This has also been a very active spring, which has been dominated by different conference papers that have been a nice distraction from the multiple writing commitments, mostly the ongoing monograph.
In late February I presented a paper on Kawakami Hiromi’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird for the Queer Ecologies and the Temporal Imagination conference held in Tübingen. I was so hooked on my reading of this work that I took the chance to expand on it and turned it into a paper that got published in ISLE as “A Gentle Extinction: Interspecies Care and Deep Time in Speculative Fiction.”
On April, I organized a panel with colleagues Shannon Lambert, Chiara Xausa, and Gabriele D’Amato on the literary representations of extractivism for the 1th Biennial EASLCE Conference held in Utrecht under the unforgivable name of ‘Join the Orca Uprising!’. In my paper, I read Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron for how it represents nonhuman agency as an equalizer to human characters without focalization; it also got turned into a paper that is currently being under review.
On June, I finally joined the hype of the Narrative conference by attending the 41st ISSN gathering in Aarhus, where I gave a paper titled “Orbiting or Eluding a Breaking Point: Temporal Strategies in Contemporary Disaster Fiction,” derived from chapter 2 on my Disaster Distortion monograph in the making. Had plenty of fun moving between panels but especially dancing to Bad Bunny at the closing dance!
And finally, right on the cusp of the summer solstice, I went back to Pompeu Fabra University to present an invited paper for the symposium “Rethinking Population Ageing: Multidisciplinary Disciplines,” organized by Stefano Bellin (thank you for the invitation!) and where I could meet friends and colleagues.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz 