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This paper tracks lead ammunition through wildlife, ecosystems, and humans via game meat. Using a Just One Health lens, it becomes clear that human and wildlife health are inextricably linked, entwining hunters, communities, raptors, and environments in complex material and ethical relationships.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how econarratives—stories about economies, ecologies, and ethics—can unsettle inherited binaries, open space for border-thinking, and cultivate relational identities that extend beyond the human. Drawing on my research into media coverage of lead poisoning in raptors and the One Health framework, I examine how dominant narratives about wildlife and public health often reinforce dualisms such as nature/culture, human/animal, and economy/ecology. For example, in analyzing regional news stories on the use of lead ammunition, I found that raptors are typically framed as passive victims of “natural” environmental hazards rather than as indicators of systemic human decisions about regulation, hunting practices, and ecological justice. This framing obscures the shared vulnerability of human and more-than-human communities to toxic exposure and positions wildlife welfare as marginal to public health.

By re-storying these same cases through a Just One Health lens—foregrounding multispecies interdependence, structural causes of harm, and reciprocal responsibility—econarratives can destabilize the binary between “human interest” and “animal interest.” They also invite border-thinking by connecting policy debates on ammunition to broader issues of environmental racism, rural livelihoods, and Indigenous sovereignty over hunting traditions. Such an approach demonstrates how narrative reframing can contribute to inclusive, just, and relational forms of identity that recognize humans as co-inhabitants within more-than-human communities rather than as external managers. Ultimately, I argue that econarratives grounded in multispecies ethics do not simply describe environmental crises but actively shape the moral and global political horizons of possible futures.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Balkan etiological text of the Golubac horsefly, arising from a slain demon, in Serbian and Romanian traditions. Drawing on 19th–21st-century sources, it explores its distribution, narrative patterns, genre transformations, and contemporary media and tourism contexts.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the enduring Balkan motif of insects arising from the head, blood, or body of a slain demon, focusing on the case of the so-called Golubac horsefly—a large biting fly named after the town of Golubac on the Danube. In Serbian and Romanian traditions, this etiological narrative is closely linked to the hero’s combat with a supernatural adversary, most often a dragon (balaur). The Danube region offers the densest concentration of attestations, with Romanian sources developing the motif across multiple folklore genres, including legend and ballad. By contrast, Serbian-language accounts present more reduced forms of the same plot in terms of motif, structure, and narrative elaboration.

Drawing on records from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as recent fieldwork in Serbian, Vlach, and mixed communities in Serbia and Romania (2007, 2017, 2018), the paper explores the areal distribution, narrative patterns, and genre transformations of this etiological text. Special attention is devoted to its current status in media representations and its appropriation within cultural tourism discourses. The study reveals the Golubac horsefly narrative as a living text, maintaining its core identity while dynamically negotiating changes in context, genre, and audience.

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This paper will contextualize and critique the extensive historical global application of the folktale wolf, highlighting characterizations which often defy our traditional assumptions about the creature’s inflexible sexuality, physique, social stature, and immoral/amoral character.

Paper long abstract

Vladimir Nabokov famously asserted that “literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.” From such origins, the wolf has often been characterized as an archetype of moral transgression and masculine antagonism ranging from the sixteenth-century Chinese tale 中山狼傳 [The Wolf of Zhongshan] to the classic Northern Italian legend Zio Lupo [Uncle Wolf] to Sergei Prokofiev’s Soviet-era Петя и Bолк [Peter and the Wolf]. While a bevy of academic assessments of the folktale wolf focus on two of the most contemporarily adapted narratives - Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs - these tales (and their alternative retellings) offer a comparatively limited view of the rich history of the wolf within stories of fantasy and reinforce a set of negative stereotypes which foment a series of harmful species biases (Lappalainen) and ignore the figure’s potentially complicated motives for transgression. From Angela Carter’s revisionist Wolf Trilogy to Tomoko Konoike’s amorphic multimedia expressions of mythological wolves, there have been a series of contemporary interventions against such reductive characterizations of the wolf, but these should be seen as part of a historical continuum within the folktale rather than a recent development. While considering the evolving place of the most familiar wolf tales in a postmodern and post-masculine context, this paper also will highlight the extensive global applications of the folktale wolf throughout history, which often defy our traditional assumptions about the creature’s inflexible sexuality, physique, social stature, and immoral/amoral character.

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In this talk, I will describe different examples of ursine descent and bear characteristics among “super heroes” of Scandinavian mythology and folklore, and return to Friedrich Panzer’s ground-breaking study on the bear’s son motif, with more recent examples from folklore.

