Natalie Joelle
Natalie Joelle is a prize-winning scholar and doctoral researcher, creative and activist at Birkbeck, University of London with expertise in the environmental humanities, disability studies, cultural theory, vegan theory, transdisciplinary studies and research as practice.
Her work has been praised as contributing an original theoretical approach for the emerging field of vegan theory (Wright 2017), and offering ‘an act of vegan resistance’ (Quinn and Westwood 2018). Her writing practice is described as ‘seething with energy’, keeping ‘language malleable and alive’ (Tarlo 2017) through ‘taking for free what is rightfully ours’ (Angell 2019) and ‘with enormous care […] sifting for evidence of a threatened way of life’ (Eaves 2021).
Her publications on gleaning, radical veganism and Autistic lived experience can be found in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The Goose, Plumwood Mountain, The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, OUGHT: The Journal of Autistic Culture, and as part of the Routledge Environmental Humanities and Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series.
Natalie read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where she was awarded the Elisabeth and Derek Brewer Prize, followed by art historical research supported by The James Stuart Bursary, and postgraduate education in Culture and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She then took up a doctoral scholarship at Birkbeck for transdisciplinary English and Environmental Humanities studies under the supervision of Carol Watts, funded by the School of Arts and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Her recent work has included being a British Research Council Fellow of the Kluge Centre, Library of Congress, lecturing and training in adult education and for the NHS, and appointed service on national advisory boards in the education and environmental research sectors.
Natalie is currently working on the manuscript of her first collection gLeans, which was longlisted for the Europe-wide Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment in 2021, and completing an artist’s book twentysix g lean stations, funded by the Experimental Humanities Research Network.
Natalie’s work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Doctoral Training, Research Travel and International Fellowship Programmes, The Disabled Students' Allowance, Sterling College, Birkbeck School of Arts, and The Fund for Women Graduates.
Supervisors: Professor Carol Watts
Address: Department of English and Humanities
Birkbeck College
43-46 Gordon Square
London
WC1H
Her work has been praised as contributing an original theoretical approach for the emerging field of vegan theory (Wright 2017), and offering ‘an act of vegan resistance’ (Quinn and Westwood 2018). Her writing practice is described as ‘seething with energy’, keeping ‘language malleable and alive’ (Tarlo 2017) through ‘taking for free what is rightfully ours’ (Angell 2019) and ‘with enormous care […] sifting for evidence of a threatened way of life’ (Eaves 2021).
Her publications on gleaning, radical veganism and Autistic lived experience can be found in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The Goose, Plumwood Mountain, The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, OUGHT: The Journal of Autistic Culture, and as part of the Routledge Environmental Humanities and Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series.
Natalie read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where she was awarded the Elisabeth and Derek Brewer Prize, followed by art historical research supported by The James Stuart Bursary, and postgraduate education in Culture and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She then took up a doctoral scholarship at Birkbeck for transdisciplinary English and Environmental Humanities studies under the supervision of Carol Watts, funded by the School of Arts and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Her recent work has included being a British Research Council Fellow of the Kluge Centre, Library of Congress, lecturing and training in adult education and for the NHS, and appointed service on national advisory boards in the education and environmental research sectors.
Natalie is currently working on the manuscript of her first collection gLeans, which was longlisted for the Europe-wide Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment in 2021, and completing an artist’s book twentysix g lean stations, funded by the Experimental Humanities Research Network.
Natalie’s work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Doctoral Training, Research Travel and International Fellowship Programmes, The Disabled Students' Allowance, Sterling College, Birkbeck School of Arts, and The Fund for Women Graduates.
Supervisors: Professor Carol Watts
Address: Department of English and Humanities
Birkbeck College
43-46 Gordon Square
London
WC1H
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Articles by Natalie Joelle
press. What follows is a playful index of The Militant Vegan, which takes the form of a collage that recirculates its radical print culture, articulating an alphabet of ecotage to counter the suffering of animal exploitation.
To dwell in detail upon the specificities of a single drawing throughout the form of an extended essay is an uncommon approach in the Anglophone literature on Seurat’s work on paper. This study will address the imbalance in the field by offering a sustained critical account of this one early-1880s drawing by the Neo-Impressionist artist.
With reference to contemporary optical theory and comparative approaches, this piece argues that Seurat’s plant-like gleaner fathoms the surface of visual anatomy; intervenes as an entoptical phenomenon; blurs the bounds of legality; enacts a metaphor for information and evokes vitality. The drawing is a troubling, multivalent assessment of what it might mean to glean: to gather what reapers have left behind.
Book Chapters by Natalie Joelle
Research As Practice by Natalie Joelle
press. What follows is a playful index of The Militant Vegan, which takes the form of a collage that recirculates its radical print culture, articulating an alphabet of ecotage to counter the suffering of animal exploitation.
To dwell in detail upon the specificities of a single drawing throughout the form of an extended essay is an uncommon approach in the Anglophone literature on Seurat’s work on paper. This study will address the imbalance in the field by offering a sustained critical account of this one early-1880s drawing by the Neo-Impressionist artist.
