J Ryan
Biographic Data
| ID | 11900 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Ryan |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Ryan |
| SIGNATURE | RYAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Edith Cowan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5102-4561 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1911 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sensing, Speaking, Remembering
In Northern Finland, including sparsely populated Finnish Lapland and the small city of Rovaniemi, the widespread clearing of old trees has degraded the boreal environment. Disrupting the diverse relationships between people and trees, climate change will continue to alter the country’s northernmost forests, as is widely known. In this urgent context, we propose that the collaborative project Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) has developed new…
Gifts from the Sentient Forest
Forests face myriad threats globally including in Northern Finland, a relatively remote region celebrated as Europe’s last wilderness. Alongside the increasing imperilment of forests, however, lies a growing body of research indicating how trees respond sensitively to environmental change. The term forest sentience signifies the ability of trees to feel, sense, experience, behave, react, express, and remember. The article presents an analysis of …
Art as intervention
Creative activists continue to inspire environmental resistance in Myanmar
Ecocriticism
Over the last two decades, the Anthropocene and its calamitous signatures of climate upheaval, species loss, and biocultural fragmentation has garnered dedicated attention from ecocritics, ecologists, and the public. As the culmination of a fifteen-year scientific process, however, in early 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences, or IUGS, rejected the Anthropocene as a unit of geological time in favour of a view of the Anthropocene …
The Fruit of Contradiction
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 communicate within their own bodies, between the same and different species, and between themselves an…
Towards an Indigenous Hydropoetics
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 present. Recognising rivers' capacity for agency, the idea is developed in relation to contemporary …
Literary Ethnobotany in Aboriginal Australia
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 multidimensional knowledge systems surrounding them—as embodied figures exerting material agencies in d…
Ecocriticism
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. Conclusion: Ecocriticism and Transformation.
Ecocriticism
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 six monographs, one edited book, and two journal issues. Ecocriticism publications in 2019 reflect a…
Environmental theater
Decentring the Human, Imagining the More-Than-Human (Poetry, Plants, and the New England Region of Australia)
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 the flora of the New England Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. The article focuses o…
Writing the Lives of Plants
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 relations
The pained and silent song of a branch
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" (1975), "Reading the Signs" (1982), and "The Pained and Silent Song of a Branch" (1982). Barokka's…
Ecocriticism
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, three edited book collections, three journal issues, and three stand-alone articles. The biospheric ur…
Ecocriticism
Journal Article 1Ecocriticism Get access John Charles Ryan John Charles Ryan Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 26, Issue 1, 2018, Pages 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mby001 Published: 27 June 2018
Abalone in Diasporic Chinese Culture
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, WA’s abalone fishing regulations have been overhauled frequently because of depleting local stocks. W…
Sacred Ecology of Plants
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, intelligence, and memory in the plant world, the vegetative soul takes on a new signilcance. Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and other Western commentators delineated between the ensoulment of plants, animals, and humans. They regard…
Biological Processes as Writerly
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" within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment in Genesis, a project aiming to demo…
Planting the Eco-Humanities? Climate Change, Poetic Narratives, and Botanical Lives
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 fundamental role in the carbon cycle of the biosphere and the disruption of botanical communities in th…
Where Fanny Balbuk Walked
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 sought to erase the city's wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the coloni…
Come. Glory in My Wonder's Will
In one of the last interviews with late Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, conducted between 16 October 16 2012, and 9 May 9 2013. Coleman discusses the motivations behind and sources of her one-hundred-poem American Sonnets sequence, which was published as part of three discrete volumes of poetry ( American Sonnets [1994], Bathwater Wine [1998], and Mercurochrome [2001]). She focuses in particular on the social and professional discrimination she e…
Plant-Art
Whether as paintings, sketches, textiles, or craftwork, plants have been integral to Western art through the ages. Florilegia, herbals, botanical illustrations, pressings, and other renderings of whole plants and, very often, of their flowers comprise part of the tradition of plants in art. Closely related to these visual forms are tactile and sensory practices engaging plant materialities and involving, for example, natural dyes from roots, resi…
Natural Heritage Conservation and Eco-Digital Poiesis
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 ‘botanical heritage’. This article examines the project's conceptual foundations in terms of nature/cu…
‘The Name Blossomed’
Habitat poetry represents the lives of plants, animals and the features of the natural world within their ecological networks. Commonly detailing physical contact with nature, habitat poetry narrates moments in which the senses engage with ecological processes. Additionally, habitat awareness in poetry tends to convey a sense of grappling with scientific discourses. These characterisations of habitat poetry will be articulated in the context of t…
Digital Arts
This text presents an introduction to new media art through key debates and theories. This book 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 of the book progressively present a study of the impact of the digital on art, as well as the exhibition…
Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS)
Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intel…
Writing the Lives of Plants
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 relations
Marital Status, General-life Satisfaction and the Welfare State
This study examines the relationship between general-life satisfaction and marital status cross-nationally. A common theme in the marriage and family literature is that marriage, especially a happy and stable marriage, is necessary for psychological and social integration in industrialized countries (see, for example, Ogburn, 1938; Burgess and Locke, 1945; Parsons, 1955; Winch, 1970; Hareven, 1977; Laslett, 1978; Doherty and Campbell, 1988; Maste…
