Fall Talk with Danielle Celermajer
Philosophy, affect and transformation: Writing multispecies justice in the midst of climate catastrophe
When: September 15, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM ET
Where: Wilf Hall, 5th Floor Seminar Room
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The idea of Multispecies Justice has, for the most part, been articulated within scholarly circles, but as violence and injustices against beings other than humans intensify, it is one that must acquire political, cultural, and affective purchase. In this talk, I reflect on the choices, strategies, and process of writing a creative non-fiction book about climate change and violence against the more-than-human in the midst of catastrophic fires, and in the intimate company with the multispecies community in which I live. Against a background hegemonic human exceptionalism, writing earth others into narrative and analysis, not merely as victims of violence and injustice, but as complex and diverse beings making sense of, having feelings about, and navigating cataclysmic shifts in their relational worlds, is challenging but critical. I wish to open a conversation amongst scholars committed to affecting a reorientation of ethics, politics and law towards the more-than-human about what doing so demands of our scholarly, narrative and indeed life practices.
Danielle Celemajer
Danielle Celermajer is a Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project. A longtime human activist, before joining the academy she was head of Indigenous policy at the Australian Human Rights Commission and worked in grass roots democratization and human right movements in Central America. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. Her latest book, Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future, was written in recognition of the critical urgency of conveying the complex conceptual recognition of the multispecies harms of the climate catastrophe in ways that can provoke affect and hence action.
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