II SPOTLIGHT Seminar
More-than-humans in the semi-peripheries
A SPOTLIGHT Summer School seminar on ways of seeing and being-seen-as other species
Sept 29, 2025, Bucharest, Romania
Venue: Cinetic, UNATC (I. L. Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film) Organizers UNATC & University of Opole
Contact persons dr. Michał Wanke, UO, dr. Anna Vlad, UNATC
Background
SPOTLIGHT Summer School will be held in Bucharest again, funded by the University of St. Gallen and co-hosted by New Europe College and UNATC (I. L. Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film) on 21 – 28 September 2025. This is the fourth edition of SPOTLIGHT, which deals with audiovisual capturing of social phenomena in urban spaces in Central and Eastern Europe, such as identity of place (Opole, PL in 2022), migration and diversity (Józsefváros, Budapest, HU in 2023) and architecture and city dwelling (Bucharest, RO in 2024) or more-than-human relations (Bucharest, 2025). Co-organized interdisciplinarily between visual anthropology, human geography, sociology and documentary filmmaking, it offers an immersive experience for the participating students from all over Europe.
For the second time, the SPOTLIGHT Summer School will conclude with a conceptual seminar held at UNATC on Monday, September 29, 2025.
There is no participation fee. Organizers do not provide catering or other services.
PROGRAM
Bucharest time (CET+1 hours)
09:15 Registration and build up
09:30 Welcome (Ana Vlad, Michał Wanke)
Session 1. Multispecies encounters in urban-rural contact-zones
moderator: Ágnes Erőss
10:00 [on-site] Drying Landscapes, Disrupted Flows: Visualizing Water and Its Absence in a British Columbia Park (Clara Kleininger-Wanik, University of Exeter, UK)
10:20 [online] Urban-rural entanglements – mapping asparagus fields as multispecies enquiry (Anna Tüdős, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
10:40 [online] Haunted Flows: Listening to Non-Human Witnesses of War from the Drains of Delhi to the Bridges of Mitrovica (Soma Basu, Tampere University, Finland)
11:00 discussion
11:20 coffee pause
Session 2. Seeing in urban spaces
moderator: Karina Gaibulina
11:40 [on-line] Visual Encounters in a Multispecies City: On the Rights to Privacy and to the City of Urban Pigeons (Isabel Pastor Fernandez, Universität Basel, Switzerland)
12:00 [on-site] The wild in the city – beyond tamed nature in the case of urban nature protected areas in Bulgaria (Radoslava Kuneva, Centre for advanced studies, Sofia, Bulgaria)
12:20 [on-site] Crows, Class, and Coexistence: Multispecies Marginality and Affective Politics in Bucharest (Nicoleta Cati Zichi, National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest)
12:40 [on-site] Managing invisibility in semi-peripheries. People who use cannabis in Poland and Turkiye (Michał Wanke, University of Opole, Poland)
12:00 discussion
12:20 coffee pause
Session 3. Visibilisation/instrumentalisation/memorialisation
moderator: Michał Wanke
13:20 [on-site] Use of Animals in Polish 21st-century National Discourse: Case Study of Krzysztof Kotowski’s Trzech gości w łódce plus wampir (2022) (Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi, University of Warsaw, Poland)
13:40 [on-site] Meat Modernity and Interspecies Injustice: Industrial Animal Agriculture in Socialist Poland (1945–1989) (Gabriela Jarzębowska, University of Warsaw, Poland)
14:00 [on-site] Urban Riverhood in the Semi-Periphery: Prishtina as a Site of More-Than-Human Affirmative Memory (Olga Łojewska, German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, Germany)
14:20 [on-site] Dacia the Automobile: More-than-Human Archives and the Ecology of Ruin (Ana-Cristina Irian, Bucharest, Romania)
14:40 discussion
15:00 Seminar closure
19:00 Social dinner (facultative, self-paid, venue to be announced later)
CALL FOR PAPERS CLOSED
Call for Papers
More-than-humans in the semi-peripheries. On ways of seeing and being-seen-as other species
Semiperipheral status of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) creates path dependencies and renders knowledge produced in the region in an epistemologically handicapped position, further marginalizing the vulnerable voices, and especially those whose intersectionalities systematically drag them away from public vision or recognition. If humans of the non-dominant genders, races, ethnicities or classes are out of sight, then the non-human actors tend to be rendered invisible, or acutely misrepresented. Similar arguments and distinctions – nature vs culture, humanity vs animality – have been used to dominate others – both human and non-human (Mullin 1999) and can be said to have contributed to the climate crises we find ourselves in (De Castro and Danowski 2018). Other species’ relationships to humans, the ultimately dominant group is defi ned by neglect, coercion or exploitation. Also, their presence is often romanticized or aestheticized, depriving them of agency, let alone dignity.
Scholars argue for a transformative approach to urban studies that incorporates multispecies justice, which acknowledges the rights and needs of both human and non-human residents in the city (Wang 2024). The right to the city, traditionally focused on humanresidents, is also being reevaluated through a multispecies lens. Current research seeks to explore non-human placemaking in cities enabling the planning of multispecies-friendly urban policies (Van Patter 2022) and address the rights of non-human urban residents, advocating for their access to urban spaces (Singhe 2022).
Some multispecies encounters are undesirable, creating unintended, feral (Tsing 2015) effects of human activity – colonialism, segregation, hyper-inequalities. These agents are making their own agency known in a way that evokes disgust or detest. Another group of non-humans is anthropomorphised and enclosed in apartments whereas others appear only as already processed meat or fur. Proposing that human and more-than-human interests are not at odds, but can benefit from being considered together, through the lens of multispecies justice (Chao et al. 2022), we look for proposals on city dwelling, planning and inhabiting which serve multispecies interests analysis of multispecies marginalisations.
This seminar delves into multilayered epistemological injustice against non-human actors of the social life in the CEE. We seek contributions accounting for the years of neglect of non-human actors who have been under attack in the region, but also those under threat due to the populist backlash throughout the region.
Submission and timeline
-Abstracts for the seminar are due on July 21, 2025;
-Submit 300-500 word abstract to michal.wanke@uni.opole.pl together with keywords and authors’ short bio;
-Notification of acceptance by July 28, 2025;
-Selected papers (ca 8000 words) are due on Nov 3, 2025;
-Expected publication in the series Interdisciplinary Studies on Spatial Dynamics and Marginalization in Central and Eastern Europe by Lexington Books is in late 2026;
There is no participation fee. Organizers do not provide catering or other services.
References
Chao, S., Bolender, K., Kirksey, E. (eds. 2022): The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478023524
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de and Danowski, Déborah. “6. HUMANS AND TERRANS IN THE GAIA WAR”. A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 172-204. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478004318-008
Mullin, H. (1999): Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 201-224. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.201
Shingne, M. C. (2020). The more-than-human right to the city: A multispecies reevaluation. Journal of Urban Affairs, 44(2), 137–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2020.1734014
Tsing, A. L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. 2015. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 331.
Van Patter, L. E. (2022). Toward a More-Than-Human Everyday Urbanism: Rhythms and Sensoria in the Multispecies City. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(4), 913–932. https://doi-org.libproxy.unibz.it/10.1080/24694452.2022.2134838
Wang, J. (2024): Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15189.001.0001