Toward a Phen(omen)ology of the Seasons
The emergence of the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP)
Humanity’s Bioregional Places
Originally theorized as a radical environmental movement, bioregionalism connects humanity to the specificities of a place. To establish greater cohesion between environments and cultures, bioregionalism endeavors to integrate societal activities and the nuances of natural spaces known as bioregions. The criticism of bioregionalism, however, pertains to the shortcomings of circumscribing culture within ecological boundaries. In light of its criti…
Plants That Perform For You'? From Aesthetics to Floraesthesis in the Southwest of Western Australia
Biological Processes as Writerly
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" within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment in Genesis, a project aiming to demo…
Where Fanny Balbuk Walked
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 sought to erase the city's wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the coloni…
Rennell's Journal, 1764-1767
Conference news
Marital Status, General-life Satisfaction and the Welfare State
This study examines the relationship between general-life satisfaction and marital status cross-nationally. A common theme in the marriage and family literature is that marriage, especially a happy and stable marriage, is necessary for psychological and social integration in industrialized countries (see, for example, Ogburn, 1938; Burgess and Locke, 1945; Parsons, 1955; Winch, 1970; Hareven, 1977; Laslett, 1978; Doherty and Campbell, 1988; Maste…
Plants That Perform For You'? From Aesthetics to Floraesthesis in the Southwest of Western Australia
Towards a corporeal aesthetics of plants
This paper argues for the application of ethnographic practice, specifically participant observation and semi-structured interviewing, in the development of a corporeal aesthetics of flora. The study is characterized as an ethnography of botanists and, building upon emerging work in cultural ecology and human–plant geographies, is situated within the proposed context of cultural botany. During the Southwest Australian spring wildflower season bet…
Cultural Botany
Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunctio…
Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS)
Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intel…
Images of the Pacific Rim
Erika Esau, Sydney, Power Publications, 2010, 368 pp., AUD$59.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780909952396 Images of the Pacific Rim contributes to an emerging consciousness of the historic cultural intersec
Humanity’s Bioregional Places
Originally theorized as a radical environmental movement, bioregionalism connects humanity to the specificities of a place. To establish greater cohesion between environments and cultures, bioregionalism endeavors to integrate societal activities and the nuances of natural spaces known as bioregions. The criticism of bioregionalism, however, pertains to the shortcomings of circumscribing culture within ecological boundaries. In light of its criti…
‘The Name Blossomed’
Habitat poetry represents the lives of plants, animals and the features of the natural world within their ecological networks. Commonly detailing physical contact with nature, habitat poetry narrates moments in which the senses engage with ecological processes. Additionally, habitat awareness in poetry tends to convey a sense of grappling with scientific discourses. These characterisations of habitat poetry will be articulated in the context of t…
Toward a Phen(omen)ology of the Seasons
The emergence of the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP)
Natural Heritage Conservation and Eco-Digital Poiesis
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 ‘botanical heritage’. This article examines the project's conceptual foundations in terms of nature/cu…
Come. Glory in My Wonder's Will
In one of the last interviews with late Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, conducted between 16 October 16 2012, and 9 May 9 2013. Coleman discusses the motivations behind and sources of her one-hundred-poem American Sonnets sequence, which was published as part of three discrete volumes of poetry ( American Sonnets [1994], Bathwater Wine [1998], and Mercurochrome [2001]). She focuses in particular on the social and professional discrimination she e…
Plant-Art
Whether as paintings, sketches, textiles, or craftwork, plants have been integral to Western art through the ages. Florilegia, herbals, botanical illustrations, pressings, and other renderings of whole plants and, very often, of their flowers comprise part of the tradition of plants in art. Closely related to these visual forms are tactile and sensory practices engaging plant materialities and involving, for example, natural dyes from roots, resi…
Planting the Eco-Humanities? Climate Change, Poetic Narratives, and Botanical Lives
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 fundamental role in the carbon cycle of the biosphere and the disruption of botanical communities in th…
Where Fanny Balbuk Walked
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 sought to erase the city's wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the coloni…
Sacred Ecology of Plants
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, intelligence, and memory in the plant world, the vegetative soul takes on a new signilcance. Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and other Western commentators delineated between the ensoulment of plants, animals, and humans. They regard…
Biological Processes as Writerly
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" within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment in Genesis, a project aiming to demo…
Ecocriticism
Journal Article 1Ecocriticism Get access John Charles Ryan John Charles Ryan Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 26, Issue 1, 2018, Pages 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mby001 Published: 27 June 2018
Abalone in Diasporic Chinese Culture
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, WA’s abalone fishing regulations have been overhauled frequently because of depleting local stocks. W…
Ecocriticism
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, three edited book collections, three journal issues, and three stand-alone articles. The biospheric ur…
Decentring the Human, Imagining the More-Than-Human (Poetry, Plants, and the New England Region of Australia)
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 the flora of the New England Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. The article focuses o…
Writing the Lives of Plants
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 relations
The pained and silent song of a branch
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" (1975), "Reading the Signs" (1982), and "The Pained and Silent Song of a Branch" (1982). Barokka's…
Ecocriticism
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 six monographs, one edited book, and two journal issues. Ecocriticism publications in 2019 reflect a…
Sociology (20 works) · Art (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Ecology (12 works) · Environmental ethics (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works) · Literature (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Biology (10 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (10 works)