēthos: How Animals Make Us Human"

Venue: ORB 203 (O’Rahilly Building Room 2.03), University College Cork main campus. There is no need to register for this lecture – but if you are travelling to Cork from any distance, please contact Crystal Addey ([email protected]) so that we can keep you updated with any schedule changes.

At Theognis lines 213-218 the poet recommends adopting the cagey maneuvers of the octopus, who “adapts her colours to match the rock she clings to,” as a model for negotiating human social relations. The poem consists of a mere few lines but involves several revealing double-entendres. Chief among them is the word ēthos, which Theognis uses to mean “cast of mind,” but originally meant the habitual “haunt” or “den” of an animal, only later to be used to describe human behaviour.

In this lecture, I will discuss the ways in which, evolutionarily and historically, human ethics relate to non-human animal behaviour. Taking the Theognis poem as a point of departure, I trace the development of the concept of human ethics from the earliest uses of the Greek word ēthos, linking these findings to biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, which he described as a “bubble” in which both space and time are wholly relative, experienced and navigated uniquely by organisms in Nature depending on their morphology and sensory receptors. Human ethics, I propose, extrapolating from Uexküll’s idea, differ from animal ethics by the degree of recursive intelligence (logos, or “reason”) humans possess relative to other species, a notion, as it happens, that is adumbrated in Porphyry’s treatise on the humane treatment of animals, De Abstinentia. The idea of human ethics deriving from the experience and observation of animal behavior (and yet being distinct from it), I suggest further, finds its fullest expression in antiquity in the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis, which I translate and characterize (with a nod to the nomenclature of zoologists) as “proprioception.” Ethics, I conclude, borrowing a phrase from Temple Grandin, is one of the many ways that animals make us human.

M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences at the University of Vermont, USA. With his wife, he also built, owns, and operates Works & Days Farm. His books include Plato’s Pigs and Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature (Cambridge 2020), How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land (Princeton 2021), How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism (Princeton 2022) and How to Care about Animals: An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small (Princeton 2023). A book in press with Princeton, to be published simultaneously in French with Presses universitaires de France, Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World, is forthcoming in May 2025

14/10/2024

The next lecture in the University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group Public Lecture Series is Dr Ilenia Iengo (Independent Researcher) on:

"The inflamed body-territory: An Environmental Justice, Transfeminist, and Crip praxis from the Southern European city of Naples, Italy"

The lecture is free and open to all. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/eco-humanities-public-lecture-17-october-2024-tickets-1005134994827

The presentation centres an autoethnographic immersion in "Terra dei Fuochi", southern Italy, zooming into the intersecting injustices marking the experience of endometriosis, the bodily inflammatory chronic illness I live with and the toxic waste fires raging in the territory between the provinces of Naples and Caserta. Thinking with the sprouting intersection of environmental humanities and crip studies and disability justice, while rooted in a critical environmental justice and transfeminist standpoint, the epistemic justice exercise uncovers the toxic embodiment where bodies and places are enmeshed. Although a growing body of literature acknowledges the role of chemical and endocrine-disrupting toxins buildup in the occurrence of endometriosis, I delineate the epistemic injustices which keep this relationship silent in mainstream medical discourses. Through the blend of environmental memoir, embodied knowledge, activist campaigns, and medical literature, the article exposes the accumulation of environmental, medical, ableist, misogynist and capitalist slow violence, that living with endometriosis brings forth. While emerging from the materiality of experiencing trauma and pain, the talk reclaims the emancipatory possibilities which can be articulated. From the politicization of an "invisible" illness standpoint, the paper proposes a toxic autobiography where transfeminist, environmental and disability justice politics are collectively affirmed through situated ecopolitics of response-ability that account for interdependence and self-determination of marginal bodies and territories.

Ilenia Iengo holds a PhD in Feminist Political Ecology, developed as part of the WEGO-ITN Marie Sklodowska-Curie PhD at BCNUEJ, Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. She is a chronically ill scholar-activist from Naples, southern Italy, and is also a member of the Ecologie Politiche del Presente laboratory and Undisciplined Environments collective. Her work lies at the crossroad of environmental humanities, transfeminist political ecology, and disability justice engaging with toxicity, embodiment, and prefigurative urban politics.

