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Focusing on narratives in both online and print media, this study examines what constitutes happiness through narratives related to urban gardens and discusses the characteristics of depictions concerning the healing power of plants and nature and the associated sense of well-being. 　　

Paper long abstract

In Germany, cultural practices that experienced a surge in popularity during the pandemic, such as urban gardening, continue to be subjects of interest. Germany is leveraging its cultural heritage as a strategic tool to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: Sustainable cities and communities. The present study explores how people in Germany connect through cultural heritage and how they achieve subjective well-being by sharing 'things, experiences, and spaces'. The concept of 'happiness' and 'contentment' as expressed through cultural heritage is referred to as 'happiness narratives'. This study aims to collect and analyse data from both urban and rural areas. I believe that horticultural practices, such as allotment gardening and urban gardening, should be considered part of the cultural heritage. This perspective is the primary focus of this study.

My lecture will focus on narratives in both online and printed texts, with particular emphasis on the discourse of protagonists regarding urban gardening and allotment gardens, as well as how they portray happiness within these environments. This study also compares these with traditional fairy tales such as those in the Brothers Grimm's Children's and Household Tales. This study aims to identify and examine descriptions of the healing power of plants and nature, as well as the associated sense of well-being, to clarify their characteristics.

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Analyzing a North Croatian fairy tale "Stekljena gora" (Glass Mountain) and its variants, the paper explores narrative structures symbolically tied to nature. This foundation is both universal and more closely connected to the locality where it was recorded.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a Kajkavian variant of an oral fairy tale structured around the central motif of the glass mountain, recorded in the early 1980s in northern Croatia. The motif, attested in diverse dialectal and lexical forms, is also present in numerous related versions within the broader corpus of South Slavic oral literature. In addition, the narrative features anthropomorphic (the old woman and the fairy) and anthropomorphized (the four winds, the horse) appearances, all of which are conceptually tied to the natural world.

The mystery of the relationship between external and internal nature is conceptualized, represented, and mediated through human consciousness-transcending the ethical “sum of all appearances” (Kant), the idealistic “Spirit estranged from itself” (Hegel), the cosmocentric “pure will” (Schopenhauer), the dialectical “nature’s universal metabolism” (Engels), the anthroposophical “source of wonder” (Steiner), the biocentric “awe of life” (Jahr, Schweitzer), the existentialist “split between subject and object” (Jaspers), the anthropocentric view of “nature as a resource” (Catton), the antianthropocentric notion of “dark ecology” (Morton) etc. Modern man, unlike his traditional counterpart, often loses direct interaction with nature and tends to compensate through reinterpreted neo-traditional practices.

Through the analysis of the reference version of the fairy tale, compared with its other variants, this paper – using ethnological, anthropological, symbolic, philological, and mythological theoretical discourse – explores the multilayered structure of the oral narrative, which draws its conceptual and symbolic foundation from nature. This foundation is both universal and more closely connected to the locality where it was recorded.

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This paper explores how bird calls shape urban storytelling, layering memory, emotion and place, and contributing to the evolving narratives of city life through sound and imagination.

Paper long abstract

Urban environments are often framed as spaces of human design and noise, yet they are alive with nonhuman voices that contribute to the city’s narrative fabric. Bird calls, piercing pavements and echoing between buildings, provide a sonic counterpoint to concrete and steel, offering moments of reflection, memory, and affective engagement.

This paper examines how urban birdsong functions as a narrative thread within city life, shaping the way people perceive and remember urban spaces. Through ethnographic observations, soundwalks, and folklore accounts, I explore how the songs of birds become woven into personal and collective stories, influencing emotional and imaginative experiences of the city. Bird calls mark time, punctuate daily routines, and anchor memories, creating a dynamic interplay between natural sound and human narrative.

By focusing on the audible presence of birds in urban storytelling, this study illuminates how nonhuman voices participate in folklore and memory-making, contributing to broader understandings of how urban nature mediates imagination, place, and emotion. It considers how soundscapes, like visual traces of nature, shape the evolving narrative of city life, adding depth and resonance to human experience in urban environments.

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I explore elemental worldings in Latvian folklore in the context of ecophenomenology and critical genealogy. In the article I demonstrate situated knowledges as part of the lived, experiential genealogies that co-constitute us today and consider their significance for reconnecting with the Earth.

Paper long abstract

In this article, I explore some of the elemental worldings in Latvian folklore, particularly the element of water and its connection with other principal elements in pre-Christian Latvian cosmologies. I am specifically interested in the elemental as an ecophenomenological vehicle for reconnection with the Earth—a reconnection that scholars of environmental humanities demonstrate as necessary in the current dire ecological conditions. The elemental, in contrast to such abstracted concepts as "nature" or "the environment", provides the means for "thinking with" past genealogies and mobilizing sensed knowing. Methodologically, I am, thus, interested in the genealogical and phenomenological exploration of folklore as situated knowledge that allows revisiting animist human-environment relations for developing future ethicalities.

In the first part of the article I explore the theoretical framework of situated knowledges and represent pre-Christian knowing in the context of process ontologies. In the second part of the article I then describe elemental knowing in Latvian folklore and explore it as a vehicle for the transformation of human-environment relationships. My argument is further strenghtened by uniting the approaches of embodied critical thinking and critical genealogy and demonstrating the present significance of past genealogies that constitute us.

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Paper short abstract

The paper analyses ecological tropes in 21st-century vampire narratives and Disney fairy tales from Disney Princess franchise. While both started as modern narratives of man’s conquest of the “nature”, they evolved to produce stories of Hero-Monsters and Eco-Warrior Princesses.

Paper long abstract

Modern, and specifically post-enlightenment Western civilisation, relied on the division: body—mind, nature—culture(civilisation), definitely valuing the latter over the first. The so called civilisation was assigned to the white middle-upper-class Western men, and the “nature” as wilderness was assigned — to a different degree and in different ways — to the non-white, the non-Western, the low-class, the women. This worldview found its embodiment in the emerging popular culture, including the seemingly diametrically different narratives: horror stories and fairy tales. They all represented a brave hero’s conquest and/or submission of the wild “nature” embodied by a Monster that usually “threatened” a woman.

This paper analyses vampire narratives and best-known modern fairy tales, i.e. Disney animated movies, specifically the Disney Princess franchise. While both started as modern narratives of conquest, they both evolved in line with the changes occurring in the Western (global) culture: feminist, decolonial, ecological movements. The paper specifically focuses on the 21st-century narratives that seem to embrace ecological stances and construct new types of protagonists: posthuman(ist) Hero-Monsters, eco-vampires, and eco-feminist Princesses. The analysis points out at the problematic white male ecology [Sandilands 2005] of Good Eco-Vampires, but also examines the eco-decolonial and posthumanist potentials of the narratives such as Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer: A Gothic Native Novel (2007) and Netflix Hemlock Grove series (2013-15), comparing them with Decolonial Eco-Warrior Disney Princesses in the John Musker and Roy Clements’ Moana (2016), and Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada’s Raya and the Last Dragon (2021).