Teaching
2024 – 2025
- Introduction to Environmental Humanities
- Undergraduate seminar, University of Mannheim
- Enemy of the… State? Immigration and Invasive Species in the U.S.
- Postgraduate seminar, Amerika-Institut, LMU Munich
- An army of the wild? How words change the way we see ‘foreign’ animals
- Bookable lectures for Amerikahaus, Munich
Selected Talks
2026
- EASST, Krakow, Poland
- EASLCE, Utrecht, Netherlands
2025
- Killing as greenwork of care
Green Work and Environmental Knowledge Workshop, KHK Aachen, 27 November
- What do we care for when we kill for conservation?
Narratives of Care Hybrid Symposium, Melbourne, Australia, 20 – 21 November 2025
“Killing for conservation”: multispecies pest control and relating in a “predator-free” New Zealand
LMU-ChAN Scientific Forum 2025, LMU Munich, 29 – 31 October 2025
This presentation examines invasive species management through multispecies STS, drawing on fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand. Centering on the national Predator Free 2050 initiative, it situates eradication campaigns against rats, possums, and mustelids within New Zealand’s particular biogeographic history and eco-nationalist imaginaries of nativeness and belonging.
Rather than treating eradication as a purely technical or numerical exercise, the presentation argues that conservation operates through the production of killability: the social, ecological, and technological conditions under which certain lives are rendered both legitimately and practically killable. It foregrounds three sets of relationships produced through eradication practices. Affective relations show how successful trapping depends on empathy, attunement, and thinking with target animals. Metabolic relations (Courtney Addison, in prep) reveal how poisons rely on animals’ sensory preferences, digestion, and food chains, often producing “double deaths” through secondary poisoning. Spatial relations trace how forests are partitioned into governable microzones of killing through trap lines, distances, and surveillance technologies. Moving from these microzones to broader deathscapes (Palmer 2024), the presentation argues that eradication infrastructures function as storytelling devices: material records of past campaigns, ethical commitments, and ecological imaginaries. These landscapes narrate not only conservation success and national care, but also the intimate, ongoing labour through which humans learn to live with—and kill—unwanted others. It concludes by proposing a “dwelling perspective” of killing (Ingold 1993), which sees these deathscape as an enduring testimony to how humans live with, know, and destroy other species.
For the workshop National Parks in China and Human-Wildlife Coexistence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives,
chaired by Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch (LMU Munich) and Prof. Dr. Wanting Peng (Tongji University)
- The art of killing kindly: invasive species and the science of the bush in Aotearoa New Zealand
Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Seattle, U.S., 2 – 5 September 2025
- Naturalised citizens or noxious immigrants? Caring for ‘invasive’ plant species in a changing world
European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), Uppsala, Sweden, 18 – 23 August 2025- Co-convenor: Panel “Vegetal (Hi)stories: More-than-human Narratives of Invasion and Belonging”, with Dr. Eline Tabak
- Roundtable “Environmental History in the Field(s)”, sponsored by KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- Reports from the Field – Invasive species management in Aotearoa New Zealand
Rachel Carson Centre Research Forum, LMU Munich, 25 July 2025
- Troubled care: invasive species in a more-than-human world
Echeverri Lab, UC Berkeley, 21 April 2025
- Troubled care: invasive species in a more-than-human world
Colloquium, Folklore Program, UC Berkeley, 16 April 2025
- Troubled care: invasive species in a more-than-human world
Seminar, Mannaki Whenua Landcare Research Lincoln, 17 February 2025
Past
- Troubled Care: Care is not just philosophical details
Workshop “Species on the Move. Historical Perspectives on Invasive Species”, ETH Zürich, 11 – 12 November 2024 - The concept of ‚Invasive species’ and the demand for conservation
in panel “Human-wildlife Conflict: Perspectives from around the Globe”, LMU-ChAN Scientific Forum 2024, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, 25 – 27 September 2024- Funded by China Academic Network partnership fund
- Funded by China Academic Network partnership fund
- Natural Enemy: Exploring enmity in the more-than-human world
World Congress of Environmental History, Oulu, Finland, 19 – 23 August 2024- Discussant: Roundtable panel “Problems of Place”
- Panel convenor
- Aesthetic of nature in urban ecosystems
Workshop: “Defining and Using Aesthetics in the Environmental Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Experiment”, LMU Munich, 10 – 11 April 2024- Funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria (Elitenetzwerk Bayern)
- Co-organizer
- (Dis)Values of Invasive Species and Invasion Science
Workshop: Values in Climate and Environmental Sciences, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich, 10 February 2024 - Killing Kindly / Killing for Conservation
Rachel Carson Centre Research Forum, LMU Munich, 8 February 2024 - Fatberg: The Monstrosity of Immediacy
“Eco-temporalities and Geo-politics”, University of Cologne, 13 – 14 October 2022 - Symposium “Novel Natures? New technologies and conflicts in nature conservation”, Hannover, Germany, 20 – 22 July 2022
- Funded by VolkswagenStiftung
- Making a Chinese Philosopher Think the Anthropocene: Rereading Xiong Shili’s Anthropocosmicism
Ways of Knowing: Graduate Conference, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, United States, 26 – 27 October 2018 - Two Figures of Gaia: The Secular And The Chthulu – the Earthly Metaphor of Entangled Humanism
The Anthropocene and Beyond: Towards a Shared Narrativity in Interdisciplinary Research, Hong Kong, 29 May – 1 June 2018
katie kung 