Högre seminarium i slaviska språk (polska): Irena Chawrilska

This talk draws on a chapter from my forthcoming book SWAMP LIFE: The Logic of Softness, co-authored with Professor Rick Dolphijn, entitled A Bestiary of Softness and Disquiet, to theorize female monstrosities as figures through which wetland ecologies become legible as sites of relationality, transformation, and political force. Rather than treating swamps as marginal or degraded spaces, I approach them as dense naturecultural formations in which sediment, water, microbial life, myth, literary imagination, and classificatory systems co-produce one another.

Focusing on Polish folklore and literature, the lecture turns to a cultural landscape populated by female and feminized wetland figures, including: moriany, rusałki, topielice, boginki, dziwożony. These figures destabilize normative distinctions between life and decay, nature and culture, body and environment. They condense anxieties around femininity, excess, reproduction, death, unruly embodiment, and the permeability of bodies and landscapes. Rather than treating them as fixed folkloric types, I read them as unstable wetland assemblages: material-semiotic formations of water, mud, vegetation, grief, desire, inheritance, seasonal change, and social regulation. Their literary afterlives—including Olga Tokarczuk’s Zielone dzieci (The Green Children)—extend this archive of uncanny, green, and more-than-human becoming.

The talk argues that these female monstrosities resemble extremophiles: life-forms that flourish in unstable, oxygen-poor, chemically dense conditions. Wetland matter does not merely constrain life; it enables particular forms of endurance, adaptation, and becoming. I further suggest that swamps function as laboratories of saltational rather than gradual evolution: sites where sudden, nonlinear transformations produce novel life-forms and collective assemblages. This logic matters biologically and politically alike, since swamps generate myths and cultural narratives that challenge linearity, purity, and normativity.

Drawing on bestiary traditions, Polish folklore, and literary imaginaries, the paper proposes swamp life as a theoretical model for more-than-human becoming—one grounded in softness, disquiet, and the disruptive power of relation.

For the article see https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/pt/article/view/52652

Irena Chawrilska's research focuses on environmental humanities, particularly wetlands, swamplife, hybridity, and experimental literature. She is currently working on theories of swamplife and more-than-human thinking. Irena is the author of the following books: Hybrids and Hybridity: From the Borderland of Literature and Visual Arts (2020) and Polish for Sustainability? Polish Culture and Global Challenges (2022) and Lost in Gdańsk! Polish Culture in the Age of Uncertainty (2023). She is also the director of the Academic Centre for Polish Language and Culture and the coordinator of the More-than-Human Studies Lab at the Centre for Sustainable Development at the University of Gdańsk in Poland. Irena is also the PI in the international research project „CONVIVIUM: New European Bauhaus Solutions In Food, Living Heritage, And Convivality” (Horizon Europe 2024–2027), and she was a visiting scholar at Utrecht University (2023), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (2025), visiting professor at the University of Toronto (2023–2024).

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