Call for papers: Cute Ecologies symposium – 7 June 2024 (online)
A day of lightning talks and presentations on critical research and creative practice, organised by AWW-STRUCK – online on 7 June 2024. With roundtable guests Miranda Lowe CBE, Natural History Museum Principal Curator; Hugh Warwick, ecologist and hedgehog advocate; Claire Catterall, Senior Curator of the CUTE exhibition at Somerset House. Please see the Call for Papers and submit abstracts to awwstruck.infogmail.com by Friday 19 April 2024.
Encountering cute forms of nature, from bunnies and hedgehogs to monkeys and deer, is an everyday experience for most of us. They appear on tea towels, cakes and images gone viral on social media. The cute nonhuman might even be our companion animal. The apparently simple, benign nature of cuteness means it goes unexamined, especially in the context of the environmental crisis where the aesthetic is likely to appear irrelevant, if not irreverent. This symposium challenges such thinking by asking: Can cuteness prompt care-giving behaviour for environments? What power dynamics exist in the ‘cutification’ of flora and fauna? What fate for ‘uncute’ species?