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This paper explores how children (aged 5–11) use multimodal econarratives to express their views on climate change. Findings show strong awareness of ecological harm, emotional responses such as eco-anxiety, and a tendency to depict humans as heroes or bystanders, rather than as causes of damage.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how children negotiate their (current and future) identities and relationships with nature through the production of econarratives. The paper reports on findings from a study investigating how a sample of 40 children aged 5-11 perceive and represent environmental issues through multi-modal econarratives that they have produced in response to a visual stimulus. Using a multimodal discourse analysis framework, the research explores the discursive and semiotic strategies children employ to express their knowledge, attitudes, and emotions about climate change and ecological harm. Application of the framework also helps to reveal how the children use narrative production to understand their own human identities in relation to more-than-human identities in nature. Findings reveal that children demonstrate a strong awareness of environmental degradation, particularly its impact on animals, often portraying humans as either passive observers or heroic saviours, but rarely as contributors to environmental harm. The visual narrative elements frequently depict environmental damage as agentless events, suggesting a gap in children’s understanding of the causal role of human activity. The study highlights the emotional weight of children’s responses, with sadness and eco-anxiety emerging as dominant themes. These insights underscore the importance of integrating multimodal approaches in climate education and suggest that future curricula should more explicitly address human agency and empower children with actionable knowledge to confront environmental challenges. The study makes a methodological contribution to ecolinguistics in exploring the ways in which multimodal discourse analysis can be used to further understandings about how ecological discourses are constructed in narrative texts.

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This paper explores contemporary Italian cinema as econarrative. Films like The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro, and Small Body use landscapes and mythologies to address ecological crisis and eco-anxiety, showing ecology as both narrative form and mode of identity and belonging.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary Italian cinema has increasingly responded to the ecological crisis by creating narratives that interweave environment, memory, and identity. Films such as Le meraviglie (The Wonders, Alice Rohrwacher, 2014), Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, Rohrwacher, 2018), and Piccolo corpo (Small Body, Laura Samani, 2021) place their stories in fragile rural ecologies and peripheral communities, where landscapes are not passive settings but active agents in shaping belonging. These works function as econarratives that illuminate the material, psychological, and philosophical dimensions of ecological collapse.

Drawing on concepts from climate psychology, they reflect emotions such as eco-anxiety (Clayton, 2020), solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005), and ecological grief (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). By dramatizing disrupted agrarian traditions, broken seasonal cycles, and endangered livelihoods, these films embody collective feelings of loss, displacement, and mourning while simultaneously imagining resilience and coexistence. They also activate deeper symbolic registers: archetypal imagery and folk mythologies—cycles of fertility, death, and renewal—that Jungian psychology interprets as expressions of the collective unconscious. In this way, ecological crisis emerges as both planetary wound and psychic rupture.

Philosophically, these cinematic econarratives resonate with phenomenological approaches (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), where identity and dwelling are inseparable from environment, and with eco-psychology (Roszak, 1992), which views ecological devastation as fragmentation of the self. Italian films thus become imaginative laboratories in which ecology is translated into narrative form and psychic landscape, enabling the (re)negotiation of identity. By foregrounding entangled eco-cultural belonging, they destabilize dichotomies such as nature/culture and human/n

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Drawing on Pope Francis’ discourse, this presentation examines the relationship between religion and ecological identity within econarrative construction. It highlights how these interventions arguably contributed to a shift toward more ecologically conscious religious identities and narratives.

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Religion is arguably one of the dimensions of identity that shapes not only individual but also collective behaviours, including our relationship with the more-than-human world. It can offer relief and hope, fostering action and shared values that inspire and influence change on a global scale. Focusing on religion and the recent efforts around its “greening” (Koehrsen et al. 2022), this presentation examines the relationship between religion and ecological identity─ understood here as a socially and discursively constructed practice of extending our sense of self when we interact with nature (Lei 2021) ─ within econarrative construction. Narratives provide context and build strong frameworks for identity (Kohlhaas & McLaughlin 2019); therefore, this nexus is crucial to consider in light of current ecological and social crises.

The presentation draws on research in this field and offers examples from the often- challenged Christian tradition (Sachdeva 2016). Particular attention is given to the late Pope Francis’ articulation of pastoral themes that foster ecological identity, such as integral ecology and care for creation, in his public speeches and encyclicals.

