Alys Daroy

In the early modern era, shaped by expanding systems of scientific, theological and colonial order, the polypus (octopus) proved remarkably resistant to imaginative and epistemological capture. This paper examines how these cephalopods were represented in early modern manuscript and print illustrations and their classical and medieval inheritances. Whether rendered as marginal ornamentation, monstrous enigmas or zoological specimens, the octopus's material and cognitive unruliness animated complex visual and conceptual negotiations. We explore how these images, including a folio from Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, a medieval Latin manuscript, a fifteenth-century copy of Oppian's Halieutica and Ulisse Aldrovandi's engraved polypus in De Mollibus (1606), among others, stage encounters that are as affective as they are epistemological. While previous scholarship has often foregrounded the mythic or proto-scientific aspects of marine imagery, few studies attend to their ecological and emotional dimensions. Drawing on the eco-aesthetic and eco-cognitive framework of affective ecology, we argue that the liminal octopus'; fluid morphology and ambiguous agency blur the boundaries between knowing and feeling. In eluding visual and conceptual fixity, it performs a poetics of disturbance where fear and fascination coalesce. Amidst early modern anxieties about the sea's unknowability, the octopus becomes a figure of entangled perception, one that gestures toward enchantment even as it foreshadows extractive and classificatory violence. In an era of accelerating biodiversity loss and marine collapse, such unruly objects offer not only historical insight but a vital reminder of artistic enchantment as a mode of attention and wonder. Written and presented by Dr Alys Daroy and Dr Elizabeth Burns-Dans. Panel: Early Modern Unruliness. Convenor: Dr Susanne Meurer.

This paper investigates the intersection of eco-dramaturgy, Shakespearean villainy and botanical precarity, exploring how Shakespeare’s infamous antagonists resonate with the extraordinary yet vulnerable dynamics of carnivorous plants. By examining the behavioural mechanisms of critically endangered Australian species, this interdisciplinary study considers how these botanical entities function as metaphors for survival, exploitation and environmental fragility. Drawing on ecocriticism and ecological performance studies, we propose that the behaviours of carnivorous plants, such as trapping and consumption, offer a compelling ecological lens through which to reinterpret Shakespeare’s calculating but also ambivalent figures within the play’s landscape. We consider the ways in which these characters’ strategies and power dynamics align with the captivating yet precarious existence of these plants, whose survival depends on both their agency and their vulnerability within delicate ecosystems. Through applying ecological textual readings, eco-performance and pedagogical methodologies, this research contributes to Shakespearean studies’ vibrant engagement with urgent ecological concerns. Discussion further reflects on the role of interdisciplinary creative practice in advancing environmental advocacy, artistic intervention and cross-disciplinary scholarship. This paper forms part of a larger project integrating botanical art, eco-performance and public engagement to reimagine Shakespeare’s villains through an ecological framework, amplifying awareness of endangered plant species in an era of ecological crisis.

Increasing public awareness of ecologically degradative practices is essential for supporting sustainability transformations in the Anthropocene. As the world’s dominant land use, agriculture embodies unsustainable characteristics and practices exceeding planetary boundaries (Campbell et al., 2017; IPCC, 2020: 7). As industrial agricultural systems increase in scale, intensity, and move further beyond the visibility of urban centres, awareness of the commonplace nature and makeup of agribusiness decreases (Zeunert, 2024a,b,c,d). The extent of food systems’ negative ecological impacts warrants closer public scrutiny (Campbell et al, 2017; Poore & Nemecek, 2018; IPBES, 2019; Benton et al, 2021 Zeunert, 2018), a task that can be assisted by systematic environmental communication modes visually communicating scale and impact.

Sustainability and environmental citizenship is of central importance to visual culture, which can perpetuate capitalist industrial economies at the cost of the more-than-human world (Greenwalt & Creech, 2018). Imagery can evoke profound emotional and intellectual affect (Holm, 2020). Socially motivated image-making through visual communication mediums such as photojournalism or documentary filmmaking can connect seeing with action, witnessing with deliberation, and visual representation with political action (Latour, 1986: 9; Fish & Zeunert, preprint).

This research responds to a current lack of systematic visual evidence beyond satellite imagery conveying Australia’s current state of agricultural landscapes, as well as a dearth of innovative methods connecting consumers with agricultural landscapes. It explores how digital methods might improve agricultural and food literacy through linking consumers to the environments that produce their foods. It focuses on Australia as a case study of industrialised agriculture, having wider application to global landscapes similarly impacted by agribusiness. Australia offers a useful case, with industrial practices dominating yet obscured by geographic distance from urban centres, a lack of inclusion in State of the Environment reporting, ag-gag legislation, and pervasive idealised rural imagery failing to convey frequently degraded states of food production environments (Zeunert, 2024a,b,c,d).

