LAW AND THE INHUMAN

The second roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The two speakers were Matilda Arvidsson and Connal Parsley.

The final contribution to the rountable is a beautiful reflection and response offered by Dr Sophie Chao.

Marie Petersmann is Assistant Professor at LSE Law School. Her work lies at the intersection of international law, ecology, and critical theory. Her research focuses on the material, subjective, spatial, and temporal boundaries of ecological harms in a changing climate and explores new strategies of resistance and reparative action for climate justice in the Anthropocene. She holds a PhD in International Law from the European University Institute (Florence) and an LLM from the Graduate Institute (Geneva). She is the author of When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide: The Politics of Conflict Management by Regional Courts (CUP 2022). Prior to joining LSE, Marie was Senior Researcher at Tilburg Law School, where she was awarded an NWO Veni grant for her project Anthropocene Legalities: Reconfiguring Legal Relations within More-than-human Worlds.

Dr Kathleen Birrell is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Research in Law at La Trobe Law School. Her research adopts critical legal methodologies to explore the changing relationship between law and ecology, law and humanities and decolonial theory and praxis. She is the author of Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (Routledge, 2016). Her current projects explore the implications of new materialism and geophilosophy for legal scholarship, practice and activism in the context of the Anthropocene. She teaches and supervises students in the areas of legal theory, law and humanities, law and politics, property law, environmental law, and climate law. She is President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia and Editor of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.

Julia Dehm is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Law, La Trobe University Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor) and Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (edited with Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.

Afshin Akhtar-Khavari is a Professor of International Law (Public and Private) at the School of Law. He earned his BSc (genetics) and LLB from the University of New South Wales, LLM from the University of Sydney and PhD from Griffith University. Afshin is interested in law and nonhuman societies. He writes about environmental issues and challenges within the law drawing on theory, science and ecology. He has published widely into journals, edited collections and has written monographs, textbooks, and edited books and special issues of journals. He is currently writing a book for the Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies series on the topic of international law and restorative environmentalism. Afshin is currently a CI on two ARC Discovery Projects. The first examines the potential of traceability technologies to influence governance and policing of plastics. The second studies the potential of property covenants to support restoration activities that will allow private landholders to respond to climate change.