Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters reclaims the notion of alien encounters together with strange, but queerly loved companions, Vulgar slugs, diatoms (micro-algae), and familiars (spiritguides of witches), the book’s three human co-authors ask: what would it take to establish more-than-human, bio- and geo-egalitarian co-existence on a planet in trouble?  

This playfully crafted mixed-genre book is informed by feminist posthumanisms, and co-created with a spectral community of more-than-humans, who are respectfully summoned to contribute with their perspectives. In focus of the entangled artistic-philosophical-poetic investigations are questions of ethics, aesthetics and methodologies to co-exist response-ably rather than based on modern human beliefs in exceptionalism, and entitlement to sovereignty, control and conquest of more-than-human worlds. 

Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, NGOs, politicians, students from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, artists, writers, activists and artivists, who are interested in entangled artistic-poetic-philosophical modes of understanding the world as well as in ecology, new feminist materialism, critical posthumanism, and questions about radically rethinking and reimagining human/more-than-human relations on Earth.

The article is based on a lecture performance titled “Archipelagic Rehearsals – Abstract as Score” that was presented at the RGS-IBG conference, held jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, in Cardiff in 2018. The presentation was an exploration of a possibility to practice, in Édouard Glissant’s terms, “archipelagic thinking” by presenting a lecture with interaction from the audience, as a lecture performance. That “archipelagic experiment” is continued in the article through an attempt to format the performance as an academic text. In turn, the text is an attempt to create new imaginaries and storytelling with Spanish slugs through participatory artistic experimental practice. The writing as artistic practice offers the potential for becoming and as such it is unpredictable in its outcome. The article starts with the author’s framing of Glissant’s poetics and attempts a feminist and more-than-human approach to present the event – the performance of the lecture and the story of the slug in footnotes that were an integral part of the lecture.

In 2009, the Swedish artist Katja Aglert embarked on an artistic residency research trip to the Arctic. This became the starting point for her project 'Winter Event - antifreeze'. Five years on it has, using repetition and reiteration as its main artistic methods, turned into a complex multi-branched structure, of which this book forms a part and constitutes the finale. The project proposes a different narrative of the Arctic, dissects clichés of romanticism and mysticism related to this context, and deconstructs heroism and so-called discoveries from a norm-critical perspective. The book is the result of a collaboration between Aglert and the curator Stefanie Hessler and includes documentary images by the artist, reference material from a variety of other resources, an extensive introductory essay by Hessler, as well as specially commissioned texts by renowned theorists Lisa Bloom and Sabeth Buchmann.