Eating Well in Multispecies Worlds

Eating Well in Multispecies Worlds is the seventh seminar of "Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts Bodies, Politics, Ecologies", a series of eight online seminars that together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Wednesday, 12 May, 5.00 - 6.30 pm BST/ 4:00 - 5.30 CEST
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Liza B. Bauer, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen: "'You Are Not the Friend of Those Who Turn You into a Smelly Bone': Reconfiguring Dining Table Constellations in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam" 

Abstract: Dr. Liza B. Bauer will join us to provide insights on the affordances of science and speculative fiction (sf) texts in negotiating ideas on not/eating other animals through a lens that expands on Derrida’s eating well. From an animal studies perspective, the cultural norm of eating other animals but never human ones can be understood as a crucial performance that secures the so-called anthropological difference: the belief in a fundamental distinction between humans and all other animals. Reading Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, Dr. Bauer considers the narrative tropes and strategies sf texts apply in order to de- and reconstruct eating practices, such as, reversing human-animal hierarchies, suspending the anthropological difference, or playing with the narrative perspective, thereby imagining dinner table constellations differently and alienating readers from familiar patterns. Building on Derrida’s critique of carnophallogocentrism—the construction of the “human” along the model of a carnivorous, masculine, and language-using subject—the talk suggests that Atwood’s fiction moves beyond asking what not to eat, or what and how to eat, toward the question: with whom to negotiate the terms of eating and living well in multispecies worlds.

Biography: Dr. Liza B. Bauer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Endowed Professorship for HumanAnimal Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen and has co-directed the Human-Animal Studies research section at the same university’s Graduate Centre for the Social Sciences, Business, Economics and Law since 2018. Her postdoctoral project critically examines technology-assisted research into animal communication. From 2022 to 2025, she served as Scientific Manager of a transdisciplinary think tank, the Panel on Planetary Thinking. A collaborative monograph, Our Planetary Condition: Foundations for a Politics with the Earth (MIT Press), co-authored with Frederic Hanusch, Claus Leggewie, and Clemens Finkelstein, will appear in late 2026. Her award-winning dissertation was published in 2024 as Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species (Palgrave). Alongside numerous publications in literary studies and animal studies, she has contributed to the edited collection Animals and Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2024), Multispecies Futures: New Approaches to Teaching Human-Animal Studies (Neofelis, 2022), and spoken twice on Josh Milburn’s Knowing Animals podcast.

Phoebe Chetwynd, CY Cergy Paris Université: "Veg*ns Living Through Ecocollapse: Interdependence and Survival in Rachel Atalla’s Thirsty Animals (2023) and Alison Layland’s After the Clearances (2025)"

Abstract: Anthropogenic ecological crisis has highlighted the ethical and environmental consequences of industrial animal agriculture, making experimentation with alternative eating practices ever more urgent. Because of the genre’s capacity to take critical distance from society, speculative and science fiction (sf) should have a critical role in the experimentation with new modes of being and eating (Castle and McDonald 2022). Yet, since the mid-twentieth century, speculative and science fiction (sf) has largely endorsed meat-eating – and, particularly, hunting and pastoral agriculture – as both necessary and natural (Bulleid 2023).

This paper explores the relationship between anthropocentrism, meat-eating and subjectivity through Rachel Atalla’s Thirsty Animals (2023) and Alison Layland’s After the Clearances (2025). In the former, extreme drought sweeps the United Kingdom and the vegetarian Aida is forced to return to her family farm in Scotland. In the latter, a Welsh eco-nationalist community attempts to build new, sustainable relations with the more-than-human world on an isolated island. I thus introduce two new novels to the flourishing body of work at the intersection of animal and sf studies, pursuing reflections on eating practices in times of ecological crisis. 

I open with a discussion of the ways in which ecocollapse challenges anthropocentric subjectivity in the novels, throwing human dependence on ecosystems into stark relief. Water plays an important role here: water binds human and more-than-human worlds together while water shortages threaten the survival of plants, nonhuman animals, and humans alike. Through their veg*n characters, both novels also explore the role of eating practices in environmental activism and in building new relations with the more-than-human world. At the same time, however, all the characters ultimately consume nonhuman animal flesh at some point in the novels: as food and water supplies dwindle, Aida eats meat with her family while the hardline vegan inhabitants of the eco-nationalist community are derided as puritanical and unrealist. Depictions of pastoral agriculture and hunting affirm meat-eating as necessary and natural, pointing to the anthropocentric limits of the sf imagination.

Biography: Phoebe Chetwynd is a lecturer in British literature and translation at CY Cergy Paris Université, specialising in animal studies, food studies, and speculative and science fiction (sf). She received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2025: this innovative research looked at anthropocentrism and ideologies of meat-eating in representations of the future(s) of meat in twenty-first century sf. She is currently working on a monograph based on this research, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2025, she published an article on biopolitics and language in Joseph D’Lacey and Vincent Message’s anthropophagic slaughterhouses in Extrapolation. She also published an article on entomophagy and entanglement in Becky Chambers’ extraterrestrial multispecies communities in e-Rea the same year. Her review of Sarah McFarland (2021) appeared in Configurations in 2026, and she has spoken at conferences across France, Holland, and the United Kingdom.

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image by DICSON on Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License.