02/10/2024

The next University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group event is a poetry reading and author talk with German poet Dorothea Grünzweig. The event will take place on Thursday 3rd October starting at 4pm (Irish/UK Time).

The event is free and all are welcome to attend.

This is a hybrid event, which will take place in the Shtepps (Room 1.72) in the Hub, University College Cork main campus. If you wish to attend in person, there is no need to register.

If you wish to attend online, please register via Eventbrite using this link and you will automatically receive the Zoom meeting invitation/link:

Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/eco-humanities-public-lecture-3rd-october-2024-tickets-1010445879827

Dorothea Grünzweig has been invited to UCC from Finland to give a poetry reading with commentary and engage in a panel discussion. Originally from Germany, Grünzweig has lived in Finland for many years. She is a well-known voice in recent trends in German ecological poetry, and has enriched this genre with new facets relying on her life in a remote area in Finland. All there in a flash is the title of Grünzweig’s latest poetry book, its original German name being Plötzlich alles da. Her poems lead us to the universe of Finnish landscape, with its seasonal changes, its Northern vegetation and animal life, mirrored in the Finnish culture. They show the fascination and beauty of this part of the world, but also its endangerment und vulnerability. Grief and rage about nature’s destruction stand side by side with glimpses or visions of hope for harmony and fair, unifying cohabitation. All there in a flash works like a spell. Whatever is lost, at risk, faded and longed for is chanted into being and is suddenly (‘plötzlich’) wholly present. But the reversal is constantly close: All gone in a flash. So Grünzweig’s poems live on the tension between the two poles: the abundance of life and its disappearance.

The author will read from this poetry book, but a few poems from earlier works, such as Kaamos Kosmos and Glass Voices lasinäänet will also be heard. She will give brief workshop comments on the poems to shed light on their background and her own working methods.

Grünzweig will read her poems in English, which Derk Wynand (Canada) has translated with her from German. This event is funded by the Eco-Humanities Research Group and the UCC Future Humanities Institute, in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the German Embassy Dublin.

Dorothea Grünzweig's body of work includes seven volumes of poetry, along with a series of poetological essays and translations of Finnish, English, and Mansi poetry. Her debut poetry volume appeared in 1997 at the Göttingen-based Wallstein Verlag, that has remained her publishing house up to the present day. Grünzweig regularly gives poetry readings, predominantly in Germany, but as well in various other countries, nowadays often in cooperation with musicians. She has received several literary awards, including the poetry prize of the German PEN. Grünzweig was born in Korntal near Stuttgart, and she studied German and English at the University of Tübingen and Bangor, Wales. She was doing postgraduate research on the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins at Oxford, whose poetry she later translated and published. She taught at the University of Dundee, Scotland, before becoming a secondary school teacher at a boarding-school in South Germany. In 1989 she moved to Finland for a post at the German School of Helsinki, which she left after nine years in order to become a free-lance writer and translator. She is currently working on her eighth poetry book following Plötzlich alles da (2020).

All there in a flash - Poetry Reading and author talk with German poet Dorothea Grünzweig from Finland

18/05/2024

Next in the University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group Public Lecture Series is "Rewilding Philologies, Rewilding Pedagogies: Practising the Languages, Literatures and Cultures Disciplines with Ecological Awareness" by Caitriona Ni Dhuill (University of Salzburg), Hanna Bingel-Jones (University College Cork) and Tina-Karen Pusse (University of Galway).

Thursday 6th June 2024: 4.00-5.15pm (Ireland Standard Time (IST/DST))

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/eco-humanities-research-group-public-lecture-june-2024-tickets-818347267707

What sense does it make to speak of ‘rewilding’ disciplines that were never wild to begin with?
This presentation explores the implications of ecological crisis for the philologies -- the classical and modern languages, literatures and cultures disciplines. We ask:

What spaces can be found within the study of languages, literatures and cultures today to reflect on, resist and begin to remake disciplinary, professional and pedagogical practice in light of the multiple socio-ecological predicaments of our time?
What distinctive perspectives do the philologies bring to the urgent task of undoing ecocidal cultural and political-economic commitments to infinite ‘growth’, runaway consumption and habitat destruction (including the destruction of human habitats through monocultural models of development)?
How do the perspectives and resources of the philologies help to foster ecological awareness and eco-centric orientation in students and scholars alike?

