Kaisa Kortekallio's presentation is guided by the question how the skills and methods developed within literary studies could be applied to transdisciplinary and more-than-human exploration of multispecies entanglements. Literary scholars are trained to pay close attention to textual and contextual phenomena ranging from features like structure, rhythm and voice to genres, strategies and ideologies. What happens if we turn these attentional skills to more-than-human ecologies? How do they respond?

Inspired by more-than-human and posthuman approaches in phenomenology and multispecies ethnography (Astrida Neimanis, Anna L. Tsing, Natasha Myers) Dr Kortekallio is developing a method called more-than-human reading. Rooted in the study of speculative fiction, the method itself is built on a speculative and experimental premise: what happens if we consider reading as an embodied and environmental practice? In the presentation, Dr Kortekallio will discuss the first findings of applying this method to collaborating with plant life in the utopian context of what Natasha Myers has called the Planthroposcene.

Kaisa Kortekallio (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) / Literary Studies and Creative Writing, University of Turku. In her research, she has combined posthumanist and cognitive approaches to the study of literature and reading, with a focus on ecological science fiction. Her recent work focuses on cohabitation and collaboration with plant life. She is the author of Mutant Narratives in Ecological Science Fiction: Thinking with Embodied Estrangement (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).