Underworlds explores unconventional sites and struggles of global dis/ordering. Guided by leading theorists and critics, we explore how familiar locations and legacies of power are cabined, crossed, and cut apart by alternative arteries, lineages, and languages of ordering and world-making - from oceanic archives to landscapes of plasticity and pollution, from the circulation of debt to the aesthetics of breathing. Across these sites, we explores new modes of resistance and refusal. Convened by Marie Petersmann (LSE) and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (QMUL). Sound / art by Tobias & Dominique Koch.
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Moving beyond modernist modes of seeing and ordering the world – ways of governing often entangled with sentimental tropes of liberal hope – this episode reflects on hope as a set of sensibilities and practices of living ‘after the end of the world’. Hope is seen, in this sense, as a specific mode for dis/ordering the world and our place within it. This entails an attentiveness to the diverging onto-epistemologies that sustain varying expressions of hope, as well as the political subjectivities and forms of refusal and resistance these engender. What is the space of hope and hopelessness – or the ‘death of hope’ – in a context of mass extinction and its many foreclosed futurities? Which expressions of hope – speculative, pragmatic, nihilist – can be foregrounded against the ever-receding horizon of liberal hope?
The speakers:
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her most recent book, Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska University Press, 2023), won the 2024 Hugh Silverman Book Prize in Philosophy and Literature. She completed three books on extinction: The Death of the Posthuman (2014), Sex After Life (2015), and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016, with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller). She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future (2011) with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, and co-edited Deleuze and Law (2012) with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin, Deleuze and Gender (2009) with Jami Weinstein,Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (2008), and Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000) with Ian Buchanan. Claire is currently completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive, and the Earth).
Rather than concentrating only on how waste is defined or regulated in (international) law, this episode foregrounds the material patterns of dis/ordering that thinking through waste reveals and generates. This entails an attentiveness to the ethical positions, material practices, and shifting legal geographies that help us navigate the world from the vantage point of its wastelands. How can we trace the arteries of power and modes of production that constitute the ‘Molysmocene’ – the ‘geological era shaped by human waste and its management’? Which historical legacies, worldviews, and material entanglements have shaped this saturation and contamination with waste? Which avenues for action are available in such political landscapes of plasticity and pollution?
The speakers:
Heather Davis is an Assistant Professor and Program Director in Culture and Media at The New School in New York. Her work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. She also co-edited, with Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Heather is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary collaboration between visual artists, cultural workers and scientists, who work together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region.
Michael Hennessy Picard is Lecturer in International Environmental Law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, where he also teaches Waste Law. His research focuses on the transnational regulation of global waste objects, from the recycling of shipwrecks to the (mis)management of outer space debris. He co-edited (UCL Press, 2023), which offers 35 short entries on the waste of humans and humans treated as waste, illustrated with artwork, photography, collage and mixed media.
Frontiers
Wednesday, October 23, 2024 • Duration 59:41
Frontiers as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering
This episode foregrounds how frontier spaces are legally, materially, and discursively produced, which subjectivities it fosters, and which modes of capitalist production it enables and forecloses. This entails an attentiveness to the forms of refusal and resistance that the violence and extractivism of frontier spaces invite. What are the lineages and legacies of frontier thinking in histories of racial capitalism, and how are these intertwined with regimes of (international) legal ordering? How is frontier imagination currently extended to new locations and aligned with new rationalities – including those attuned to the so-called ‘green economy’? Which forms of political counter-mobilization do these frontier imaginaries invite?
The speakers:
Christine Schwöbel-Patel is Professor and co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies at Warwick Law School. She was a Leverhulme Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University (2023-2024). She is the author of Marketing Global Justice (CUP, 2021) and co-editor of Aesthetics & Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2023). Christine’s current project is on ‘Legal Pipelines of the Green Transition’, which studies the relationship between international law, the green transition, and capitalism. More than merely a metaphor, Christine uses the notion of ‘legal pipeline’ as a material and discursive infrastructure of extractive capitalism. ‘Are lawyers instrumental in spinning the web, or are they trapped by legal pipelines – by key dynamics between law and capitalism that support and legitimise the extractivist concentration of wealth?’ – Christine asks. How to ‘blow up’ and undo the legal pipelines of capital if there is to be a ‘just’ green transition is the main inquiry of this project.