Finally, the presentation considers the wider impact of these papal interventions on both religious and secular groups, highlighting how they have inspired ecological action and arguably contributed to a shift toward more ecologically conscious religious identities and narratives. This work contributes to ongoing conversations about the role of language and narrative in framing and informing religious discourse, and how such discourse, in turn, supports broader discursive and real-world practices that incorporate the more-than-human.

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We interrogate the dominant onto-epistemologies shaping linguistics, showing how they reproduce colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric logics they seek to resist. We propose a knowledge system model for language informed by an econarrative of identity based on our positionalities as researchers.

Paper long abstract

We interrogate the dominant onto-epistemologies that inform sociolinguistics, foregrounding how disciplinary self-definitions risk reproducing the very colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric logics they claim to resist. Our proposal underscores a broader disciplinary tension (when the solution becomes the problem), informed by an econarrative of identity based on our positionalities as reserachers. Sociolinguistics and applied linguistics grew out of different strands: constructivist traditions tied to social justice, and structuralist traditions rooted in the comparative, functional, and typological insights. Yet much sociolinguistic scholarship misrepresents structuralism as reductive, reinforcing a binary between human-centred constructivism and supposedly dehumanising structuralist approaches. This strawman framing obscures how structuralist and functionalist traditions have long engaged with complexity, interconnection, and multi-level systems. We argue that constructivist sociolinguistics, despite its emancipatory ambitions, remains entangled in colonial, capitalist, extractivist, hegemonic, and anthropocentric frameworks. This risks limiting its capacity to contribute to decolonial and more-than-human perspectives.

As an alternative, we turn to ecolinguistics, which foregrounds the interconnectedness of life and the stories we tell about it. By re-situating humans within planetary and cosmic systems, we open sociolinguistics to models such as dynamic systems theory, which enable us to account for societal-level trends without reducing individuals to flattened datapoints. Quantitative methods, far from being inherently reductionist, can be repurposed with care and ethical intentionality, much like ecological models of variability in nature. Ultimately, we propose that embracing ecolinguistic and more-than-human perspectives allows sociolinguistics to move beyond dichotomies, dismantle extractive narratives, and foster econarratives that support just, interconnected identities as citizens of Earth.

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This paper addresses the notion that British people are particularly close to the nonhuman animals they live with. Using individual perspectives from Aberdeenshire and its Polish immigrant population, I reflect on my own English culture to evaluate the validity of the "animal lover" narrative.

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This paper is based on a Steve Baker observation that the UK is often considered a "nation of animal lovers". More specifically, I am analysing how this applies to nonhuman animals that share a household with humans, particularly pets (as the research area is largely rural, livestock and visiting wildlife sometimes fit this category too), as perhaps the most likely scenario in which humans could be said to "love" nonhuman animals and the closest that many people consistently get to the natural world.

As I am aware that I fit the "animal lover" description, this is a partially autoethnographic paper. I also use two outside lenses; one that comprises UK nationals from a separate region to mine, and one representing a non-UK group unaffected by the stereotype. My work draws on my experience within Aberdeenshire, an area defined by its multiculturalism, and with its sizeable and dedicated Polish immigrant community. Using one-on-one interviews, I compare my English perspective with those from various North East Scots and Polish nationals, in order to evaluate the accuracy of Baker's assertion through its pertinence to culturally distinct places, as well as the opinions of impartial individual observers.

In addition to Baker's statement, and his theories of constructed identity, my fieldwork questions are inspired by Samantha Hurn's multi-species ethnography, Anna Barcz' critique of zoonarrative realism in modern literature, and Adrian Franklin's historical notes on changing attitudes towards nonhuman animals.

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This paper explores Serbian bird narratives, from folkloric admiration to media absence and illegal hunting. It traces how shifting discourses frame birds as either symbolic agents or expendable resources, exposing Serbia’s ecocultural identity ruptures.

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Birds hold a prominent place in Serbian folklore, appearing as sacred messengers and carriers of moral knowledge. Cultural figures like the cuckoo, stork, and sparrow reflect a longstanding intimacy between human identity and avian life. These narratives, passed down through proverbs, epic poetry, and children’s stories, have helped shape a national worldview rooted in coexistence and codependence.

The reverence extends beyond oral tradition into national symbolism: the two-headed eagle, emblematic of sovereignty and vigilance, adorns Serbian flags and coats of arms. Yet today, Serbia hosts only three nesting pairs of the eastern imperial eagle (Aquila heliaca), one of the most endangered birds in the region.

