Denielle Celermajer in Talking Animals, Law & Philosophy

Denielle Celermajer’s presentation on “Encounters, ethics and politics: imagining a path towards just transformations”. The framework of multispecies justice, which I have been working on for the last several years takes as its starting point the ontology, ethics and politics of human exceptionalism and the consequent systematic exclusion of other animals and more broadly Earth others as subjects of justice. It does so, on the one hand by insisting on the ethical value of Earth others and their functioning and flourishing, and on the other by contesting the picture of the human that has underpinned hegemonic western thought and institutional logics, and insisting on the ecological conditions of all life. The focus of my work at this point is on the moral imperative to, and possibilities for including other animals and Earth others in political decision making. This latter institutional transformation raises questions of representation, which are normally approached by asking how those who do not have language, and with whom communication seems inescapably constrained, could be represented for the purposes of political decision making. In this talk, I take a different approach, mobilising the double meaning of representation as an aesthetic and political practice to reflect on how we might learn to encounter other animals and Earth others such that their representations compel a sense of responsibility to inclusion through an expanded ecological self.