Cait Storr is a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School. She is the author of (CUP, 2020) and of many articles that touch upon the relationship between property, territory, and jurisdiction, with a focus on decolonial struggles for legal control over natural resources, including in domains beyond national jurisdiction. Her current research project, ‘Australia’s Critical Minerals Strategy: Implications in National and International Law’, examines the evolution of critical minerals discourse over the twentieth century, and analyses how the geopolitical objectives of the major powers in the energy transition are both entrenching and transforming colonial relations at the extractive frontier.
Commons
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 • Duration 44:41
The Commons as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering
Rather than focusing strictly on how the commons are formally (mis)recognised or regulated in (international) law, this episode foregrounds the diverging modes of dis/ordering that practices of commoning can produce. This entails an attentiveness to the new legal spaces that commoning engenders, as well as the forms of political subjectivity and resistance that animate it. Moving across different sites and scales, the episode explores commoning practices on both a transnational and local level – from a reimagining of international law’s constitution of value and the reclaiming of common wealth to the urban practices of adverse commoning employed under conditions of rapid gentrification.
The speakers:
Isabel Feichtner is Professor of Public Law & International Economic Law at the University of Würzburg in Germany, and a Fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, where she chairs the programme ‘Reclaiming Common Wealth’. Isabel’s work brings us to one of law’s most aspirational yet abstract ideas on ‘global commons’ as the ‘common heritage of so-called Mankind’ or ‘Humanity’, as well as concrete practices of resistance to the appropriation, commodification, and valuation of such ‘commons’, with a particular interest in the Deep Seabed and its mining. Listeners might find resonance here with the first session of our series, where Professor Surabhi Ranganathan – a close collaborator of Isabel – spoke about the enclosure of the Ocean Floor through mining exploration and exploitation practices. Today, we are excited to hear more from Isabel about her work ‘Commons Public Partnerships’, and whether and to what extent they can support socio-ecological transformations through democratization and commoning.
Elsa Noterman is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her work on urban practices of ‘adverse commoning’, which are deployed today under conditions of rapid gentrification, takes a feminist, decolonial and critical legal geography approach to property, and questions of land and housing justice. Her work focuses on everyday collective struggles over land and housing in the US and in the UK, with case-studies on reclaiming public land in the city of Cambridge – where Elsa was a Junior Research Fellow before joining QMUL – addressing the inequalities in access to land and food, and reimagining land stewardship towards climate and racial justice. Elsa’s work delves into practices of resistance and contestation of property regimes in pursuit of equity and reparation through commoning.
Debt
Friday, May 24, 2024 • Duration 01:02:23
Debt as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering
Rather than focusing only on how (sovereign) debt is formally recognised and regulated in international law, this episode foregrounds the material structures of global ordering and disordering that debt generates. This entails an attentiveness to the histories of violence that are thereby enacted or amplified, as well as a focus on practices of resistance and expressions of political subjectivity that emerge in relation to the construction and circulation of debt. How is this fabrication of debt implicated in the profoundly unequal configurations of global ordering that emerged after the formal end of empire? Which legal forms and institutions shaped and were shaped by these formations of debt and the uncommon wealth they sustained? Inversely, which practices of redistribution and reparation can be articulated in relation to the unpayable debt thereby accrued?
The speakers:
Vasuki Nesiah is Professor of Practice in Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School, NYU. Vasuki’s work on debt and reparations as politics of refusal brings together critical legal theory, decolonial thinking, Black feminist theory, and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) – a school of thought and of practice of which she is a founding member. Vasuki’s current focus is on her book project Reading the Ruins: Slavery, Colonialism and International Law, as well as a co-edited Handbook on TWAIL under contract with Edward Elgar.
Kojo Koram is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck University of London. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray, 2022) – which was nominated for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing – and editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press, 2019). Alongside his academic work, Kojo regularly writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, and the New Statesman.
Breath
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 • Duration 01:02:06
Breath as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering
Rather than concentrating only on how the right to breathe is formally recognised (or not) in international law, this event foregrounds the patterns of dis/ordering that are embedded in infrastructures of toxicity, and the unevenly allocated affordances of breath and breathing these engender. This entails an attentiveness to forms of political resistance, new approaches to law and normativity, and modalities of political subjectivity that this focus on breath and breathability can foster (as investigated by the Logische Phantasie Lab’s Decentralized Right to Breathe). How, Breathing Aesthetics asks, are forces of ‘extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism’ tied to and materialized in the ‘contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air’? Which political coalitions and practices of resistance can emerge from such emergent configurations of breathing injustice?