In contemporary Serbian media, birds are largely absent—except when portrayed as victims of illegal hunting or reduced to biodiversity statistics. These portrayals are shifting from relational storytelling to transactional reporting, where birds are framed almost exclusively through discourses of crime and decline. With an estimated 200,000 birds illegally killed each year, including protected species, Serbia’s avian crisis reflects a concerning disconnect between cultural heritage and environmental responsibility.

This paper examines how folkloric, literary, and media narratives position birds as either symbolic agents or expendable resources. Through ecological discourse analysis and two purpose-built corpora, it explores how storytelling mediates ecocultural identity and our evolving relationship with other living beings.

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Through collaborative autoethnography with birds as colleagues, we explore the relationship between naming and ecocultural identity. Invented names, grounded in language, memory, and culture, reveal how self and more-than-human worlds are co-constituted in moments of attentive encounter.

Paper long abstract

Each assignation of a name to members of the more-than-human world carries cultural, psychological, and emotional perceptions shaped by our ecolinguistic relationships with the living world. How, then, can we explore the cognitive narratives that inform how we name nature?

This collaborative, auto-ethnographic study examines how naming encounters with birds generate econarratives of identity: stories in which self, place, and the more-than-human world are co-constituted. As three scholars of folklore (Ireland), heritage (Australia), and sociolinguistics (England), we independently visit our local areas, pausing whenever a bird appears to ask: What name might we give this being? Which language comes to mind? What physical traits, behaviours, or fleeting moods guide the act of naming?

By treating naming as a narrative practice, we reveal how ecological attention becomes a means of self-inscription. Each moniker carries memories of personal history, linguistic repertoire, and the layered ecocultural contexts of our regions. The emerging econarratives—whether a Gaelic-inspired phrase, an Emilian coinage, or a Greek-Anglicised compound—show how identities are shaped through multispecies relations rather than solely through human communities.

Methodologically, we draw on sensory ethnography, folklore, and language-as-heritage to capture both the immediacy of encounter and the reflective stories that follow. Our comparative analysis highlights how ecologies and linguistic heritages generate distinct modes of belonging.

Ultimately, these bird-naming encounters show that identity can be narrated through ecological intimacy. Econarratives emerge as practices of reciprocity and care, revealing that to name is to locate oneself within a living, more-than-human world while acknowledging the limits of human language.

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This paper interprets Madeline Katt Theriault’s Moose to Moccasins through eco-mnemonics, showing how land, species, and material culture anchor memory, positioning Indigenous autobiography as an ecological archive central to environmental humanities and climate ethics.

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This article theorises Madeline Katt Theriault’s Moose to Moccasins: The Story of Ka Kita Wa Pa No Kwe as an Indigenous econarrative that exemplifies eco-mnemonics—a mode of life-writing in which memory is distributed across plants, animals, materials, and landscapes. Theriault encodes ecological relations as mnemonic scaffolds, showing how rivers, moose, birch, moccasins, foodways, and photographs function as repositories of survival knowledge. Remembering emerges as a relational practice enacted with more-than-human kin, positioning autobiography as an ecological archive of belonging.

Methodologically, the study combines close reading with ecolinguistics, Indigenous research paradigms, and climate humanities. Stibbe’s (2021) “stories we live by” framework identifies life-affirming discursive patterns, Wilson’s (2008) relational accountability and Ermine’s (2007) ethical space orient interpretation within Indigenous epistemologies, and Salmón’s (2000) kincentric ecology grounds memory in interspecies kinship.

The analysis demonstrates how rivers operate as route-mnemonics, moose and birch as species-cues, moccasins as material archives, foodways as mnemonic calendars, and photographs as multimodal anchors of ecological knowledge. Together, these eco-mnemonic practices challenge Eurocentric models of solitary, linear selfhood and extend ecolinguistics into Indigenous life-writing.

By advancing eco-mnemonics as a conceptual vocabulary, the article positions Indigenous autobiography as a climate text that encodes resilience, ecological ethics, and relational survival, affirming its central role in environmental humanities.

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This paper explores the narrative that “bread is more digestible in Europe than in the US” as an econarrative that reveals how food chauvinism reflects narratives about culture (baking and fermentation) the body (gut health and the microbiome) and the environment (wheat and glyphosate).

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the popular narrative that “bread is more digestible in Europe than in the US” as an econarrative that reveals how food chauvinism and food cosmopolitanism is entangled in narratives about culture (traditional baking and fermentation) the body (gut health and the microbiome) and the environment (wheat and glyphosate). Drawing on ecolinguistics and discourse analysis, I examine how this transatlantic comparison operates not merely as nutritional folklore, but as a cognitive narrative that encodes anxieties about industrial food systems, cultural belonging, and the porous boundary between body and environment.