With reference to contemporary optical theory and comparative approaches, this piece argues that Seurat’s plant-like gleaner fathoms the surface of visual anatomy; intervenes as an entoptical phenomenon; blurs the bounds of legality; enacts a metaphor for information and evokes vitality. The drawing is a troubling, multivalent assessment of what it might mean to glean: to gather what reapers have left behind.
--Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory, 2014
‘What do you know about gleaning?’
‘Gleaning? Gleaning? Sounds a bit kinky Jim’
--Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feasts, 2015
This paper complicates redemptive concepts of gleaning in recent ecocritical and new materialist scholarship (Boscagli, 2014; Sandilands, 2011) in light of divergent current representations of gleaning practices.
Beginning with Jamie Oliver’s feminised ‘kinky’ gleaning, at once countercultural and too easily appropriable (Fresh One Productions, 2015), the paper demonstrates how the term has recently gained currency in popular culture as part of Tayloristic and largely depoliticised debates on food waste reform, and suggests that these draw upon dominant ‘lean’ management ideology, which aspires to eliminate all waste or ‘muda’.
The paper presents a polemical genealogy of ‘lean thinking’ (Womack & Jones, 2003) in lean meat and its slaughterhouse technologies, and puts management theory into unusual conversation with The Book of Ruth to consider gleaning as a mode of resistance to ‘lean thinking’.
Finally, this paper argues that today there is a pharmacology of gleaning, or, gleanologic, which typifies our ecological moment of capitalism: poised, as poison, between the increasing pervasiveness of lean thinking in managerial strategy (Leadbeater, 2015), and a more curative challenge to carnism (Joy, 2011) that is radical insofar as carnism and capitalism are coarticulated (Shukin, 2009). In contrast to Boscagli’s optimistic conclusion, it suggests that gleaning as a method of gathering ‘green knowledge’ is troubling in lean times.
- Georg Simmel
Georges Seurat’s draughtsmanship relies upon ridges, which appear in the interplay of dark, soft conté crayon and white rough handmade Michallet paper, lending a liminal quality to the texture of his work. Drawing on the plane of Seurat’s paper is always, to adopt Simmel’s words, throwing down a bridge between discordances of things.
This paper will consider the spaces of Seurat’s 1881-3 drawing The Gleaner. The piece is an exquisite abstraction of an important figure in nineteenth-century French culture, which pushes the type of the bending subject in Seurat’s work to a dramatically curved extreme. Yet in spite of being included in several major exhibitions and available in the British Museum’s public collection, this fascinating work remains barely documented.
This paper appeals to spatial theories to argue that Seurat’s figure complicates and in part urbanizes the conceptual space of gleaning. As a biblical practice, gleaning is concerned with marginal spaces, with corners: ‘thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest’, Leviticus 23:22 demands. Seurat’s sturdy bending silhouette presents a bridge-like human form. With reference to Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Paul Valéry’s short piece ‘London Bridge’, the construction of the Parisian Pont d'Asnières and contemporary architectural theory, this paper suggests that Seurat’s bridge-like gleaner breaks our mental shortcuts.
Reading Seurat’s work on paper alongside spatial theory troubles the practice of gleaning. Refiguring what it means to glean, the focal body as a bridge that gathers – or assembles – also disassembles; unsettlingly transporting us to an unknown country where we cannot collect ourselves.
Peter King’s studies of this customary right from 1750 to 1850 emphasise how practice continued to dissent from legal precedent. Gleaning has endured – yet the cultures of this important right in England after 1850 are little documented and demand further research.
The first part of this collaborative paper asks: how does gleaning resist economies of enclosure? It suggests that just as 'gleaning' is a word in which 'leaning' is not quite enclosed, so the leaning gesture of gleaning troubles the conceptual fences of enclosure.
The second part will argue that, like the gleaner after the court ruling of 1788, Wordsworth's ‘The Solitary Reaper’ is a ‘survivor-figure from the traditional open fields farming practice’: both lie beyond the constitutive bounds of capitalist society and waged labour relations which frame the lyric encounter.
J. H. Prynne’s critical ‘field notes’ to Wordsworth’s poem offer a slant way into reading some of his difficult later texts against the common condition of fraternal love exalted in his early work. The gathering which succeeds harvest or the moraine that forms in the wake of the glacier shares with reaper and gleaner the quality of being beyond or after, leaving one early poem to state, ‘we are what it leaves’. From this apparent obsolescence might be drawn a paradoxical strength and means of resistance to the topographical bounding of common land in the late eighteenth century.
In these presentations, described by order of first name:
* Author and scholar Anand Prahlad reflects on his award-winning memoir and the environmental racism at the heart of most approaches to ‘nature’ and human health.
* Disability Studies scholar David T. Mitchell presents collaborative work with Sharon L. Snyder on Autism and Nonspeciesism, drawing on their recent chapter in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory.