Paper long abstract

Stories of a hero with ursine descent is ancient and appears in folktales, folk legends, and myths from a large geographic area over the world. In folklore, what can be labelled “the bear’s son motif, or tale type” can be identified with well-known narratives or tale types where it is only one of several components. Famous heroes of Scandinavia like Beowulf or Bǫðvarr Bjarki have notable bear characteristics, even though the known stories or poems about them does not explicitly say that they were of bear parentage or raised by bears. We find stories of the bear’s son motif from the Middle Ages (i.e. in Saxo Grammaticus’ 13th century Gesta Danorum) up until the 19th century. In Swedish folklore, there is a legend type collected throughout the country, telling of how a bear kills a pregnant woman and tears the baby out of her womb. For a time, the baby is raised by the bear and becomes known for his extraordinary strength. In this talk, I will describe different examples of ursine descent and bear characteristics among “super heroes” of Scandinavian mythology and folklore, and return to Friedrich Panzer’s ground-breaking study on the bear’s son motif (Studien zur germanischen Sagengeschichte, I: Beowulf, 1910), with more recent examples from folklore.

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This presentation provides an overview of Estonian traditional folk narratives about hunters examining their lifestyle, customs, rituals, and relationships with both humans and non-humans. The tales depict the forest as inhabited and moralized space, negotiated with non-human agency.

Paper long abstract

In this presentation, I provide an overview of traditional folk narratives (collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries) that are told from the viewpoint of peasants who practiced illegal hunting. I examine how hunting folklore reflects the lifestyle of hunters, their customs, rituals and their relationships with both humans and non-humans they encountered in the surrounding natural environment. In the complex conditions of the time where wild animals provided an important supplement to the diet, or even the main livelihood, hunters were troubled not only by landlords, who were owners of all resources in forests, thus considering all hunting illegal to peasants, but also by the supernatural beings inhabiting the woods and acting as guardians and masters of the forest, capable of protecting resources, or punishing disrespect. This presentation will exemplify how these narratives portray the forest as inhabited and moralized space, where human activity is continuously negotiated with non-human agency.

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In Russian the emotions is often associated with non-man-like behavior, but after closer examination it turns out that a man can be emotional, but in interactions with animals. I will analyze interaction between the men and nature creatures, emotions and their expression in different situations.

Paper long abstract

In Russian native speaker’s mind the emotions expression is often associated with non-man-like behavior. There are expressions like “мужчины не плачут” (“men don't cry”), “терпи, ты же мужчина” (“you should bear with it becouse you're a man”). We have the idea that men are the stronger sex than women, male person is more resistant to physical and mental pain, and the expression of feelings is more typical for women.

This story looks like the same in the anthropologic records of the NPO "Propp Center" made in the Russian Northen villages — but only at first glance. After closer examination it turns out that a man can be emotional, but in interactions with animals and not with people. We have recorded lots of stories about the relations of hunters and their dogs and the painful experiences they had after death or missing of their dog partner for various reasons. They are often compare this experience to the loss of a beloved one — and in the situation of losing a dog the level of pain and distress is always higher: one of the informants told us that the father, who shed no tears at his wife's funeral, cried when his dog died.

In my presentation I will analyze male narratives about nature, emotions and their expression, try to find out which situations allow a man to openly demonstrate his feelings, what feelings they are precisely and what happens in similar situations of interaction with a human being.

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Paper short abstract

We explore the curlew’s place in Irish folklore and biodiversity decline, linking cultural knowledge, language and ecological loss through the BioCultúr framework.Using co-created graphic literature, we show how oral traditions foster relational, ethical engagement within animal-human relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the intersection of animal-human relations, folklore, and biodiversity loss through the lens of the curlew, a bird species native to Ireland. Drawing on Douglas Hyde’s (Ireland’s first President) philosophy and diaries, alongside the oral verse ‘Paidrín Cumhra’ collected from Biddy Crummy, we adopt an ethnobiological approach that foregrounds cultural expressions of ecological knowledge. Hyde’s work, foundational to Irish folklore studies, illuminates the deep interconnections between language, culture, and the natural world, providing a rich framework for understanding how human and non-human lives are entwined. Guided by a relational pedagogy of love, our approach emphasises empathy, connection, and ethical responsibility in learning, reflecting an emotional as well as intellectual engagement with biodiversity and within animal-human relations. Central to this paper is the co-creation of graphic literature in the form of a comic titled ‘Answering the Curlew’s Call’ which narratively and visually connects the curlew with Irish folklore, making the links between ecological decline and cultural loss tangible and accessible. This work situates biodiversity, language, heritage and animal-human relations within our BioCultúr framework, highlighting how restoring cultural knowledge and ecological awareness are mutually reinforcing. By integrating storytelling, art, and scholarship, we illuminate new pathways for fostering ethical, culturally grounded environmental engagement using folklore and animal-human relations at the core.