Through corpus analysis and qualitative discourse analysis, I show how bread stories enact an embodied critique of toxic agricultural practices and hyper-processed food culture in the U.S. While framed as individual health experiences (e.g. “I can eat bread in France, but not at home”), these narratives perform a border-thinking that reconfigures environmental identity where the self becomes readable through digestion, and nature is not perceived as merely “out there” but inside the gut.

Using Arran Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework, I argue that this transnational bread story functions as an econarrative of permeability—positioning the body as a site where identity is co-authored by wheat, microbes, and cultural memory. This narrative perpetuates both inclusive and exclusionary logics, nodding toward multispecies entanglement while reinscribing Eurocentric ideals of purity, authenticity, and health.

Ultimately, I suggest that bread stories illuminate how environmental identity is negotiated through a semiotic amalgam of beliefs based on taste, discomfort, nostalgia, and imagined geographies.

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This paper analyzes Satoyama discourse, where humans are framed as landscape caretakers. While this identity fosters stewardship, it also reinforces anthropocentric limits. Ecolinguistic analysis suggests alternative identity framings that could be beneficial for all species of a landscape.

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This paper investigates the Japanese concept of Satoyama as a site for examining ecology and identity within ecolinguistics. Through a corpus analysis of academic and policy texts, it demonstrates how humans are discursively framed as “caretakers” of the landscape. Lexical choices such as management, conservation, services, traditional wisdom, and human well-being position people as responsible stewards who sustain ecosystems, legitimized through appeals to tradition and harmony.

While this frame supports narratives of stewardship, it also reveals limitations. The discourse of management reproduces a human–nature dualism, maintaining hierarchical relations where nature is treated as an object to be controlled. Emphasis on ecosystem services and human benefit further reinforces instrumental valuation, constructing nonhuman entities primarily in terms of utility. In addition, the portrayal of Satoyama as “traditional” risks reifying specific historical practices, potentially obscuring the evolving needs of ecosystems under climate change and biodiversity shifts.

Ecolinguistic analysis highlights how such framing, despite its cultural resonance, may inadvertently constrain more transformative forms of sustainability. To address this, the paper proposes alternative discursive strategies: shifting from management to co-adaptation, from services to mutual support, and from human-centered benefits to multi-species flourishing. These shifts broaden the conceptual space for ecological futures beyond the caretaker identity, offering more inclusive frameworks. The paper concludes that ecolinguistics is essential for interrogating not only what ecological discourse promotes but also what it restricts, thus advancing more pluralistic and resilient sustainability narratives.

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This paper takes a narrative ecology approach to ecopoetics, exploring the potential for ecopoetry to disrupt destructive stories and perform ecocultural identities that promote respect for other people and the Earth.

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The emerging framework of narrative ecology sees stories as playing an important role within the global ecosystems that life depends on, by shaping how humans conceptualise and act in the world. While some stories, particularly the dominant stories of industrial societies, encourage people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, other stories encourage attention, care and protection of the natural world. This paper takes a narrative ecology approach to ecopoetics, exploring the potential for ecopoetry to disrupt destructive stories and provide inspirational new stories to live by. The data is drawn from the Ecopoetikon, a project which showcases outstanding ecopoetry from the Global North and Global South. In total, twenty poems are analysed to reveal the linguistic and narratological devices used to perform ecocultural identities. The performance of an ecocultural identity is defined here as an assertion of membership of a cultural group combined with a description of how that cultural group as a whole sees itself as embedded in wider ecosystems. Of particular interest is the storytelling aspect of ecopoetry, how poets weave a world where they belong to particular cultures that are embedded in particular places, while encouraging the readers to forge their own ecocultural identities within their own cultures and places. The analysis will present a picture of ecopoetry as part of the global interaction of stories, challenging dominant stories which represent humans in isolation and conveying ecological identities where groups of humans are deeply embedded within wider ecosystems.

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This paper presents Haryanvi women’s folksongs as econarratives that encode ecological ethics within cultural memory. Through Ram–Lakshman–Sita metaphors, these oral traditions link local ecology with global ecological citizenship, envisioning Earth as shared belonging beyond human-centered frames.

