EJRU News: New colleagues, Cardiff’s Environmental Law Foundation, COP 24, Student blogging and Events
28 January 2019
Welcoming new colleagues
With marking finished, the good begins to come into focus, and what could be better than getting new colleagues with a shared interest in environmental politics. Dot Kwek joined the School of Law and Politics as a lecturer in October. Dot works on comparative political theory, post- and decolonial theory, political ecology, and affect theory and new materialism inspired by Benedict Spinoza. Her article, “The Importance of Being Useless,” recently appeared in Theory, Culture and Society.
Jennifer Allan joined the School as a lecturer in January. Jen’s research examines the interactions of state and non-state governance in the areas of climate change, biodiversity and chemicals and waste management. She is particularly interested in the question of how global rules shape non-state actors, and importantly, vice versa. Jen has a forthcoming forum piece in Global Environmental Politics in February, which assesses the dangerous incrementalism of the Paris Agreement being legitimised by some state and NGO actors.
Cardiff Environmental Law Foundation Clinic
In December, Cardiff Environmental Law Foundation Clinic brought a citizen complaint against the UK over the disposal of dredged nuclear waste from the Hinkley nuclear power complex in Cardiff Sands. The citizen complaint, on behalf of activist Tim Deere-Jones, is for failure to comply with EU environmental law in granting a licence to dispose of nuclear waste, which is being dredged from Hinkley A and B in Bridgewater Bay and disposed of in Cardiff Sands to facilitate the construction of Hinkley C nuclear power station.
The Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) Clinic at Cardiff University enables students to participate in supervised legal case work and learn about the crucial role that pro-bono lawyers play in facilitating access to environmental justice. You can learn more about the Cardiff ELF Clinic and the cases our students have been involved in here: https://elflaw.org/university-network/cardiff-university/
COP 24
The research unit was well represented at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Katowice, Poland in December. Two of EJRU’s postgraduate members, Mulugeta Geta Sisay and Valeria Tolis, were there to observe proceedings and attend side-events as part of their PhD research. We were also able to offer a badge to one of our third-year undergraduate students, Rémi Cossetti, who followed the youth consistency or YOUNGOs as they’re called. It was quite a tense meeting, as pressure was on the Polish Presidency to facilitate acceptance of the latest IPCC science and deliver the Paris Rulebook, which made it an eventful COP to follow. We will be having a panel event to share these observations later this semester.
Student blogging
Over the next few months students are going to be publishing their blogs from the third year, Global Environmental Politics module on the EJRU website. This is the third year running that students have been assessed through a 1,000 word blog. Again, students excelled themselves, submitting well-researched, beautifully presented blogs that applied module content to illuminate an environmental political issue of their choice.
Events: New Materialist Reflections for the Anthropocene
February 13th, 2019: Dancing with the Dog: Interspecies cadence and urban life
Teresa Dillon, Professor of City Futures, Bristol UWE, and Resident at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.
1pm, Law building room 2.30/2.30a
Register here: https://doodle.com/poll/e3svh74kz5r65n5x
March 18th 2019: ‘Milk-Drinking Cultures at the End of the Age of the Humans’
Yoriko Otomo, Independent Researcher, Author of ‘The Gentle Cannibal: The Rise and Fall of Lawful Milk’ (Australian Feminist Law Journal) and Co-Editor of Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food (Bloomsbury, 2017)
1pm, Law building room 1.28
More information on this series is available here.