Deadline: Oct 25
Contact: Susie Yue Wu, Ph.D. candidate
Email: yue_wu@ucsb.edu

Call for Panelists for the Environmental Humanities for the Conference: “Beyond Dualism—Thinking Creatively Across Worlds.” Germany, 8–10 July 2026. Organized by the Rachel Carson Center.

Proposed panel description:
Embodied Signs: Meaning, Materiality, and Multispecies Worlding in Asia

In response to the humans–more-than-humans dualism as entrenched in the politics of the modern (Latour 1993), this panel proposes to explore semiotic entanglements in multispecies relations in the Asian context. Home to some of the world’s most diverse ecosystems and long-standing traditions of human–environmental co-existence, Asia offers a fertile ground for rethinking ecological meaning-making beyond the limits of Eurocentric epistemologies. Its cultural and ritual practices, shaped by animist cosmologies and contemporary techno-ecological imaginaries, reveal rich archives of multispecies becomings that remain underrepresented in global environmental thought. As Eduardo Kohn (2013) notes, symbolic language, an epitome of anthropogenic tendencies, must be washed over by alternative modes of thought that allow us to think with the non-humans. This panel echoes Kohn’s call in three broad theoretical contours to rethink semiotic worlding: (1) affective responses and ecological resonances between bodies (Barad 2007, Bennett 2009, Gregg and Seigworth 2010, Despret 2013), (2) indexical links and affordances in an ecology of life (Bateson 1972, Ingold 2000, Kohn 2013, Maran 2020), and (3) aesthetic enactments through iconography of ritual paraphernalia (Gell 2002, Holbraad 2012, Severi 2015, Stépanoff 2025).
Rather than treating language as humanity’s exclusive domain, this panel asks: what kinds of shared semiotic processes and indexical affordances mediate encounters between humans and more-than-humans? This panel invites empirical case studies of multispecies communications drawn from literary and cinematic imagination, indigenous cosmologies, religious practices, and digital and technological mediation from the Asia region. Possible themes include:
• In what ways do languages hybridize in human–nonhuman interactions?
• How might aesthetic expression (iconography, ritual instruments, literature, and cinema) bridge semiotic devices across species?
• How do indigenous communities interpret nonhuman signals as meaningful communicative acts?
• What ethical praxis should we adopt to respond to nonhumans not as passive resources but as meaningful interlocutors?
We posit that semiotic entanglement provides a shared plane of efficacy – a formal medium where humans and nonhumans meet in relational space. Through this approach, the panel seeks to offer novel insights into how sign processes can dissolve the modernist urge to purify species boundaries. By bringing together scholars from anthropology, East Asian languages and cultural studies, film and media studies, and related fields, we aim for a truly interdisciplinary exchange.
For the original call for panels, please see: Call for Multidisciplinary Panels in the Environmental Humanities for the Conference. Travel, food, and board will be paid for by the Rachel Carson Center.
We are looking for two more panelists. For those interested, please send an email including an abstract (200 words) and a CV to Huy Hoàng-Nguyễn (hoang.nguyen.210052@alumni.fulbright.edu.vn) and Susie Wu (yue_wu@ucsb.edu)
Deadline for submission through email: October 25th 2025.

Posted on October 24, 2025