Research is grounded in a visual sociology methodology that developed novel methods of harnessing drone technology, creative visual capture and subsequent dissemination of all major Australian agricultural elements. Discussion centres on Zeunert’s original critical dissensus (2023) archive titled ‘Food Landscapes Australia’ (http://foodlandscapes.com.au/) that distils 10,000 drone aerial captures from 38,000 kilometres of a continental-scale field research of Australian agriculture into 881 cinematographic videos within an interactive online assemblage. The method captured all major Australian commodity typologies by value and spatial area. Footage spans all Australian states and territories, commodities, major industries, and commercial farming scales. The interdisciplinary and original creative research work thus explores how digitalization can advance visual communication methods to promote sustainability transformations of agrifood systems requiring disruption (Oels, 2019). Though focusing on the Australian context, research methods have wider application to communicating Western agrifood systems’ landscape impacts.

The research contributes to shifting profit-centric major agribusinesses narratives through a disruptive and innovative socio-technical archive seeking to catalyse sustainability transformations by facilitating visual agency and affect (Forno et al, 2022). It furthers digital communication methods for sustainability transformations through increasing consumer awareness of agribusiness’ environmental impacts, while systematically illuminating states of Australia’s agricultural environment. Separation between food consumers and agricultural production environments results in shadow practices that might otherwise be considered unacceptable if more visually perceptible and if links between industrial production chains were better articulated and understood (Plumwood, 2008; Zeunert, 2024c).Creative digital methods and communication modes can produce counter imagery to heighten comprehension and interrogate the status quo of agri-food industries.

Informed individuals and consumers are important for food sustainability choices (Kirveennummi et al., 2013: 89). Increasing the visibility of industrial agriculture’s scale and effects and linking foods and production landscapes can assist increasing producer and consumer accountability of sustainability ramifications, ecological consequences and animal suffering directly linked to food choices. The critical dissensus aerial digital archive ‘Food Landscapes Australia’ (FLA) offers a model of a counter image repository to challenge agriculture’s existing dominant visual narratives through drone cinematography revealing landscape degradation by industrial agribusiness.

What can Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage teach us about our species’ complex ecological relationships within the Anthropocene? Biophilia is the partially innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes based on human co-evolution with other species and environments. Since introduced by E.O. Wilson in 1984, biophilia has evolved into an ecological design pattern analysis of human-nature connection. This paper applies an original biophilic framework to a presentist reading of the play’s classical and early modern nature references, finding innumerable biophilic patterns couched in poetic devices, allusions and imagery. This includes patterns unconsciously or consciously nested within language, revealing human psychophysiological enmeshment with biodiverse environments and more-than-human kinship. Rather than implying authorial intent, this bio-historic analysis therefore takes a postcognitive perspective grounded in ecological cognition to consider how and why the text may affect the reader/audience psychophysiologically and what ecological possibilities may follow. Research utilises a new system of literary biophilic pattern analysis distilled from 847 biophilic cues drawn from wider studies into biophilic cues eliciting attention and affective response. Instead of considering the play’s thematic nature references through an aestheticised lens tending to separate human/nature, this biophilic analysis views the text materially as a system of exchange. Dido’s lively material interactions between biotic and abiotic components are brought forward, offering currently potential new pathways for ecological criticism, pedagogy and performance. How, then, might Dido be reimagined as Queen of Kinship, offering a palette of ecological possibilities for more-than-human readings in the current age of ecological crisis?

This practice-as-research study explores the potential of biophilic staging modes to enhance Shakespeare’s liveness in performance. The paper draws on three biophilic case studies: open-air eco-theatre in Botanica Lumina: Twelfth Night (Shakespeare South, 2021–2022), ‘dynamic proscenium’ staging inMuch Ado About Nothing (Murdoch University, 2023), and reconstructed early modern/immersive theatre in Cymbeline, or, Imogen (Burning House/Heartstring Productions, 2024). Each production harnessed different biophilic design ‘cues’ to capture audience attention and enhance the audience’s affective experience of play and place. Arguing for greater consideration of lively materialities within physical dramaturgy and scenography, it asks how Shakespeare’s plays can continue to be reinvented within the theatre ecosystem to ‘live’ more impactfully through performance.

This paper examines how eco-performance can dismantle hierarchies and function as an eco-creative process of horizontal and asymmetrical gathering. Drawing on the early modern fascination with collection and Shakespeare’s multihued ecological references, it considers how rereading the plays through the lens of ecological assemblies can inform new performance modes for greater ecological impact. Discussion begins with the urgent need to take immediate and radical action towards multiple converging ecological crises stemming from ‘grand scale gathering’ of excessive resource consumption and extractive processes. It examines early modern concordances, botanic gardens and cabinets of curiosities and their relationship to colonisation and control. The paper then proposes a process of slow reading Shakespeare’s plays to unpick narratives, turning literary thematic collections inside out as a process of dispersal. Having unsettled categorical distinctions, the text’s numerous references to plants, animals, elements, minerals and ecological processes may be reassembled for revised ecodramaturgical interpretations and ecoscenographic designs. Drawing on an original design framework based on wider research into enhancing place-based connection and eco-empathy, the paper proposes an eco-assemblage mode of reading and performing Shakespeare’s plays for environmental renewal.

