People
Members of the Forum on Decentering the Human have expertise from across the fields of humanities and social sciences, including law, geography, politics, and film studies, to ensure a truly interdisciplinary approach to this area of scholarship.
Co-Directors
Professor Kathryn Yusoff
Professor of Inhuman Geography
Email: k.yusoff@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8922
Room Number: Geography Building, Room 110
Kathryn’s work is centred on dynamic earth events such as abrupt climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction. She is interested in how these “earth revolutions” impact social thought. Broadly, her work has focused on political aesthetics, social theory and abrupt environmental change. Her current research addresses questions of ‘Geologic Life’ within the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene. This research examines how inhuman and nonorganic dimensions of life have consequences for how we understand issues of fossil fuels, human-earth relations and materiality in the politics of life. Kathryn’s work draws on insights from contemporary feminist philosophy, critical human geography and the earth sciences. She is particularly interested in the opportunities the Anthropocene presents for rethinking the interactions between the earth sciences and human geography in the “geo-social formations” of Anthropogenic change.
Read more about Professor Yusoff's work.
Dr John Adenitire
Senior Lecturer in Law
Email: j.adenitire@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: School of Law, Mile End
Dr John Adenitire is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and a Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. Prior to joining Queen Mary, he was a Lecturer in Law at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law and Fitzwilliam College. He is currently working on a book project on non-human animals in constitutional law and theory. More general research interests lie in the fields of public law, legal theory, comparative public law, and law and religion.
Read more about Dr Adenitire's work.
Dr Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa
Lecturer in Law and IHSS Fellow
Email: a.alvareznakagawa@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Laws, Mile End
Twitter: @AlvarezNakagawa
Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa is a Lecturer in Law and Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. Dr Alvarez-Nakagawa’s research interests span from the globalisation of Western legal forms to the examination of new trends in the field of human rights law, such as the recent extension of legal personhood and rights to non-human beings. His work brings together insights from philosophy, critical legal theory, anthropology and political ontology to explore these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Read more about Dr Alvarez-Nakagawa's research.
Research Coordinator
Yijia Liu
PhD candidate, Law School
Email: yijia.liu@qmul.ac.uk
Yijia Liu is a third-year PhD candidate at Law School, Queen Mary University of London. She obtained her master's degree in international law from Peking University and the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD project focuses on international child abduction, approached from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes children’s rights, feminism, and the inequalities inherent in international law. She has a broad interest in feminism and critical theories of international law.
Members
Our members include academics from all the departments in the humanities and social sciences at Queen Mary.
School of Law
- Dr Daragh Murray – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human rights
- Professor Hans Lindahl – Geoconstitutionalism
- Dr Angeliki Papantoniou – Climate change
- Dr Rebecca Bates – Environmental law
- Professor Richard Falk – Ecocide
- Dr Tibisay Morgandi – Climate change law and IHSS Climate Emergency Working group chair
- Dr Dimitri Van Den Meerssche – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law
- Professor David Whyte – Climate justice and IHSS Climate Emergency Working group member
- Professor Penny Green – IHSS Climate Emergency Working group member
- Professor Johanna Gibson – Ethology and law; nonhuman authorship and creativity; animal welfare
- Professor Malgosia Fitzmaurice – Whaling
- Dr Renisa Mawani - IHSS Global Professorial Fellow
School of Geography
- Dr Andrew Russell – Climate change and IHSS Climate Emergency Working group member
- Professor Catherine Nash – Interspecies kinship
- Dr Alex Henshaw – Ecology of rivers and IHSS Climate Emergency Working group member
School of Politics and International Relations
- Dr Giulia Carabelli – Plants and IHSS Research Programme Director of Environmental Futures (climate change as socio-cultural phenomenon)
- Dr Elke Schwarz – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and political theory
- Dr Joanne Yao – Rivers and international politics
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
- Dr Sasha Litvintseva – Monsters and geology
- Dr Anat Pick – Animals in film and vegan cinema
- Dr Daniel Mann – Land exploitation in cinema
- Dr Mario Slugan - Epistemologies of non-humans
Associate Members
The Forum has members external to Queen Mary who actively contribute to the activities of the Forum. Should you wish to join as an associate member, please contact the co-directors.
- Jeff Sebo – Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU Department of Environmental Studies
- Josh Gellers – Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Florida.
- Patricia Wiater – Chair for Public Law, Public International Law and Human Rights, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg