In this article, I explore the dynamics of the supervision process in academia through the figure of the monster. Drawing on Monster Studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field that applies the monster as a means to think critically and creatively about the ethics and politics of difference, I approach what I see as a dilemma in the teaching and supervision situation: both wanting the student to succeed in academia, by being recognizably ‘academic’ enough, while also wanting to make space for the student’s difference and otherness. Academia has some strict rules and categories for what can be accepted and judged as ‘proper’ research, which means that all teaching and supervision becomes a ‘domestication process’, where the otherness of the student is polished so they may fit in. How can the monstrousness of the student be nurtured by the supervisor while they also ensure the student passes their exams? I suggest that a monster pedagogy can be one way to approach – but ultimately never solve – this tension.

I den här artikeln utforskar jag dynamiken i den akademiska handledningsprocessen genom monster-figuren. Med utgångspunkt i Monsterstudier, ett framväxande tvärvetenskapligt område som använder monstret som ett sätt att tänka kritiskt och kreativt kring olikhet, närmar jag mig vad jag ser som ett dilemma i undervisnings- och handledningssituationen: både att vilja att studenten ska lyckas inom den akademiska världen genom att vara tillräckligt tydligt "akademisk", samtidigt som man vill skapa utrymme för studenternas olikhet och annorlundahet. Den akademiska världen har strikta regler och kategorier för vad som kan accepteras och bedömas som "riktig" forskning, vilket innebär att all undervisning och handledning blir en "domesticeringsprocess", där studentens ”märkligheter” poleras, så att studenten kan passa in. Hur kan studentens monstruösitet vårdas av handledaren, samtidigt som handledaren också säkerställer att studenten klarar sina prov? Jag föreslår att en monsterpedagogik kan vara ett sätt att närma sig – men i slutändan aldrig lösa – denna spänning.

This article examines Looping Futures Lost and Found (LFLF), a collaborative sound work developed at Malmö University’s Medea Lab remixing audio from NASA’s Voyager Golden Record alongside newly recorded expressions of regret gathered during a participatory workshop. Originally created as part of the multimedia installation Tender Time for the 2023 Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice, the work interrogates the Golden Record’s idealised representation of humanity by inviting in the absences, vulnerabilities, and hauntings excluded from its planetary archive. Drawing on Derrida’s hauntology and Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, we argue that regret functions as a compositional method and a temporal disruption, summoning unrealised futures, unresolved pasts, and the spectral traces of voices omitted from dominant narratives of culture and progress. Through looping, sampling, analogue degradation, live remixing, and collaborative performance, LFLF stages a sonic encounter between archival optimism and contemporary planetary precarity. The article combines theoretical reflection with first-person compositional accounts to examine how participatory sound practices can cultivate forms of collective witnessing, relational listening, and ethical openness toward the ghosts inhabiting cultural memory. In doing so, we position hauntological remixing not simply as an aesthetic strategy, but as a relational practice for reimagining whose voices are carried into the future.

In the winter of 2020, all 17 million mink of Denmark were killed and buried in shallow mass graves due to the fear that so-called ‘mutant mink’ might pass on a new variation of Covid-19 to humans; a variation that could not be prevented through vaccination with the vaccines under development at the time. Soon after, their decomposing bodies broke through the ground, rising from their graves, which earned them the name ‘mutant zombie mink’ in the news. In this chapter, Line Henriksen argues that the coverage of the mutant zombie mink was the first time the news presented the mink as active agents in their own story. Drawing on the work by sociologist Avery Gordon, evolutionary biologist Banu Subramaniam and philosopher Jaques Derrida, Henriksen applies the ghost story as well as erasure poetry as tools to retell and reimagine the story of the mutant zombie mink. She suggests that learning to see what has been made invisible – that is: learning to see ghosts and tell their stories – can be a first step in order to do justice to the dead.

Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters reclaims the notion of alien encounters together with strange but queerly loved companions: Vulgar slugs, diatoms (micro-algae), and familiars (spirit guides of witches). The book’s three human co-authors ask: what would it take to establish more-than-human, bio- and geo-egalitarian co-existence on a planet in trouble?

This playfully crafted mixed-genre book is informed by feminist posthumanisms and co-created with a spectral community of more-than-humans who are respectfully summoned to contribute with their perspectives. In focus of the entangled artistic-philosophical-poetic investigations are questions of ethics, aesthetics, and methodologies to co-exist response-ably rather than based on modern human beliefs in exceptionalism and entitlement to sovereignty, control, and conquest of more-than-human worlds.

Feminist Reconfi gurings of Alien Encounters is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, NGOs, politicians, students from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, artists, writers, activists, and artivists who are interested in entangled artistic-poetic-philosophical modes of understanding the world as well as in ecology, new feminist materialism, critical posthumanism, and questions about radically rethinking and reimagining human/more-than-human relations on Earth.