The 2026 BioCriticism webinar series offers interdisciplinary approaches to “Health across Scales”. Guest speakers will discuss how scientists, writers, and artists imagine the networks and dynamics that shape health across scales, from the microbial to the planetary. Each session consists of two talks followed by discussion. Please join us for the next session with Jim Scown and Heather Houser:
“Poetics and Ethics of Health on a Warming Planet“
a BioCriticism webinar with Jim Scown and Heather Houser
13th of March 2026, 2.00-3.30 pm CET
Join zoom meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83696571693?pwd=AGeP1A6nUIOyJZlownGGfRcddKeuZ3.1
Meeting ID: 836 9657 1693
Passcode: 885197
Dr Jim Scown, “Healthy Soil Communities: ‘The politics and poetics of soil health’ from the 1930s to the present“
The cultivation of soil health is often linked to the pursuit of human health. Concerns over soil health today, for example, invoke soil as a ‘human-natural body’ in need of treatment and care, often following degradation that is understood to stem from the same chemical farming systems considered damaging to human health, biodiversity and the global climate. In this paper, I trace early concepts of soil health in 1930s Britain, ideas which drew heavily on far older soil knowledges from subsistence agricultures in India – and, in the writing of organic pioneers such as Jorian Jenks, became part of fascist, racist projections over the health of a white British nation. As global warming fuels soil desertification and climate migration today, there remains this potential association between the ecological regulation of the soil body and the political regulation of human bodies and populations. Examining soil health for its perceived analogies with human health, I trace these associations as they are employed in service to various other forms of health – national, racial, environmental, planetary. By drawing on historicist literature and science methods to read a range of scientific, medical, political and agricultural writing, I ask what versions of health and society ‘healthy soils’ may themselves inform and enable. This question is not only of historic interest, I argue, but of crucial importance when it comes to understanding the interplay between climate breakdown and eco-authoritarian politics as interest in soil health grows today.
Jim Scown is an honorary researcher at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the intersections between soils, literature and science and his first book, Soil, Science and the Victorian Novel: Dirty Realism, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury’s ‘Explorations in Literature and Science’ series. He has worked as Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Exeter and as Farming Co-lead at the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. In September 2026 he will begin a Wellcome early-career award, ‘Healthy Soil Communities: Understanding the Biosocial Relations of Health through Soils, Stomachs and Society’, based in the European Centre for Environment and Human Health at the University of Exeter.
Prof. Heather Houser, “The Numbers Game of Reproduction and Climate“
Human population is a numbers game, but it’s also about the most intimate aspects of life: sex, love, children, and family. These numbers cannot be neutral, and yet they fuel debates about fertility decisions amid climate crisis. This is as true for environmentalist worries about overpopulation as it is for fears about falling fertility rates. For this seminar, I consider the appeal and the inadequacy of data-based responses to what Jade Sasser calls “the kid question,” i.e., should I (or should one) have children in climate crisis? Asking this question raises others that expert discourses struggle with from within their frameworks of public health, economics, and philosophy: What percentage of a birth in a fertility rate counts? How much carbon dioxide counts and over how many generations? Whose injuries and pain count when climate change affects pregnancy and birth outcomes? We need the data on fertility and climate impacts to guide policy as well as personal decision-making. However, turning to numbers for irreconcilable issues leads to confusion and hypocrisy more often than it yields tidy answers. I make a case for embracing hypocrisy as I consider fiction and poetry (e.g., by Jesmyn Ward, Natalie Diaz, and Nathalie Khankan) that questions the rules of the numbers game.
Heather Houser researches and writes about the environment, science, and 21st-century U.S. culture. She is completing a book on reproduction and climate crisis titled Our Bodies, Our Climate, and her other books are Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data (2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014). Her work appears in numerous academic and public venues, including, recently, Critical Inquiry and Sierra Magazine. She cofounded the Planet Texas 2050 climate grand challenge at the University of Texas at Austin and worked on climate policy for the City of Austin from 2019 to 2025. After 14 years at UT Austin, she recently started a position as Full Professor of Literature at University of Antwerp. www.heatherhouser.com
BioCriticism is organised by Liliane Campos with the support of PRISMES EA4398 and the Institut Universitaire de France. For information and links, please contact liliane.campos@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr or check the BioCriticism website.
