When: Wednesday, May 29, 2024, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Where: Online

As part of the Underworlds series, this event engages with the wild / feral as a site of global dis/ordering. Rather than focusing only on how wildlife is formally recognised or regulated in (international) law, the event foregrounds the material patterns of dis/ordering that the ‘wild’ – as a site of both containment and refusal – reveals or generates. We thereby aim to explore the new legal geographies, subjectivities, and modes of power and resistance that an attention to these unconventional or unruly sites and actors can engender. This also entails reflection on new methodological repertoires that help us study and navigate the world as seen through this lens, as works on feral ecologies or the feral atlas inspired. How can we become attuned to such ‘wild legalities’ – to ‘the hierarchies and slippages between wild and domestic, nature and culture, native and settler, human and nonhuman life’? How can this more-than-human perspective help us conceptualize and counteract settler-colonial orders and the legal regimes enabling those? Can we make ‘legally legible the conditions under which wildness manifests itself – not as a counterpoint to humanness, but as a meeting between species’? Which legal locations and geographies can emerge from this perspective?

The speakers

Irus Braverman is Professor of Law, Adjunct Professor of Geography, and Research Professor at the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is author and editor of thirteen monographs and collections, including Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge UP, 2009) Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford UP, 2012), Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (U of California P, 2018), and Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (U of Minn P., 2023).

Floris De Witte is Associate Professor at LSE Law School. His research focuses on the interaction between EU law and politics, as well as on EU legal geography. Floris teaches a range of courses on EU law at the LLB and LLM. He is an affiliated member of the LSE European Institute. Floris sits on the editorial board of the German Law Journal and European Law Open.

**Please note this seminar is online and joining details will be sent the day before.

Event Resources

• Baptiste Morizot, Entretien sur le sauvage
• Irus Braverman, Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel
• Floris De Witte, Where the Wild Things Are: Animal Autonomy in EU Law

The Series: Underworlds – Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Engagement with practices of global ordering is often guided towards specific locations and legacies: the sovereign state, the formal sources and standards of international law, the intricacies of global diplomacy, the historical juncture and its (anti-)heroes, the international palaces of hope in Geneva, New York, or The Hague. These explorations entail ideas of where power resides and where it is to be unmasked or undone – ideas implicitly grounded in modernist geographies, temporalities, and subjectivities. Starting from the limits of these familiar perspectives, this lecture and workshop series traces the multiple ways in which these sites, actors, and events are cabined, crossed, and cut apart by alternative material arteries, lineages, and languages of global dis/ordering.

The series takes as starting point that authority and order are not fixed properties of specific actors or institutions, but the result of ongoing material processes of ordering and world-making. As such, it traces unconventional forms and sites of global dis/ordering – from raw materials to projections of hope – as material, infrastructural, and discursive compositions that shape patterns of power. The encounter between old- and new materialist, Marxist and decolonial methodologies and modes of critique is one of the key objectives of this series. Its aim, however, is not only methodological: it aspires to inspire new ethical and political openings that attend to our inevitable complicity in taking part in these processes, and reveal new modes of resistance and refusal, of struggle and sociality. These interventions are not narrowly targeted at the old nemeses of critique – the state, the truth, the universal – but work from within both entrenched and emergent material sites and practices of dis/ordering: oceans, oil / coal, breath, debt, commons, frontier(s), waste, hope, wild / feral, vessels.

Find out about all the events in the series.

The series is convened by Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche and co-organised by QMUL (the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context) and the LSE Law School.