Apprehending other worlds

UCL Anthropocene

4 March, 15:00-17:00 | Online, registration free

With Mohamed Amer Meziane (Brown), Melissa Leach (Cambridge) and James Fairhead (Sussex) What life counts as political? Increasingly, answers go beyond the merely human. Ecuador’s 2008 constitution granted Nature rights ‘where life is reproduced and exists’ while recognition of the Netherlands’ Wadden Sea’s rights adds more modestly to the hundreds of comparable global initiatives. But is it enough to attribute rights to mountains or souls to plants or animals to jump beyond extractivist modes of engaging and collaborating with other worlds? What animisms are such rights rooted in? How can we establish a 'naturekind' beyond humans? Crucial anthropological and philosophical work has illuminated important answers to these questions as well as the many different ways human societies have conceived and interacted with the non-human. Some of this has stressed non-human forms of communication and semiotics. Other approaches have aimed to decolonize knowledge by challenging unexamined nature/culture binaries. This seminar brings together leading anthropologists and thinkers to reflect on these approaches and their applications. Mohamed Amer Meziane is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown. Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique by Vues de l'esprit in 2023 and The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization by Verso in 2024. Melissa Leach is Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation Unit. James Fairhead is Professor of Social Anthropology at Sussex and has worked in West Africa and Central Africa. Leach and Fairhead's Naturekind: Language, Culture and Power beyond the Human was published by Princeton in 2025.

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Apprehending other worlds

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