In their current professionalised form, the philologies, like most academic disciplines, can be understood as products of the industrial age, enmeshed with fossil-fuel culture across all their modes of production, dissemination and practice (including the production of the subjectivities of their practitioners). The paper envisions the university as an unrealised site of deep-reaching societal and personal transformation towards more liveable relationships with human and non-human others within the damaged, increasingly fragile web of life, and asks what the contribution of the philologies can be to such transformation. While indebted to the by now prolific dialogue between ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and Anthropocene theory, the approaches explored in this paper seek to move beyond established paradigms of academic productivity to explore more ecologically reflexive -- perhaps 'wilder' -- modes of working, reading, thinking and teaching.

Caitríona Ní Dhúill is a Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg. She studied German and Music at Trinity College Dublin, where she gained her PhD in 2005 with a dissertation on gender relations in modern utopian and dystopian writing. Her research interests are in modern German and European literature since 1870, literature and ecological consciousness, slowness as a mode of resistance, and screen-free practice in the humanities. She helped to found the Centre for Culture and Ecology at Durham University in 2018 and the Eco-Humanities Research Group at UCC in 2021.

Hanna Bingel-Jones’ research interest is in German literature from 19th century to the present, with a special focus on literary ecology and ecocriticism, narrative studies, GDR literature, and the relation between theology, religion and literature. She studied English and German in Giessen and Sheffield. She completed her PhD in Literary Studies at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Giessen University, taking a narratological approach to representations of religious faith and transcendence in contemporary American prose fiction. She also taught internationally at the University of Volgograd (Russia), Belfast, Berlin and Leipzig, and is currently teaching literary studies and language at the UCC German Department.

Rewilding philologies, rewilding pedagogies: Practising the languages, literatures and cultures disciplines with ecological awareness

30/04/2024

Next in the University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group Public lecture Series is a lecture by Dawn Collins (University of Wales Trinity St. David)

Thursday 2nd May 2024: 4.00-5.15pm (IST/DST/BST)

Tibetan Ritual Traditions and Planetary Healing

Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/eco-humanities-research-group-public-lecture-from-dawn-collins-tickets-818318983107?aff=oddtdtcreator

This lecture will explore the value that understandings and practices of Tibetan ritual healing traditions may have for planetary healing. It will focus on deity yoga practices, with a particular focus on those relating to the Indo-Tibetan deities Avalokiteśvara, Parṇaśavarī and Tārā. Some innovations and continuities between contemporary developments of these practices and their more ancient counterparts, rooted in ancient Tibetan religious traditions, will be examined through the lens of their use for healing. How these practices are embodied in waking life, dream, and death processes will be examined in relation to their intended effect beyond ordinary understandings of the individual to influence at planetary levels. In this regard, some ways in which they were employed by contemporary Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic will be discussed. The value of such traditional practices in answering the urgent global call for planetary healing will be explored.

Dawn Collins holds a PhD from Cardiff University focusing on Tibetan landscapes and ritual healing. She is a tutor on the MA Ecology and Spirituality and the MA Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the Sophia Centre for Cosmology in Culture, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She is a Research Fellow of the Foro di Studi Avanzati Gaetano Massa (FSA), Rome, Italy (Gaetano Massa Research Institute for Advanced Study of the Humanities) and works as a freelance editor, most notably, on the editorial team of 84,000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. Her research is informed by her practice as a dance artist and as a practitioner of traditional massage therapies.

