Workshop: Decolonial Interspecies Justice

On September 3, 2022, APPLE will co-organize a workshop with Julia Gibson (Antioch University, Keene, Vermont) on “Decolonial Interspecies Justice”, hosted under the auspices of Antioch’s  Environmental Studies Department. The workshop focuses on three broad and inter-related clusters of questions:

• questions concerning the role of land and territory for decolonial (and) interspecies justice. How does land fit into transformative interspecies justice? Can attention to land and territory provide a way of bridging interspecies justice and social justice, particularly issues of colonialism and racial justice?

• conceptual questions about the meaning of justice in interspecies contexts. Is “species” a good framework with which to approach more-than-human justice? Is transformative justice exclusively forward looking, or does it also have an orientation to the past? What are the relationships between restoration, reconciliation, and transformation in particular interspecies contexts under settler-colonialism? Are the different conceptions of transformative and/or decolonial interspecies justice in deep conflict, or do they pull in different directions?

• practical questions of mobilizing goals and strategies, and of models and frames. Are there successful examples or models of decolonial interspecies relations? What coalitions are needed for decolonial interspecies justice? What sorts of narratives help to inspire a commitment to decolonial interspecies justice? How can/must our positionality as settler, Indigenous, or a descendant of enslaved peoples shape our strategies? Can the state, and the law, be a vehicle for transformative justice, or are the spaces for pursuing decolonial interspecies justice always outside of and against state power?
 

Speakers:

• Charlotte Blattner (Law, University of Berne)
• Julia Gibson (Environmental Studies, Antioch)
• Lori Gruen (Philosophy, Wesleyan)  
• Audra Mitchell (Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology, Wilfrid Laurier University)
• Kelly Struthers Montford (Sociology, University of British Columbia)
• Rebekah Sinclair (Philosophy, University of Oregon)
• Jishnu Guha-Majumdar (Politics, Butler University

[Photo Credit: We Animals Media - WAM14260]