Delighted to have presented a second 20 minute paper in my more-than-human ecobiography* series on 13 February:

Oolacunta and her kin linger in the gibber lands: Disrespecting Extinction

at: 

Grounding Story Conference

7th Biennial Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture Conference, University of New England, Armidale, Australia, 13-15 February 2019.

Hosted by English Literary Studies (Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education).

https://www.une.edu.au/about-une/faculty-of-humanities-arts-social-sciences-and-education/hass/news-and-events/grounding-story-conference: 

Grounding-Story_Full-Program_Final_SM

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Here is the Abstract:

Oolacunta and her kin linger in the gibber lands: Disrespecting Extinction

Close your eyes. Listen. A northeasterly is stirring the needles of the desert oaks. They whirr. They whistle a memory of the once-upon-a-time Eromanga Sea. The sun up for an hour now is gathering to midsummer. The stone gibbers of the long flat ahead shimmer in the rising heat. Up on the dune crest, Oolacunta is tucked low in her grass scrape. Her joey is asleep, pouched, oblivious. She can smell the horses and men. New unfamiliar animals are in her country. What do they want?

This paper presents a more-than-human ecobiography from the restorying extinction project, Thirty Living Ecobiographies for Thirty Extinct Mammals. Here, I wit(h)ness and recompose the life and death herstory of the Desert Rat-kangaroo, Oolacunta, a tiny Australian marsupial extirpated in the mid twentieth century. I use words, gatherings from photographic and material archives, and living sound. I propose ecobiography as an aesthetic form and generative process in critical affective response to the little-known crisis of austral mammal extinctions well documented by concerned scientists over the past forty years. Another tranche of co-mammals with precarious futures increasingly entangled with climate change as much as the undone legacy of white settler colonialism is named on the threatened species list. I wonder: If all time is now-time (Patricia Grace), what can a feminist intersectional and transdisciplinary approach bring to these deep troubles that refuse normalisation as the cost of cultural business-as-usual? Might it now be time to positively disrespect an inherited language of extinction?

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• Abstract on page 21
• The pdf of the visual presentation of the 20 minute paper is available on request. Boscacci_Grounding tory_Oolacunta lingers in the gibber lands_Disrespecting Extinction_ ASLEC_ANZ 2019 presentation.
• Seems my Biography got lost in the final program (?)

Bio: Dr Louise Boscacci works at the intersection of art and the environmental humanities. She draws an embodied working background as a biologist-ecologist into research on the implications, effects and affects of global ecosocial change, collaborating in interdisciplinary teams and partnerships to develop critical and aesthetic responses to the localised Anthropocene via writing, art, ecological thinking and affect scholarship. She has a particular interest in the more-than-human and affective dimensions of response-ability. Louise lectures in Contemporary Arts (Visual Arts) at the University of Wollongong, where she is a postdoctoral researcher and steering member of the C3P Research Centre for Critical Creative Practice. Publications in 2018 include ‘Wit(h)nessing’ (Environmental Humanities) and ‘After the Cyclone’ (Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment). Louise is a co-author and editor of the multi-authored book, 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, forthcoming with Open Humanities Press (2019).

* Connect this with ecobiography #1: AAANZ 2018 (December, Melbourne):

Melomys and the Anemometer

Pip Newling and I convened this panel: More-than-human Social Relations in the Anthropocene: Art, Extinction and Nonhuman Futures at Home and Abroad > https://louiseboscacci.net/2018/10/21/more-than-human-social-relations-in-the-anthropocene-aaanz-2018/

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* Connect this to: ASLEC-ANZ 2014(Canberra)

After-Affect Skin Songs: re-writing affective dimensions of mammal species loss 

https://louiseboscacci.net/2014/06/08/after-affect-skin-songs/