Susanne Knittel at Workshop on Rights of Nature in Anthropocene Literature

On 2 July, Susanne Knittel participated in the workshop Rights of Nature in Anthropocene Literature at the University of Vechta (Germany). The workshop was organized by Gabriele Dürbeck and Simon Probst in the context of their DFG project Das Naturkulturelle Gedächtnis im Anthropozän and it brought together scholars examining how literary and aesthetic forms engage with questions of legal personhood, representation, and agency in the context of the rights of nature. Contributions addressed topics such as Arctic poetics and climate testimony, literary and performative court cases on the topic of ecocide and the problem of representing nonhuman claimants, speculative reconfigurations of legal subjectivity, and the entanglement of animism and river ecologies in contemporary writing.

Susanne focused on the role of theatre—particularly the form of the court or the tribunal—in staging questions of ecological justice and responsibility and explored how performative tribunals can intervene in debates on ecocide and the rights of nature by making visible alternative forms of testimony, agency and accountability.