John Charles Ryan

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Researcher at The University of Notre Dame Australia

This article delineates the idea of an Indigenous hydropoetics as an ancestral outlook on rivers grounded in Aboriginal cultural traditions of, and everyday interactions with, rivers. In particular, two features—embodiment and relationality—prove integral to conceptualising Indigenous hydropoetics in response to the hydrological precarities of the...

This article considers the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concerning the idea of "biocultural justice" as expressed in the work of Indigenous poets. Building on developments in the field of Indigenous ecopoetics, the article proposes the idea of 'Indigenous phytopoetics' to signify how texts by Indigenous writers narrativize human-plant...

Distinctive for its pungent and oftentimes rotten odor, the thorny fruit of durian (Durio spp.) is considered a delicacy throughout Asia. Despite its burgeoning global recognition, durian remains a fruit of contradiction—desirable to some yet repulsive to others. Although regarded commonly as immobile, mute, and insentient, plants such as durian co...

In this paper, we trace the emergence of what we term the digital plant humanities (DPH) as an evolution of burgeoning botanical interest among environmental and digital humanists. We argue that DPH coalesces the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the three research areas of plant humanities, environmental humanities, and digital humaniti...

Democratizing access to information is an enabler for our digital future. It can transform how knowledge is created, preserved, and shared, and strengthen the connection between academics and the communities they serve. Yet, open scholarship is influenced by history and politics. This article explores the foundations underlying open scholarship as...

Aboriginal rights activist, poet, educator, and environmentalist Oodgeroo Noonuccal became the first Indigenous Australian to publish a collection of poetry. Noonuccal's work can be understood as “literary ethnobotany” that gives prominence to the plant-based cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. Her work expresses the idea of plants—and the mul...

This review of ecocritical publications in 2022 is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction: Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene; 2. Eco-modernism: The Environmental Turn in Modernist Studies; 3. Climate Criticism: Narratives of Vulnerability; 4. Cryocriticism: Biographies of Ice; 5. More-than-Human Ecocriticism: The Heterogeneities of Nature; 6. Co...

Indigenous communities across the world and, more specifically, those of the Global South, are especially vulnerable to the effects of human-induced climate change. Standing at the crossroads of modernity and ancestral life, many communities face overwhelming losses of biocultural traditions along with their rightful homelands. Such loss has led to...

The idea of arboreal ecocriticism – or dendrocriticism – reflects the burgeoning interest in vegetal life within the Environmental Humanities. Concerned with arboreal texts of diverse kinds, dendrocriticism can be understood as a tree-focused mode of environmental, literary and cultural analysis. This article theorises dendrocriticism in relation t...

In the last decade, time-lapse videos of Sumatra’s titan arum have attracted considerable interest on YouTube and other media-sharing platforms. Blooming unpredictably, the endangered plant has the tallest inflorescence and one of the largest tubers of any species in the world. Also known as corpse flower, titan arum emits a noxious odor when bloss...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the fields of ecomedia, eco-communication, and enviropop studies in Southeast Asia with an emphasis on environmental cinema and journalism. Although scholarship in these areas has gained considerable recent momentum in Anglophone contexts, especially in relation to climate change and the Anthropocen...

https://plumwoodmountain.com/editorial-plant-poetics/

This article develops a comparative ecocritical approach to contemporary poetry concerning tree ecologies and forest conservation issues in Indonesia and Nicaragua. The poetry of Indonesian authors Taufik Ismail and Micky Hidayat evokes the richness as well as the vulnerability of tropical forest systems in Indonesia through diction disclosing vari...

Explorations of plant consciousness and human interactions with the natural world. From apples to ayahuasca, coffee to kurrajong, passionflower to peyote, plants are conscious beings. How they interact with each other, with humanity and with the world at large has long been studied by researchers, scientists and spiritual teachers and seekers. The...

Valued in utilitarian terms as channels for industry, agriculture, and urban development, rivers are among the most biodiverse yet degraded ecosystems globally. In addition to pragmatic conservation measures, the long‐term wellbeing of rivers requires new perspectives on human–water relations that call attention to—and nurture—the cultural, social,...

This article outlines current developments in the Environmental Humanities, abbreviated as EH, that underscore its diversity and timeliness as scholars from manifold disciplines turn progressively more to human-nature issues in the Anthropocene epoch. Emerging in the last decade in particular, the twelve specializations outlined in this article are...

