2026 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

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Professor Zilkia Janer (in-person), Hofstra University, USA​

Title: Repurposing Botanical Illustration into a Decolonial Tool  

Abstract: The botanical illustration genre, halfway between an art and a science, served for centuries as a tool for imperial bioprospecting. After the invention of photography, the genre fell into disuse but now it is experiencing a renaissance. In this lecture I address how botanical illustrators in colonial contexts often exceeded the limits imposed by the botanists and patrons that commissioned their drawings, and how contemporary artists are developing strategies to turn botanical illustration into a tool to overcome the “plant blindness” that has played an important role in environmental degradation. I will present and analyze botanical illustrations from the past and the present, including some of my own. The purpose is to understand the historical trajectory of the botanical illustration genre and to envision further ways in which it could foster the decolonization of botany.

Keywords: Botanical illustration, plant blindness, coloniality, decoloniality, botany, India, Latin America, Europe

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Bio: Zilkia Janer’s research examines literature, gastronomy, and botanical illustration in the context of modernity, coloniality, and globalization. She received a PhD in Literature and Critical Theory from Duke University and a certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration from the New York Botanical Gardens. Dr. Janer is Professor of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra University, New York.

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Professor Juan Carlos Galeano (in-person), Florida State University, USA

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Title: Entangled Roots: Material and Affective Bonds Between Plants, People, and Ecologies in Amazonian Oral Narratives  

Abstract: My presentation explores the material and affective bonds between plants, people, and ecologies through Amazonian oral narratives gathered during years of fieldwork across the Amazon Basin, published in my book FOLKTALES OF THE AMAZON. Drawing on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Amerindian perspectivism, I argue that these narratives articulate a multinaturalist ontology where plants are not passive objects but active subjects with agency, intentionality, and transformative capacity. Through sensory crossing-over and aesthetic experience (something that shamans and storytellers know as ways of feeling the presence of spirits) these tales transport listeners into new mimetic realities where boundaries dissolve between nature/culture, subject/object, human/non-human. Plants in these narratives possess subjectivity, establish social relations with humans, and participate in ecological networks based on mutual respect and perspectivist transformation. Complementing Viveiros de Castro with phenomenological perspectives and the direct voices of riverine and indigenous Amazonians (including the wisdom from Amazonians present on my recent book AMAZÓNICAS (2025), I demonstrate how Amazonian thought offers vital alternatives to contemporary ecological crises. These stories reveal ways of inhabiting the world where forests are persons, trees are kin, and planetary health depends on maintaining ethical relations with all beings. In times of global environmental devastation, these narratives invite us to reimagine human-plant relationality through indigenous cosmologies that have sustained life for millennia.

Keywords: Amerindian perspectivism, multinaturalism, Amazonian narratives, plant agency, relational ecology.

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Bio: Born in the Amazon region of Colombia, Juan Carlos Galeano, a poet and teacher, is the author of several books of poetry and the book Folktales of the Amazon. Galeano is also the director of the documentaries The Trees Have a Mother (2009) and El Río (2018). He teaches Latin American poetry and courses on the cultures of the Amazon basin at Florida State University: jgaleano@fsu.edu

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Professor Judit Farkas (in-person), University of Pécs, Hungary

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Keynote Title: Plants and Spiritual Approaches in the Hungarian Permaculture Movement    

Abstract: This presentation seeks to contribute to global plant humanities by providing a contemporary case study focused on permaculture. Permaculture is a holistic design system based on ecological principles. It employs systems thinking, conceptualises the relationship between humans and nature as non-hierarchical, and emphasises cooperation with the natural environment. While permaculture methods extend beyond gardening, their application in Hungary is predominantly found in horticultural contexts. Social permaculture and other approaches have only recently begun to gain recognition, as has the spiritual approach. The permaculture movement welcomes diverse views on nature, from sacred to material perspectives. This paper examines spiritual approaches within Hungarian permaculture, highlighting which traditions are represented, their roles, and how they are received. The analysis illustrates this topic on the permaculturists’ relationship with plants.

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Keywords: permaculture, multispecies commoning, eco-spirituality, plant humanities, Hungary, cultural anthropology

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Bio: Judit Farkas is a Cultural Anthropologist and Professor in the Department of European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pécs, Hungary. She is the program coordinator for the Human Ecology MA program at UP, the head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Challenges and a vice-leader of the Environmental Humanities Research Group at the University of Pécs. Judit Farkas is also a member of the advisory board for the International Ecovillage Research Institute (IERI). Her primary research interests are rural eco-communities, ecovillages, permaculture, and environmental humanities.

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Dr Patrycja Austin (in-person), University of Rzeszów, Poland

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​Keynote Title: An Apple’s Eye View of Time in Daniel Mason’s North Woods

Abstract: Centered on a long-lived apple tree and the landscape surrounding a house in Massachusetts, Daniel Mason’s North Woods (2023) unfolds in a temporality shaped less by human events than by botanical endurance, decay, and regeneration, while human figures appear and disappear like seasonal ephemerals. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s claim that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is articulated through narrative,” the paper proposes that North Woods tests the limits of this formulation by allowing narrative itself to become vegetal. Time here is not humanized but vegetalized, shaped by ecological succession rather than by individual lives or historical milestones. Formally, North Woods operates as what I call a time-lapse narrative, a literary technique that mirrors scientific and visual practices designed to make slow, nonhuman processes visible. Drawing on plant studies, narrative theory, and phenomenological philosophy, the paper introduces the concept of plant seeing to describe how plants in the novel do not merely symbolize life but actively register, archive, and outlast human histories. Through disrupted chronology, cyclical structure, and shifting focalization, the apple tree emerges as a “witness tree,” a living archive that records colonial violence, environmental transformation, and climate change beyond the limits of human memory.

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Bio: Dr Patrycja Austin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rzeszów. She received her PhD for her work on Indian Writers in English from Warsaw University. Her monograph Living Time: Vegetal Temporalities in Post-2010 American Fiction will be published in 2026. She also co-authored Memes and Meaning: Presence and Transcendence in Literature.

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Professor Nirmal Selvamony (in-person)

Central University of Tamil Nadu, India

Details forthcoming...

 

 

Mr Soumyadeep Datta (in-person)

Ashoka Fellow, India

Details forthcoming...

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