Paper long abstract

The climate crisis and the ecological precarity of our times is alarming and the situation demands new modes of belonging that move beyond narrow national and anthropocentric frames. Econarratives—stories, songs, and oral traditions that embed ecological wisdom—offer an important lens for reimagining identities- local and global, rooted in ecological interconnectedness. This paper argues that econarratives function as cultural memory practices which foreground Earth citizenship rather than fragmented or exclusionary affiliations. The oral traditions, particularly women’s folksongs from Haryana, operate as practices of cultural memory that foreground an ethic of care towards the world. Through seasonal invocations, elemental metaphors, and devotional refrains, such songs do not merely aestheticize nature but position rivers, land, trees, and deities as co-actors in sustaining life. Focusing on the "Ram aur Lakshman" folksong from Haryana’s oral repertoire, the study explores how epic memory and vernacular ecology converge in women’s singing traditions. The song, recounts the thirst of Ram and Lakshman in exile, and its resolution through the nurturing presence of Sita and the replenishing cycles of water, illustrates how local narrative traditions encode ecological ethics and kinship structures that resist extractivist worldviews. By situating these econarratives in dialogue with global discourses of ecological citizenship, the paper demonstrates how local voices contribute to the negotiation of planetary belonging. The convergence of the local and the global in such songs underscores the capacity of folklore to both preserve cultural continuity and articulate cosmopolitan identities that affirm human embeddedness within a larger ecological continuum.

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This paper showcases multilingual stories from the Translationships project, a community-driven storytelling project in Seattle, US. Through translingual encounters, storytellers showcase epistemological difference and open pathways for ongoing and incomplete relationships with other beings.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on Indigenous storytelling traditions from the Americas (Cusicanqui, 2012; Kimmerer, 2020; Krawec, 2023; Simpson, 2017; Teuton & Shade, 2023) and critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2021), this paper focuses on how storytelling through translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2012) foregrounds epistemological diversity and stands as one of the ways in which resistance to colonial logics is practiced (Wang, 2024). Translingual storytelling can thus contribute to uplifting knowledges essential for environmental justice (Eppelsheimer, Küchler, & Melin, 2015); however, for centuries, the emphasis on monolingualism has prevented us from fully engaging with worldviews that define other beings as sentient and actively mediating our lives in complex relationships. Against this backdrop, the Translationships project, a community-driven multilingual storytelling project in Seattle, US, reminds us that nexus between embodied-materiality and language can be cultivated, generating an array of possible forms of meaning-making. In particular, stories will be explored to understand how translingual encounters of epistemological diversity foreground both interconnectedness and a world of incomplete translations (Nagar, 2019) among species, languages, communities, and places. These “translationships” support the conditions necessary for ongoingness in a damaged world (Haraway, 2016) and for multilingual communities to thrive despite language differences, opens up pathways for expansive relational communication.

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Indigenous Asháninka narratives of stingless bees reveal a deep respect for nature, linking oral tradition, medicinal honey, and hopes for the future with ecological stewardship. This research exemplifies storytelling as a pillar of human–more-than-human connection, identity, and resilience.

Paper long abstract

In the Peruvian Amazon, indigenous econarratives about Melipona stingless bees shape identity formation and human–more-than-human relationships among Asháninka communities. Our ethnographic fieldwork combined semi-structured interviews, participatory workshops, and collaborative capacity-building. Interviews explored relationships with bees, broader interactions with the natural environment, perceptions of ecological health and change, and hopes for the future.

Ashaninka community narratives portray stingless bees both as vital pollinators and sacred beings, woven into oral traditions that carry moral lessons and cultural values: Ritualized practices of seeking permission from the forest before harvesting— whether honey, wood, fish, or game— express profound respect for more-than-human life, framing human–nature relations as reciprocal rather than extractive. In the industrial capitalist world surrounding these narratives, environmental threats—including deforestation from illegal logging and narco-trafficking, pollution and invasive species—erode both ecosystems and cultural lifeways. Communities respond with adaptive strategies such as artificial hives, reforestation efforts, and natural pest management.

Our bee-location data generated through participatory mapping supports community livelihoods and informs national conservation planning. Engaging with government and NGO programs while maintaining sacred ties to bees and the forest, Asháninka beekeepers exemplify ways human and more-than-human worlds can be collaboratively intertwined.

By centering storytelling as an epistemic and relational practice, this paper highlights how econarratives function as tools of environmental education, cultural resilience, and interspecies care. In showing how Asháninka beekeepers connect past traditions with future possibilities, the research demonstrates how indigenous storytelling sustains both ecological stewardship as a foundational facet of cultural identity and the possibilities of becoming-with the more-than-human world.