The speakers:
Daniela Gandorfer is Lecturer at University of Westminster Law School, London, an affiliate of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, Boston, and the co-founder of Loph, a non-profit organization dedicated to decentralized and community-based approaches towards governance at the intersection of climate change, political reorganization, and new digital technologies. Before joining Westminster University, Daniela held postdoc positions at Princeton University and UC Santa Cruz, California. She received her PhD from Princeton University and is currently pursuing a MSc in Finance at LSE. Daniela’s research focuses on legal theory as well as on scientific and technological frontier spaces – such as web3, quantum physics, and psychedelics – and their implications for emerging forms of normativity and governance. Her book Matterphorics: On the Laws of Theory is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of , a co-author with Steven Swarbrick of , and a co-editor with Andrew Strombeck of . His monograph in progress, , challenges the absorption of climate action by expansionist models under late liberalism.
Oil / Coal
Wednesday, April 17, 2024 • Duration 54:09
Oil / Coal as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering
Rather than concentrating only on how the commodities of oil and coal are regulated as objects of international law, this episode foregrounds patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that these materials generate. It thereby traces the multiple entanglements between fossil fuels and the infrastructural and institutional conduits of global power. This also entails an attentiveness to the relation between the carbon world and forms of political violence, collective resistance, and the chains and geographies of global capitalism through which these unfold. How are histories of empire and its reverberations in current economic and geopolitical conditions intertwined with the materiality of carbon – as expressed in patterns of ‘coalonalism’? Which arteries of power and authority can be traced to the infrastructures of rule that the extraction of oil and coal require and enable? How can these be diagnosed and disrupted?
The Speakers:
Dr. Lys Kulamadayil is Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University in Hamburg, and incoming Fellow at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, where she will lead a project on Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law, funded by an FNS Ambizione Grant. Lys holds an LLM from the LSE, and a PhD from the Graduate Institute. Lys’s research interests include mineral resources, corruption, climate change, development, international legal knowledge production, and human rights legal theory. In her forthcoming book with Hart Publishing – titled The Pathology of Plenty – she explores the role international law has played in the extraction of mineral resources in post-colonial countries.
Professor On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He is specialized in the history and current politics of the climate crisis in the Middle East and the Global South. On is Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of four books: Rishumey Peham (2024), Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (2006). His latest book, is forthcoming with University of California Press in 2024. Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, he was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a Lecturer at the History Department at Princeton University. In 2009, he received a joint PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from NYU.
Oceans
Wednesday, April 3, 2024 • Duration 01:00:08
Oceans as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering
Rather than concentrating only on how oceans are formally framed or regulated as objects of international legal ordering, this episode foregrounds the patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that thinking through the ocean reveal. Which material historical conditions have shaped the current legal constitution of oceanic space? Which new legal and political temporalities, geographies, and subjectivities might ‘thinking oceanically’ generate? How are international law and the ocean co-constituted – through its specific spatial zones, its depths and bottoms, its vexing vents, and amphibious legalities? Which critical practices can enable us to think and act in unruly oceans – through its waves, marine mammals, and blue legalities – as the ever-shifting terrain of violence, struggle, and political imagination?
Surabhi Ranganathan is Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. Her work on the law of the sea, its biodiversity within and beyond national jurisdiction, and the techno-utopian imaginaries that today drive the licensing of mining activities in the deep seabed, offers insights into the ordering and disordering of the ocean, its colonial history, and political economy.
Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories, Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and currently Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London School of Law. Her work on ‘oceans as method’, the imperial history of the jurisdiction of the sea, the legal personification of slave ships and legal objectification of slaves raises important and urgent questions about ocean ontologies and ecologies.
· Miranda Johnson and Cait Storr, ‘Australia as Empire’ in Peter Cane, Lisa Ford and Mark McMillan (eds.), Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
‘In discarding rights altogether, one discards a symbol too deeply enmeshed in the psyche of the oppressed to lose without trauma and much resistance. Instead, society must give them away. Unlock them from reification by giving them to slaves. Give them to trees. Give them to cows. Give them to history. Give them to rivers and rocks. Give to all of society’s objects and untouchables the rights of privacy, integrity, and self-assertion; give them distance and respect. Flood them with the animating spirit that rights mythology fires in this country’s most oppressed psyches, and wash away the shrouds of inanimate-object status, so that we may say not that we own gold but that a luminous golden spirit owns us’.
Additional credits for Daniela’s talk:
Researchers (audio):
Layla Varkey
Ananya Malhotra
Tiffany Critchlow
Ariane Fong
Nadin Mukhtar
Janette Lu
Music:
Brendan Rogers
Heat, A History: Lessons from the Middle East for A Warming Planet
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