(Re)Configuring More-than-human Normativities: Strategic Litigation, Collective Actions, and Sensing Technologies

Which modes of collective action, disruptive experimentation, and technological design can help resist, refuse, and repair endemic ecological harms? How does law order relations between human and nonhuman modes of existence, differently affected by such harms? How could law be used not to separate, distantiate, and divide affected beings, but to bind and connect them to make sense of their multiple, entangled, and enduring struggles? This conference interrogates the differential vulnerabilities, responsibilities, and accountabilities that law works with and against. It brings together scholars from the Transformative Effects of Global Law (TEGL) project and activists based in the Netherlands to explore sites of engagement with(in) more-than-human existences. Ranging from litigation for ecological care, posthumanist approaches to collective action and technological sensing of (un)recognized vulnerabilities, the conference will foster transdisciplinary conversations on existing academic and non-academic projects.

The panel discussions will be followed by presentations from the Theory Hacks collective. This collective is composed of legal researchers specialised in environmental and digital humanities and tech-developers. Over 2021/2022, the Theory Hacks collective used the site of De Ceuvel and its phytoremediation process of toxic metals from the polluted soil through the Brassica plant as an entry door to work on Radical Contracting: How to Create Value Metabolisms? The outputs of the joint collaborations will be presented and discussed on site.

The event will be concluded with exhibitions and performances by experiential art collectives Marshmallow Laser Feast, Entangled Others Studio and CodeXDiagrams brought together by the Sovereign Nature Initiative in the Experimental Zone at De Ceuvel.

Jointly organized by:

Daniela Gandorfer (Logische Phantasie Lab) dgandorfer@lo-ph.org

Andrea Leiter (University of Amsterdam) a.b.leiter@uva.nl

Marie Petersmann (University of Tilburg) m.c.petersmann@uvt.nl 

This event is supported by Transformative Effects of Globalization in Law, Amsterdam Centre for International Law, Tilburg University, Sovereign Nature and Logische Phantasie Lab.