EcoViolence Roundtable at EASLCE 2026

On April 15 we hosted the roundtable “Ecoviolence and Multispecies Justice: Rethinking Responsibility,” as part of the EASLCE 2026 conference, “Join the Orca Uprising! Nonhuman Resistance and Multispecies (In)Justice” (11th Biennial EASLCE Conference, Utrecht University, 14–17 April 2026). The session brought together the whole team for an interdisciplinary conversation on how violence unfolds across human and more-than-human worlds.

Starting from the concept of ecoviolence, the discussion approached violence not as a singular event but as an interconnected, ecological continuum—one that links environmental degradation, colonial histories, extractive economies, and cultural forms of representation and memory. Across literature, film, theatre, poetry, material ecologies, and museum practices, we explored how cultural production can make visible these entanglements and open up new forms of response-ability.

Susanne explored tribunal theatre as an ecodramaturgical form that exposes the limits of the Western courtroom while imagining justice otherwise; Salomé zoomed in on the role of film and reenactment in local resistance to lithium extraction in Covas do Barroso, Portugal; Tom considered ecopoetry’s role in/as resistance and sabotage to fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure; Ifor examined river sediment as a dynamic political material shaped by and resisting extractive violence; and Sofia reflected on artistic interventions into museum collections that raise questions of responsibility for colonial and ecological violence and the challenges of integrating ecological perspectives into reparative frameworks.

Together, the roundtable highlighted how rethinking violence ecologically raises crucial questions about representation and representability, witnessing and testimony, the notion of the archive, and the agency of the aesthetic. In doing so, it emphasized the role of cultural and creative practices in cultivating new forms of solidarity and care across species lines.