IMS Guest PhD and Post Doc project presentations

Narrating the Lives and Agency of Discarded Things

Silvia Kurr, PhD, Linnaeus University

Abstract 

With the material turn in the humanities, the link between narrative and the concept of material agency has become one of the topics discussed by both narratologists and new materialist scholars. This paper contributes to this discussion by exploring how the material-technological dimension of the virtual reality medium can provide affordances for narrating the agency of plastic waste. As a case study, I examine the VR project Ripple: The Unintended Life of Plastics in the Sea (2019), which brings together digital technology, voice-over narrations, and Mandy Barker’s photographs of marine plastic debris to immerse the participant in the strange lives of discarded things in the ocean. Drawing on new materialist thought and intermedial studies, I analyze two aspects of materiality in Ripple. First, I am interested in how the material dimension of the VR medium, which encompasses technology, offers new expressive affordances for narrating the doings of discarded things in an immersive way. Second, I explore how the very materiality of plastic waste that is presented in the VR environment supports the narratives of nonhuman agency.

Bio

Silvia Kurr is Researcher at Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS). She is currently working on a one-year research project titled “The Agency of Waste Across Media.” She has published on the intermedial relations between literature, painting, and film. Her research interests include intermedial studies, ekphrasis, new materialism, and ecocriticism.

Transmediality and Media Representations of the Nature Essay in Literature, Film, and Video

Stefano Bracci Testasecca

Bio-bibliographical note: Stefano Bracci Testasecca is a second-year PhD student at Roma Tre University in Rome, supervised by prof. Simona Corso and prof. Lucia Esposito, and he is currently working on the literary essay as a genre within contemporary British literature, with a lens on ecocriticism and intermediality. From January to June 2025 he has worked as a guest PhD researcher at Linnaeus University sponsored by prof. Niklas Salmose, and has participated in the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), specifically in the research cluster IMS green, dedicated to mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergencies. He received a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Media & Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2021, and a Research Master in Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University in 2023, with a thesis on the contemporary American Lyric.

Presentation Abstract: This presentation will cover my current PhD thesis and will focus specifically on its methodology section. My project seeks to follow the steps of the Intermedial Ecocriticism (2023) theory (and text)book by Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose by performing an analysis of the affordances of different ecomedia through comparison and intermedial analysis. My thesis seeks to explore the essay genre, specifically nature writing about the British landscape and the Anthropocene, across different media: from its source medium, literature, to the film essay, and finally the video essay. Using Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media (2021), Edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, as a guideline, I will explain how I am planning to make use of the concepts of transmediation (chapter 9) and of media representation (chapter 10). Finally, I will show how, by identifying the literary devices of the essay genre through narratology, I hope to acquire a better understanding of its media qualities and affordances, and of the ways in which these get implicitly referenced in the film essay and in the video essay.