When: Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PMWhere: Online and In-person (venue tbc)
As animals, rivers, mountains, rainforests, ecosystems, and synthetic entities such as machines, AI, and robots gain recognition as subjects of rights in different parts of the world, non-human rights are becoming part of our ordinary legal landscape and vocabulary. This timely book provides a critical outlook on this rising trend at the crossroads of two of the main concerns of the 21st century: climate change and automation.In seeking to address the foundations, genealogies, philosophies, and impacts of non-human rights, the contributors to this volume examine both their potential and limitations. Are non-human rights just a mere extension of the liberal human rights discourse or, as some suggest, something else and new based on different principles? Are they a ‘revolution’ or just ‘more of the same’? Are they symptomatic of a new epochal zeitgeist or a reinforcement of capitalist, racist, colonialist, hetero-patriarchal, and speciesist dynamics? Are they a practical solution that could ‘save’ us from the multiple interconnected crises we face today, or are they an obstacle to broader social change?Drawing on a variety of perspectives – ranging from the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology to new materialism, post-human feminism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, and other similar approaches informed by decolonial thinking, phenomenology, poststructuralism, Indigenous scholarship, and critical animal studies – the authors of the volume provide a rich and comprehensive overview of what non-human rights are today and how we can engage with them (and sometimes sympathize with them) without lowering our critical threshold.
Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa is a Senior Lecturer in the Law Department and Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on the question of law and political ontology, and he is currently working on a project about the extension of rights to non-humans, funded by the British Academy.
Costas Douzinas is Emeritus Professor of Law and Founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck University of London. He is the author of The End of Human Rights (Hart 2000), Human Rights and Empire (Routledge 2007) and The Radical Philosophy of Rights (Routledge 2019).
This event will take place in person and simultaneously online. There will be a drinks reception after the event.