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 Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih (in-person), North-Eastern Hill University, India

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Title: Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lessons from the Khasi Khanatangs
 

Abstract: Cheryll Glotfelty, the pioneering ecocritic, lamented the fact that literary studies had, for a long time, overlooked the global environmental crisis. However, what was true of literary studies was not so of literature, which had greened itself from the very beginning. Oral literature serves as a repository for animistic and pantheistic world views—ecocentric to the core. Like many indigenous literatures and belief systems, the Khasi khanatangs, or sacred stories, which form the foundation of the Khasi world view and religious philosophy, with their non-anthropocentric ethics, are crucial to our understanding of contemporary earthly existence and our efforts to create a more eco-friendly world. The paper draws attention to two aspects of the khanatangs. The first relates to the belief that God had sent man, originally an inhabitant of heaven, to earth to be its conscientious caretaker, in response to the repeated pleadings of Mei Ramew, the Earth Mother. The second relates to the belief that man’s coming was in accordance with Ka Hukum, Ka Kular, the divine pledge, which declared that as long as man adhered to the Three Commandments given by God, he could come and go as he pleased between heaven and earth, through a divine tree on a sacred mountain that served as Ka Jingkieng Ksiar, the golden ladder, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. In discussing these aspects of Khasi oral narrative, the paper considers the Khasi green consciousness and how vital anti-anthropocentrism and a strong connection with the land are to our planet, beset as it is by existential threats. As Glotfelty reveals, even ecocritics and theologians are turning to such ancient belief systems for the wisdom they contain about nature and spirituality.

Keywords: animism, ecocentrism, Khasi culture, oral literature, spirituality

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Bio: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is an Indian poet, novelist and writer. Born and brought up in Sohra (aka Cherrapunjee) but living in Shillong, he writes in two languages: Khasi and English. He is a faculty member at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, India. His debut novel Funeral Nights was published in 2021. He was awarded the Shakti Bhatt Prize in 2024 for his body of work.

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Professor Judit Farkas (online), 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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Professor Nirmal Selvamony (in-person), Central University of Tamil Nadu, India

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Keynote Title: The Floral Human: Towards A puttiṇai Philosophical Anthropology

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Abstract: In my presentation I argue that we cannot be adequately human without being adequately floral. In order to explicate this philosophical anthropological assertion, it is necessary to review two conflicting views of flora-human relation – the dominant reductive view of looking upon the flora as objects either useful or useless, and the less dominant one that regards the flora as a being not only worthy of human affection and even reverence but inseparable from the being of the human. The latter view, characteristic of the tiṇai world, was overrun by the former one when tiṇai morphed into state society. Using the puttiṇai concept of the personaic triad (mūviṭam), I draw out the philosophical anthropological implications of these views, particularly the floral aspect of humanness by underscoring the urgency of recovering the latter relation in order to end the present Anthropocene and usher in the Neo-tiṇaicene. 

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Keywords: floral human; tiṇai, mūviṭam, philosophical anthropology 

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Bio: Nirmal Selvamony is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator and musician with over four decades of experience in decolonizing the study of literature, ecology and society through the theory and practice of tiṇai. He retired from the central University of Tamil Nadu as the head of the department of English Studies and the dean of the School of Social Sciences and 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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Mr Soumyadeep Datta (in-person)

Activist and Ashoka Fellow, India​​