‘Bears Meddling in Human Politics’: Ecologising Democracy in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Ines Kirschner

From the Old Brewery

Join Dr Suk-Jun Kim, Isabella Engberg, and Ines for a chat about her current research on conference-going polar bears and climate change in German-Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. If the Anthropocene – our proposed geological epoch, where human activity has become a dominant influence on the planet – ruptures modern notions of agency, intentionality, and rational decision-making, is Man really the only political animal? And what are the potential value and limitations of anthropomorphism for imagining a more-than-human politics?

Ines holds a PGDE in English and History from Karl-Franzens-University Graz, Austria (2015), as well as an MLitt in English Literary Studies from the University of Aberdeen (2018). She has worked as a modern foreign language assistant and teacher in Austria, Spain, and the UK. Ines started her PhD in 2019 and is a recipient of the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture’s New Kings studentship. Her PhD project explores nature and wildlife conservation in twenty-first-century fiction, with a particular focus on multispecies projects of world-making. In 2020, she organised an event on storytelling and urban ecology for children and families as part of, and co-funded by, Explorathon and Being Human, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. She has been a teaching assistant on EL1009 Acts of Reading and attended COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference, as part of the University of Aberdeen’s delegation.