Speakers

Kathleen Vaughan

Talk Theme

Attunement and Interdisciplinarity in “Learning From the St. Lawrence” is a presentation by Kathleen Vaughan and François Guillemette, collaborators on the SSHRC-funded Learning With the St. Lawrence project. Exploring the River as both ecosystem and imaginary, they reflect on five years of interdisciplinary arts-science collaboration. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s concept of l’indiscipline, they highlight the value of working beyond disciplinary boundaries to foster socially transformative practices. The presentation considers the importance of attunement—close, respectful attention—when working outside one’s field, and the challenges of measuring long-term impact. They share insights from public events where participants engaged in art practices shaped by scientific understanding to deepen awareness of the River’s complex issues.

Sneha Subramanian

Author

An awardee of the distinguished GREAT scholarship, I have earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. My dissertation concentrated on elements of comparative literature in the fiction and nonfiction of Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh. I examined these through a postcolonial ecocritical lens. My primary areas of research interests include climate led migration, postcolonial identity, and blurring the lines between the human and non-human world. I believe my presence will benefit the meeting by bringing a perspective of a first-generation settler in lands colonially known as Canada. The intersections between academic and creative work further enhance my scope of ideas for the Crossing Boundaries symposium. The framework of looking at environmental resilience from multiple perspectives is an urgent concern in our world. My work exhibits continued collaboration with the environmental sciences.

In 2024-2025, my work has been selected to be a part of Manufactured Ecosystems, a trans-disciplinary international project exploring the future of nature-based knowledge, techno-knowledge, and imagined knowledge to forecast the future of climate adaptation. I am one among six writers selected from across Canada. I will develop a fiction piece for a future-based science fiction anthology, co-edited by Nebula award-winning author and scientist Premee Mohamed and sci-fi editor and writer, Heather Clitheroe. I am paired with Canadian scientists to create biomimicry-inspired stories that explore and forecast the future of climate adaptation technologies.

Sneha Subramanian

Author

My presentation will include my research work on postcolonial ecocriticism. My work burgeons in the intersections of congruences between ecology and colonization. I will explain how postcolonialism is often deemed as anthropocentric or linked with social justice. Similarly, ecocriticism is said to be centered around animal rights and environmental conservation. However, the two fields have a mutual solidarity. In critiquing the cultural ideologies which have shaped an otherness when references to the natural world occur, we will develop a sense of unison. This node is indispensable when engaging environmental resilience.

It is vital to acknowledge how cultural politics can set an intervention through cultural production into our lived political and social realities. A certain ideology of humans and animals seen as barbaric and a threat to each other is propagated through various media. My presentation will aim to harmonize the relationship and blur lines of division between what is supposedly human and non-human. My presentation will extend the contemporary scholarly ideas of juxtaposing postcolonialism and ecocriticism in the praxis to develop newer ways of looking at the world. At the end, participants may expect to leave with curiosity, forming connective ideas that will sharpen their perspective of environmental resilience.

I will present excerpts of work from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh to illustrate how resonances between the natural and human world. There will be an opportunity to generate creative and research-based archival work with several prompts after the presentation.