This article outlines current developments in the Environmental Humanities, abbreviated as EH, that underscore its diversity and timeliness as scholars from manifold disciplines turn progressively more to human-nature issues in the Anthropocene epoch. Emerging in the last decade in particular, the twelve specializations outlined in this article are...

This paper scrutinizes the narrative technique of the eco cinema Sexy Killers by Dandhy Laksono in depicting the exploitation of nature in Indonesia and its impacts. Moreover, it also examines the relationship between human beings, including capitalists, low-class people, and the environment. The results show that Sexy Killer presented nature explo...

This review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2019 comprises seven sections: 1. Introduction: Ecocriticism, Climate Change, and COVID-19; 2. Anthropocene Ecocriticism; 3. Affective Ecocriticism; 4. Postcolonial Ecocriticism; 5. Zoocriticism and Phytocriticism; 6. Ecocriticism and Ecomedia Studies; 7. Conclusion. The review focuses on...

Ecopoetry—the practice of writing, reading, and critiquing poetic works that thematize the natural world and issues of sustainability—is hampered by its reliance on the terms “environment” and “nature” as undifferentiated catch-alls. As typically invoked, the terms tend to cover ecology, nonhuman life, oceans, rivers, rocks, animals, plants, forest...

Located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, the Northern Tablelands bioregion is a high plateau landscape unique for its geological, faunal, and floristic variety. Known widely as the New England of Australia, the Tablelands is “a strange, almost inverted landscape” of undulating plains aside steep chasms. This article analyzes poetry about...

COVID-19Pandemic Poemsis a timely initiative of Cape Comorin Publisher. Featuring poets from India, Indonesia, Australia, the United States, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and elsewhere, the anthology represents a significant literary response to the global contagion. The poems contained herein remind me that the stark separation between us, as...

This article aims to illuminate how Indonesian poets Taufiq Ismail and Khairani Barokka narrativize late-20th- and early-21st-century ecological precarity, including urgent issues of deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss, and Indigenous dispossession. Ismail set the ecocritical agenda in Indonesian poetry early on with “I Want to Write Poetry...

Among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, wetlands are also some of the most vulnerable. This edited book argues for the cultural value of wetlands. Through a focus on swamps and their conservation, this volume makes a unique contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities.Nine contributors situate the Austr...

Phytography refers to human writings about plant lives as well as plant writings about their own lives. The author conceptualizes phytography in terms of vegetal intelligence, behavior, corporeality, and temporality. Narrating the complex worlds of plants, phytography uses a variety of formal strategies to advocate new possibilities for human-flora...

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has triggered sudden, calamitous social changes across the world. In the pandemic context, transformations of the Southeast Asian media landscape have prompted broader questions concerning health policies, scientific communication, transnational movement, and the increasing uptake of social media by the region’s 655 mi...

This second issue of Southeast Asian Media Studies makes a distinctive contribution to Media Studies in the region through its emphasis on Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. While advancing knowledge of Southeast Asian media and Media Studies in these countries , the issue also highlights the increasing hybridity of the academic field through pr...

This review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2018 is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction: Anthropocene Timescales and Affects; 2. Affective Ecocriticism; 3. Material and Empirical Ecocriticisms; 4. Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics; 5. Ecocritical Convergences; 6. Conclusion. The review focuses on four single-authored monographs, th...

Anglophone environmental literary criticism has evolved within the bounds of regions and regionalism. Particularly during its early years, ecocriticism privileged local engagement with the natural world as a literary-activist mode. Recent approaches, however, emphasise translocal, transregional, and transnational frameworks. Moreover, intersections...

Gorge is an experimental, heteroglossic poetry sequence composed collaboratively with the plant life of the Northern Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. This article theorises Gorge as a work of ‘radical plant poetry’ and as a ‘gorge-text’ derived from – rather than merely representing – the chasmic environments of the Tablelands. Radi...

This is a long poem, a sequence of 24 sonnets on trees. Resumen Éste es un poema largo, una secuencia de 24 sonetos sobre árboles.

This review of publications in the field of ecocriticism in 2017 is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Anthropocene Ecocriticism; 3. Material Ecocriticism; 4. Cognitive and Affective Ecocriticism; 5. Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities; 6. Conclusion. The review focuses on three single-Authored monographs, three edited collect...

In October 2017, the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development of Western Australia (WA) promulgated a new regulation on recreational abalone harvesting. A notable change was that, from 2017 on, the annual fishing season in the West Coast Zone was reduced to four days, from every December on Saturdays only. During the last decade, W...

