AWW-STRUCK has teamed up with the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) for an online seminar focusing on intersections and entanglements between Cute Studies, ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Chaired by Hannah Boast, the recording features Papers by Joshua Paul Dale, Isabel Galleymore and Caroline Harris.
Cute Studies x Environmental Humanities
Cute kitten memes, our caring companionship with the species who share our domestic spaces, cuddly toys designed to reward and encourage sponsorship of endangered species, the breeding of companion animals such as dogs and rabbits for ‘cute’ but health-threatening characteristics … Cuteness matters in the way that it shapes human attitudes towards and treatment of nonhuman beings.
The term ‘Cute Ecologies’ previously titled a 2019 article by Erica Kanesaka Kalnay in which she argued “for the significance of diminutiveness and whimsy to a politics that cares for nonhuman life”. This seminar continues AWW-STRUCK’s series of events on creative and critical approaches to cuteness.
About the speakers and papers
‘The egg came first: Cuteness in cross-species bonding and domestication’
Joshua Paul Dale is the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books, 2023). He is the editor and author of numerous articles and books on cuteness and was awarded a four-year JSPS grant to study the American cute and Japanese kawaii aesthetics in 2019. Dale is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at Chuo University in Tokyo. Visit his website at: www.cutestudies.org.
‘“Hug me, I’m endangered”: Cute charisma in the sixth mass extinction’
Isabel Galleymore is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Significant Other (Carcanet 2019) and Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Bloomsbury Academic 2020). Isabel held the position of Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2022-23. Her AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship project is Cuteness in Contemporary Environmental Culture: Developing Ecopoetic Practice.
‘“[T]he cute vision of the world is a world without nature”: Challenges in defining nonhuman cuteness’
Caroline Harris is a writer, language artist and publisher, and nearing completion of her PhD with Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is also Research and Administration Assistant for the Living Sustainably Catalyst. Caroline’s creative and critical research focuses on the poetics of deer in relation to Cute Studies. Her latest pamphlet, A Summoning Spell for Lost Deer (2023), is published by Osmosis Press. She is the founder of Small Birds Press.
Chair
Hannah Boast is Chancellor’s Fellow at University of Edinburgh and author of Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2021. Hannah also works in animal studies, and has written on topics including gay frog memes and queer ecologies of Tiger King. Hannah is Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.
For more about AWW-STRUCK and ASLE-UKI, please see their linked websites. If you have questions, do email awwstruck.info@gmail.com.
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