Research

Dr Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa has been co-awarded an HSS Strategic Research Initiative grant for the project Rewilding Imagination for Sustainable Futures, which he will co-lead with colleagues from the School of Business and Management, and English & Drama.

Focusing on climate change and human–environment relations, the project builds on the work of the Forum on Decentering the Human and the Imagination Research Network. It starts from a simple but radical premise: institutions change profoundly when rivers, soils, and non-human species are imagined as co-participants in climate action. The project aims to establish a cross-Faculty Rewilding Methods Lab and to support the development of a major collaborative UKRI or Leverhulme bid later this year.

Led by Dr John Adenitire

This stream considers the phenomenon whereby courts and legislatures are asked to grant fundamental rights to non-human entities, such as animals, nature, and artificial intelligences. Participants in the stream consider the theoretical foundations of this phenomenon. Is it an assault on the centrality of the human or merely a way to use the common legal tool of fundamental rights to protect entities which some humans value? Are there any faults in this phenomenon? A prominent branch of critical theory scholarship, for example, has long been sceptical about the desirability of fundamental rights being used to bring about social justice. Is this branch of scholarship correct? Do we need something other than fundamental rights for a more just world for non-humans? Finally, the stream considers whether this phenomenon has a future. Is it merely a fad, likely to fade away as it encounters resistance, or will this phenomenon redefine the very notion of what is a fundamental right and who is entitled to it?

Themes include:

• The theoretical nature of fundamental rights
• Animal rights law and theory
• AI rights
• The desirability of rights of nature

Past events in this stream include a series of talks that took place in late 2023:

Led by Professor Kathryn Yusoff

This stream looks at the inhuman legacies of both colonialism (and its afterlives) and inhuman epistemologies (in terms of subjectivities, legal entities, and materialities). Understanding the inhuman as a key site in the construction of the colonial planetary condition named the Anthropocene, this theme seeks to think with the non-normative dimensions of the inhuman to release other speculative futures that address on-going racial and environmental inequities.

Themes include:

• Racial Architectures of the Anthropocene
• Inhuman Reparations & Repair
• Inhuman afterlives and futurelives

Past events in this stream include:

Led by Dr Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa

The LPO research stream aims to explore the confluence between different forms of political ontology and examine how these approaches could complement each other and open up new paths for understanding social, political, legal and economic transformations in a context marked by the deleterious effects of climate change and the unpredictable results of automation. The stream aims to recover ‘critique’ in its most original formulation by exploring the ontological presuppositions and the necessary and sufficient ‘conditions of existence’ of particular discursive and material practices. It starts from the observation that thinking anew about the fundamental structure of our reality has far-reaching normative consequences. It also comes to terms with the fact that legal theory necessitates more critical self-awareness of the ontological commitments to which it adheres when considering notions such as rights, freedoms, equality, and justice. Therefore, this stream pays particular attention to exploring how law connects with ontological assumptions and practices that structure it but which it also helps to structure through its ‘worldmaking’ powers. It endeavours to analyse how the ontological and cosmological levels determine and explain legal formations – law and political ontology – without overlooking law as a lens through which people apprehend the world – law as political ontology. In sum, this research stream examines the embeddedness of ontology in law, and the embeddedness of law in ontology.

Research Themes include:

• Political Ontology, Ontological Pluralism, Cosmopolitics, Cosmohistories
• Legal Ontologies, Law and Modes of Identification, Law and Performativity, Law and Magic
• Non-Human Rights, the Non-Human Turn in the Law
• Political Ontology and the Anthropocene

Research outputs of this research stream include:

This stream invites scholars from both the natural and social sciences to tackle fundamental problems regarding anthropocentrism. We hope that by merging the intellectual contributions of both the natural and social sciences we will enable more fruitful conversations regarding the limits of anthropocentrism. The main activity of the stream is an ongoing series of talks:

Led by: Dr Giulia Carabelli and Matthew Beach

This stream builds on and expands the work done by Dr Giulia Carabelli and Matthew Beach for The Plant Forum (TPF) at QMUL. It interrogates the roles of plants in building worlds past, present and future. The co-directors aim to bring together scholars across disciplines at QM who are interested in plant-human relationships as well as to initiate collaborative projects outside the university.

Themes Include:

• Creative methods to explore and foreground vegetal life.
• The roles of plants in nurturing radical imaginaries for a more just future.
• Environmental and multispecies Justice.

The majority of people in the world identify as members of a particular theistic tradition. Billions of people therefore gain motivations and justifications from these traditions on how to interact with other humans and non-humans. Scholarly work on non-human rights in the cultural West has, by and large, sidelined the importance of the role of theism in advancing or blocking the political and legal recognition of fundamental rights for non-humans. In this research stream we encourage scholarly engagement with the theistic underpinnings of non-human rights. The main activity of this research stream is a talk series on 'Theisms and Non-Human Rights'.