The ancient aesthetics of yijing has played a crucial role in traditional Chinese philosophy, literature and art since the eighth century CE. Defined variously by early and contemporary writers, yijing links an artist’s emotional domain to objects in the world. This article conceptualises yijing as an ecological aesthetics and distinguishes it from...

The eighteenth-century naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) argued that plants are animate, living beings and attributed them sensation, movement, and a certain degree of mental activity, emphasizing the continuity between humankind and plant existence. Two centuries later, the understanding of plants as active and communicative organ...

In his article “A Comparative Literary History of Resurrection Plants” John Charles Ryan assembles a comparative history of resurrection plants through textual analysis of early botanical commentaries, herbal references, prose, poetry, and other sources. Resurrection plants include a diverse range of botanical species, typically of arid regions, th...

This article examines the DNA-based biopoetry of Christian Bök in relation to its antecedents in the art-science experiments of Joe Davis, Pak Chung Wong, and Eduardo Kac. In particular, I develop an ecocritical analysis of the process of encipherment at the center of their works. Wong encoded lyrics from the song “It’s a Small World After All” wit...

With developments in the botanical sciences regarding signaling and behavior, the idea of plant sensitivity becomes an increasingly real possibility. In conjunction with empirically argued principles of percipience, inte lligence, and memory in the plant world, the vegetative soul takes on a new significance. Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and ot...

Through the poetry of Australian writer and activist John Kinsella (b. 1963), this article emphasizes the actual, embodied—rather than metaphorical—dimensions of the death of plants vis-à-vis the pressing international context of accelerating botanical diversity loss (Hopper) and the anthropogenic disruption of floristic communities globally (Pando...

This essay offers an initial attempt to think through how some of the ideas emerging from the new field of "critical plant studies" (CPS) can elucidate, deepen, or challenge aspects of climate change discourse. Across the globe, the deleterious impacts of climate change on plants are increasingly documented by scientists. However, despite their fun...

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers...

Based in oral traditions and song cycles, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is full of allusions to the environment. Not merely a physical backdrop for human activities, the ancient Aboriginal landscape is a nexus of ecological, spiritual, material, and more-than-human overlays—and one which is increasingly compromised by modern technologic...

The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, intelligence....

Abstract: It is widely known now that scholarly communication is in crisis, resting on an academic publishing model that is unsustainable. One response to this crisis has been the emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing, bringing scholarly literature out from behind a paywall and making it freely available to anyone online. Many research and acade...

This is Not a Seminar (TINAS) is a multidisciplinary forum established in 2012 at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia to support practice-led and practice-based Higher Degree by Research students. The Faculty of Education and Arts at ECU includes cohorts of postgraduate research students in, for example, performance, design, writing and visua...

A city of biodiversity, Perth in Western Australia faces significant environmental challenges. As species and habitats vanish, so too can their biocultural heritage. To address biological and cultural decline, FloraCultures is a digital conservation initiative that uses archival, ethnographic and design approaches to conserve and promote Perth's 'b...

This article develops a reciprocity ethics of the environment through a discussion of ethnobotanical medicines used in the treatment of cancer. The moral virtue of reciprocity, defined as the returning of good when good is received or anticipated, is central to the posthumanist rethinking of human relationships to the plant world. As herbal medicin...

Digital Arts presents an introduction to new media art through key debates and theories. The volume begins with the historical contexts of the digital arts, discusses contemporary forms, and concludes with current and future trends in distribution and archival processes. Considering the imperative of artists to adopt new technologies, the chapters...

This paper examines the nexus of ecology, sensory experience, and emotion through the concept of botanical memory. Building upon theoretical precedents in environmental memory, collective memory, sensory memory, bodily memory, and emotional geography, I describe botanical memory as an important cultural convergence between plants and people. An eth...

Catastrophe surrounds us perpetually: from the Queensland floods, Christchurch earthquake, global warming, and Global Financial Crisis to social conflicts, psychological breaking points, relationship failures, and crises of understanding. As a consequence of the pervasiveness of catastrophe, its representation saturates our everyday awareness. On a...

Written narratives enable humans to appreciate the natural world in aesthetic terms. Firstly, narratives can galvanize for the reader a sense for another person’s experience of nature through the aesthetic representation of that experience in language. Secondly, narratives can encode and document for the human appreciator as writer an experience of...

Since European settlement, the Western calendar has insufficiently accounted for the seasonal nuances and multiple temporalities of Australia. Beginning with Tim Entwistle’s recent proposal to revise the four-season Australian norm, this article traces the emergence of the Western calendar in Europe and its institutionalization ‘Down Under.’ With i...