Skip to main content
Forum on Decentering the Human

Research

Current research streams and activities from the Forum on Decentering the Human.

Fundamental Rights for Non-Humans

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:

A still of a slide show with a cartoon of a man and a robot shaking hands

Event series

Talk Series - Fundamental Rights for Non-Humans: Foundations, Faults, and Future

Inhuman Legacies and Racial Architectures of the Anthropocene

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:

An aerial shot of tower blocks in a city, with colourful awnings on the streets.

Event

Inhuman Reparations

Law and/as Political Ontology (LPO)

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:

The façade of a white geometric building with lots of holes.

Event

International colloquium on the ‘Non-Human Turn in Law’

A forest of cut down trees with healthy remaining trees in the backgroud.

Publication

Non-Human Rights: Critical Perspectives (Edward Elgar Publishing)

Building Bridges: The Natural and Social Sciences on Decentering the Human

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:

A wooden bridge leading across a ravine into woodlands.

Event series

Building Bridges

Back to top