Stanislavksi’s instruction that the actor ‘take their place’ within the theatre invites deeper consideration of performer relationships to the Anthropocene environment on, and beyond, stage. The actor’s embodied alignment with props, set, stage and cast impresses its mark upon the performance environment. Similarly, stage, properties and site affect the actor’s performance in circular exchange. Stanislavski’s attention to living, organic and inert materialities hence offers a unique lens through which to view ecodramaturgical forms and methods to increase human-environment connection in the current era of ecological crisis. Currently, however, despite eco-performance’s extensive discussions of place-based theatre and modes, none substantially investigate an expressly Stanislavskian ecodramaturgical mode. This paper thus argues for Method-based eco-performance, arguing that reflexive situatedness lies at the heart of ecodramaturgical futures. Discussion draws on ecological cognition and performance ecology, offering ecodramaturgical tools based on a deep awareness of, and relationship to, place. It begins with an overview of key Stanislavskian performance techniques in relation to embodied cognition and place-based ecodramaturgy. It then distils a ‘toolkit’ for enhancing the performer-environment relationship based on wider research into psychophysiological studies of human-nature connectedness. These are applied to two eco-theatrical case studies from Method actor Giovanni Enrico’s Climate Change Theatre Action 2023. Techniques therefore focus on practical application for both pedagogy and professional practice. By creating more conscious interactions with the more-than-human world, the paper argues that actors, dramaturgs and theatre makers can enhance the actor-audience-environment relationship for heightened affective performance in the Anthropocene age.

Shakespeare classes within Australian universities are often filled with students who must take them as required units rather than through a genuine desire to learn about early modern theatre and its associated theoretical, historical, and textual contexts. Thus a challenge for university teachers is to engage students by creating innovative learning experiences that allow them to explore the content in ways they find interesting. Twinned with such engagement is the need to demonstrate how and why Shakespeare Studies retain critical import today through the plays’ themes, characters, aphorisms, significance in popular culture, etc. At Murdoch University, WA, we include three Shakespeare units in our English and Creative Writing major: Shakespeare and Contemporaries, Shakespeare’s Monsters and this year, a final year showcase production of Much Ado About Nothing in Acting and Producing for the Stage. Within these units, we have designed curricula, including topics, themes, texts, additional resources, learning activities, electronic resources, and student-centred assessments to meet the diverse needs of students from different majors (including English and Creative Writing, Theatre and Drama, and Education). In particular, we have introduced negotiated assessment as each unit’s final assignment. This paper thus comparatively examines the implementation of these strategies within these units. We focus on how negotiated assessments contribute to authentic learning, as well as how they fit within the Universal Design for Learning framework. To substantiate our specific strategies for Shakespeare Studies in our contemporary historical moment, our paper moreover shares examples of work produced by students, with their consent, from Shakespeare and Contemporaries Shakespeare’s Monsters and Acting and Producing for the Stage in a bid to elucidate how negotiated assessment can meet unit learning outcomes.

In his comprehensive work "Shakespeare’s Storms," Gwilym Jones notes that if metaphors and similes are included, there is “some instance of storm in every Shakespearean play” (2015, p. 2). So too there is some instance of the sea in every Shakespearean play. Even non ‘blue world’ works harness the maritime trope—we encounter, for instance, "Much Ado About Nothing’s" wide sea, The Merry Wives of Windsor’s “golden shores” and "Love’s Labour’s Lost’s" “salt wave”. The nautical imbues mind, body and landscape in an ‘interlapping’ conception of watery selfhood as Shakespeare invites us to think with the sea (with my mind / As with the tide swell’d (Henry IV, Part 2 )) and the sea (“I am the sea” Titus Andronicus)). How do Shakespeare’s oceans unite word and world and what may this suggest about our species’ biological past and our blue planet’s rapidly deteriorating ecological future? Research into Homo sapiens’ ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptation suggests that our “earliest home” was potentially a sort of Eden located near a sea or lake (Beery et al., 2015, p.115).

This presentation examines the continued cognitive, physiological and potential ecological impact of Shakespeare’s plays situated by, with and as the sea in light of evolutionary psychology. It applies research into the cognitive and physiological affects of oceanic patterns and principles, based on biologist E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis (1984) and subsequent biophilic landscape studies (Kellert 2018; Browning et. al. 2022). Harnessing an original framework scaffolding cognitive ecology, ecological aesthetics and affective material ecocriticism, it argues for paying closer attention to Shakespeare’s direct, indirect and symbolic maritime cues for affective but also potential in an age of environmental crisis.