Photo: Kimberly Roberts

09/01/2024

Next in the UCC Eco-Humanities Research Group Public lecture Series is a lecture by Dr Jesse Peterson (University College Cork), Thursday 25th January 2024, 4.00-5.15pm (GMT) on:

"Ecologizing Death through an Ecohumanities Approach"

Scholarship on death typically focuses on the death of humans, overlooking the wider socio-ecological factors involved in processes around death. However, situating death within an ecohumanities approach carries potential to expand and enrich our understanding of nature as a matter of ‘deathly concern.’ In this lecture, Peterson will present on ecohumanities and death, highlighting emerging themes and contributions from the newly published (9 Jan. 2024) volume, Death’s Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human, edited by Jesse D. Peterson (UCC), Natashe Lemos Dekker (UL), and Philip R. Olson (VT). Published as part of the Death and Culture Series by Bristol University Press, this volume explores death beyond the human to reveal complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities, and environments. Using examples from this publication—such as the death of waterbodies (Peterson, 2024), the ‘ecological afterlives’ (Olson, 2024; Gould et al., 2024; Holleran, 2024) of the human dead, or the agency of parasitic and microbial lives (Zanzu, 2024; Hoerst, 2024; Yepez & Johnson, 2024)—Peterson will discuss and reflect on the social, cultural and political importance of nonhuman death, the relational materiality of the human co**se, and concerns over ‘ontological security’ (Giddens, 1984) offered by novel forms of care and labour.

Dr Jesse D. Peterson (he/him) works as a Lecturer with the Radical Humanities Laboratory and Department of Geography at University College Cork. He researches societal relationships to ecological challenges using transdisciplinary methods, having focused on issues related to oceans and biodiversity. His research addresses topics such as the production of ocean health and pollution, more-than-human relationships, socio-ecological death, citizen science, biodiversity data, and innovation in research methods, with publications in peer-reviewed journals, edited collections, literary magazines, and museum exhibits, such as Geohumanities, The Digital Environmental Humanities Handbook, Green Letters, Minerva, saltfront and more.

All Welcome!

Register here:

An Eco-Humanities Public Lecture from Dr Peterson (University College Cork)

01/12/2023

Public lecture from Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (University of Maryland), and Professor Andrew Frederick Smith (Drexel University)

Title: Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse

Time and Date: Thursday 7th December 2023, 4.00-5.15pm (GMT)

Venue: Online, register to receive Zoom link

Abstract: It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change.

Bio: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño & Cupeño) is an Indigenous feminist philosopher. Shelbi researches, teaches, and consults on Indigenous research and evaluation methods, cultural and language reclamation, Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous feminist interventions in critical social work, and land-based feminist coalition-building. Shelbi is fascinated by the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, caretaking, power, and trauma. Shelbi is a proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, and is of both Luiseño (Payómkawichum) and Cupeño (Kúupangaxwichem) descent. She is an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland College Park and the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab, a hub of Indigenous feminist research and evaluation.

Andrew Frederick Smith, kinless (i.e., a settler/colonizer/occupier), is a professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He also is department chair of the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science. His recent research is inspired by the pursuit of what Kim TallBear calls “settler ontocide,” which has led him to focus on the philosophical dimensions of Indigenous ecological knowledge systems, Indigenous climate/food justice, and Indigenous feminisms. His latest book is The Threefold Struggle (SUNY 2022).

To Register, Go To This Link:

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/public-lecture-by-shelbi-nahwilet-meissner-prof-andrew-frederick-smith-tickets-703216909707?aff=oddtdtcreator

Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse

01/12/2023

The University College Cork - Eco-Humanities Research Group, which collaborates with ERI Environmental Research Institute UCC, aims to bring the perspectives of the humanities to bear on the multiple interlocking ecological and existential crises of our time. We are a group of scholars from across and beyond the humanities disciplines whose work is concerned with climate and biodiversity crisis and with their far-reaching implications for values, ideologies, identities, and symbolic systems. Together, we explore how our work in the humanities can help individuals and communities, including communities of researchers in the natural and social sciences, to navigate the growing conceptual, emotional, ethical and other demands of contemporary ecological crises. We also consider the place of critical ecological awareness within humanities education at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and within transdisciplinary research. Co-convenors: Dr Crystal Addey, Dr Jenny Butler, Dr Laurence Davis and Dr Maureen O'Connor.

The Eco-Humanities Research Group aims to bring the perspectives of the humanities to bear on the multiple interlocking ecological and existential crises of our time. We are a group of scholars from across and beyond the humanities disciplines whose work is concerned with climate and biodiversity c...