* Poet and Insect Librarian Dez Mendoza considers their entomological found-text work ‘Frass’ as a an Autistic poetics of care.
* Artist Helen Mirra considers a constellation of what she helpfully, and here influentially, suggests can be considered ampersand qualities, and ecologically responsible guidelines for artmaking.
* Rhonda Moore offers an Autist-autobiographical narrative poem that connects her anthropological interest in pain with her lived experience of interconnecting ecologies of grief.
The presentations together are Autecologies of enworlded ethics, care, communication, perception, and politics; including liberatory contemplative practices; considerations of the role of the colour green in the context of intersectional violence; and radical gleanerly acts of nonproduction and non-harm.
ASLE: EMERGENCE/Y, July 26-August 6, 2021
Registration: www.asle.org/conf-register/
Proposals are invited for ten minute presentations to form part of a session on gleaning, or, SONGLE, as part of the programme at the 2019 ASLE-UKI Biennial, ‘Co-emergence, Co-creation, Co-existence’.
Proposals considering cultural representations, practices or figures of gleaning, either historical or contemporary, are welcomed from scholars and practitioners across disciplines, including creative contributions, and creative-critical dialogues.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a 50 word bio, and any additional or technical requirements, to Natalie Joelle at [email protected] by 1st February 2019.
Academic labour after repetitive strain injury (RSI) often demands establishing a radically different relationship to the digital, including operating a computer with speech in what is largely a silent, open plan work culture; (re)learning alternative methods of composition; and intellectually unwelcome and financially unsustainable rest breaks from what for many is a vocation in addition to a precarious livelihood.
How do we as scholars with RSI interact differently with or defer the digital in our labour, and what might it mean to have a ‘differigital’ working practice in a digital age? What present and possible forms might ‘differigital’ academic work take? And how might we use them to begin creating a more RSI-positive work environment in the academy?
This participant-driven meeting will be an opportunity to network with others affected by or interested in the causes, impacts and context of RSI, share research, political and personal insights and ways of working.
Attendees are encouraged, but not required, to arrive with a small stimulus to contribute to the discussion, which can take any form, but might include:
• A verbal account of an experience or idea for change;
• A 250 word abstract style summary of prospective, in progress, or published research relevant to the topic;
• An artefact to introduce.
Those experiencing or researching RSI in HEIs are particularly invited to attend, in addition to – but not limited to – equality activists and campaigners; developers of assistive technologies; health and wellbeing practitioners; scholars in digital humanities, medical humanities, critical management studies and disability studies.
It is hoped that the event will be the catalyst for the formation of an alliance that will produce research, offer mutual support and provide advocacy for an extensive but underserved community.
Difference and Repetition: Academic Labour after RSI
Thursday 25th May 2017, 6-7:30 PM
Room 106, School of Arts
43-46 Gordon Square
Birkbeck, University of London
WC1H
Convenors: Natalie Joelle (Birkbeck) and Chris Till (Leeds Beckett)
Optional RSVP via Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/difference-and-repetition-academic-labour-after-rsi-tickets-33547817425
Academic labour after repetitive strain injury (RSI) often demands establishing a radically different relationship to the digital, including operating a computer with speech in what is largely a silent, open plan work culture; (re)learning alternative methods of composition; and intellectually unwelcome and financially unsustainable rest breaks from what for many is a vocation in addition to a precarious livelihood.
How do we as scholars with RSI interact differently with or defer the digital in our labour, and what might it mean to have a ‘differigital’ working practice in a digital age? What present and possible forms might ‘differigital’ academic work take? And how might we use them to begin creating a more RSI-positive work environment in the academy?
This participant-driven meeting will be an opportunity to network with others affected by or interested in the causes, impacts and context of RSI, share research, political and personal insights and ways of working.
Attendees are encouraged, but not required, to arrive with a small stimulus to contribute to the discussion, which can take any form, but might include:
• A verbal account of an experience or idea for change;
• A 250 word abstract style summary of prospective, in progress, or published research relevant to the topic;
• An artefact to introduce.
Those experiencing or researching RSI in HEIs are particularly invited to attend, in addition to – but not limited to – equality activists and campaigners; developers of assistive technologies; health and wellbeing practitioners; scholars in digital humanities, medical humanities, critical management studies and disability studies.
It is hoped that the event will be the catalyst for the formation of an alliance that will produce research, offer mutual support and provide advocacy for an extensive but underserved community.
Difference and Repetition: Academic Labour after RSI
Thursday 25th May 2017, 6-7:30 PM
Room 106, School of Arts 43-46 Gordon Square Birkbeck, University of London WC1H
Convenors: Natalie Joelle (Birkbeck) and Chris Till (Leeds Beckett)
Optional RSVP via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/difference-and-repetition-academic-labour-after-rsi-tickets-33547817425
Join this innovative and participatory panel of partners on the art of partnership, viewed through the prism of student learning experiences. Student and academic delegates alike are strongly encouraged to take part by posing thought-provoking questions from the floor."