We Joined the Orca Uprising: VAS at 11th Biennial EASLCE Conference 2026

Several members of VAS made their way to Utrecht from 14–17 April for the 11th Biennial EASLCE Conference – an event whose title, Join the Orca Uprising! – Nonhuman Resistance and Multispecies (In)Justice, managed to be at once tongue-in-cheek and quietly radical. Beneath the splashy aquatic imagery, the gathering offered a genuinely serious and intellectually rich exploration of how humans relate to, think about, and live alongside other species. The result was a program full of talks that were thoughtful, bold, and occasionally disarmingly moving. VAS was very much part of the uprising, contributing two full panels and an individual talk.

On Wednesday 15 April, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg presented her paper, “Animal Agency, Autonomy, and Resistance in Picture Books.” Taking what might seem like the gentlest of cultural artifacts – children’s picture books – she revealed them to be fertile ground for ethical reflection. Through a care- and justice-based lens, these stories became sites where questions of agency, autonomy, and even resistance are quietly but powerfully staged.

Thursday 16 April saw Zipporah Weisberg and Carlo Salzani join a panel organized by Serrin Routledge-Prior: “Simone Weil and ‘Soft’ Resistance: Rootedness, Attention, and Sacredness.” Drawing on the work of Simone Weil, the panel explored how seemingly “soft” concepts might, in fact, offer powerful tools for rethinking human–animal relations. Carlo’s talk, “The Ethics and Politics of Attention: Justice, Love, and Poetry as Resistance,” traced how Weil’s notion of attention can reshape our engagement with poetic representations of nonhuman animals. Zipporah’s contribution, “Animal Sanctuaries: Sacred Sites of Resistance,” pushed Weil’s idea of sacredness beyond its human boundaries, arguing that animal sanctuaries can be understood as spaces where the sacredness of all animals is both recognized and enacted.

On Friday 17 April, Claudia Hirtenfelder, Carlo Salzani, and Konstantin Deininger presented their panel, “Urban Infrastructures of Hope.” Claudia opened with “Animals as Urban Problems and Solutions,” examining how urban policies frame animals in ways that both enable and constrain their lives as subjects. Carlo followed with “Legal Infrastructures and Ideological Dismantling: The Case of Street Dogs in Southern Italy, Turkey, and India,” turning to the “soft infrastructure” of law and its potential to reshape human–animal coexistence. Konstantin closed the panel with “No Future? Hope and Practical Utopias for Urban Animals,” offering a grounded yet hopeful perspective, using the example of the Austrian Bat Station in Vienna as a site where material and social infrastructures come together to support a multispecies future.

As far as uprisings go, the Utrecht conference was undoubtedly (and thankfully) peaceful, but it offered plenty of opportunities for intellectual resistance, rebellion, and agitation. Perhaps that’s not such a bad way to change the world: a roundtable discussion, a lecture, and maybe a subtly radical illustrated book – one step at a time.

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As a side note, none of us are terribly good at remembering to take photos and posing politely for them! We hope to take poor photos with you and to learn about your work at upcoming animal studies events.