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There is no doubt that human beings\u2014and all other \u2018Earthlings\u2019\u2014face an uncertain and risky future. Everywhere in the news, intimations of ecological collapse seem to arrive like an incoming tidal flow\u2014while the Earth system has endured its hottest ever year since formal records began. Hothouse Earth is forcing movements, drifts and collisions\u2014human, animal, insectal, vegetal, aqueous, and atmospheric\u2014that increasingly force a confrontation between the ecological and the socio-economic-political. The vectors of encounter seem increasingly convergent and increasingly densely entangled. Geologists, struck by the sense in which \u2018humanity\u2019 has become a geological force incontrovertibly marking the Earth system record in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented scale, have named the epoch as the \u2018new age of the human\u2019: The \u2018Anthropocene\u2019.<\/p>\n
What if, however, the crisis of the Anthropocene is precisely born of a mistaken sense of the centrality and unique agency of the human? What if making the human so central to the epoch reflects a kind of over-reach\u2014a kind of humanistic arrogance and misguided hubris\u2014albeit of a complex and ambivalent kind? And what might it mean\u2014for law, politics, economics, science, the arts, for, indeed, the entire span of \u2018human\u2019 social endeavours\u2014to confront, at last, the monumental and microscopic agencies of multiple non-human partners in the forging of pasts, presents, futures and worlds?<\/p>\n
This speaker series in the Cardiff School of Law and Politics engages with one of the most imaginative, daring and boundary-transgressing responses to the problematic, outdated centrality of the human: new materialism. New materialism, in many ways, renders the traditional sense of human agency impossible\u2014with complex implications for law, politics and the construction of the eco-social. New materialism embraces complexity, hybridity and entanglement\u2014pointing towards the inescapability of intra-relationality, all the way down<\/em>.<\/p>\n Hosted by the Centre of Law and Society and the Environmental Justice Research Unit, this series takes participants on a dazzling intellectual journey, in a series of encounters with various lively agentic forces: sand, air, algorithms, water, insects and drones. An entangled world\u2014and its implications for law, property, urban landscape, spatial justice, ecological security, and international humanitarian law\u2014forms the scene of our prospective encounter with new materialist thinking\u2014and each other\u2019s responses. All are most welcome.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/strong>This event is the opening event for the series. There will be two papers (details below) and a chance for in-depth discussion and engagement with the themes of the papers and the series as a whole.<\/p>\n \u2018Can Property be Justified in an Entangled World?\u2019 Margaret Davies, <\/em><\/strong>Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Law, Flinders University, Australia<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n For some decades property theory has emphasised questions about the nature of property, and focused upon redefining it in such a way as to rebalance it toward responsibilities, or to find ways of strengthening common and public interests rather than individual rights. The issue of whether property can be justified at all\u2014once a staple of moral and political theory\u2014has been submerged in this necessary but limited emphasis on redefinition. However the basis for liberal property theory, the presocial individual and its differentiation from a world of objects, is utterly dissolved in posthumanism. Private property is, moreover, at the centre of global ecocide. For these reasons (and many others), the question of the ethical foundations for property can no longer be ignored. Is property justifiable at all, and if so in what form, in an entangled world? What does the codependence and indeed interchangeability of subjects and objects mean for the future of property?<\/p>\n \u2018<\/strong>A Hyena\u2019s Laugh: Sand, Suspension, and Urban Form\u2019\u00a0<\/strong>Dr Julian Brigstoke, Lecturer in Human Geography, Cardiff University, UK<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This paper critically engages with new materialist debates through a consideration of an everyday material: sand. Sand is a vital material of power. Its force emerges from its granularity, its roughness, its consistency and absorbency. This enables it easily to form suspensions in water and air. Sahara sand keeps the Amazon alive. Sand transgresses borders and thresholds. It connects the elemental to the global, and the distant past to the present. Sand\u2019s power is ghoulish: shifting form, moving boundaries, deceiving travellers. It has a hyena\u2019s laugh. It marks time, decay, and death. Yet when taking forms such as concrete, asphalt, and glass, sand is also the most important material of the world\u2019s urban landscapes. There is a global shortage of construction sand, and the geopolitics of sand mining\u00a0and land reclamation is becoming increasingly contentious. This paper argues that thinking the geopolitics and geopoetics of sand requires questioning the granular materiality and non-human temporalities of cities, urban form, and the flows of matter across water, land and air.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n19th<\/sup> September 2018: Opening Event: \u2018Encountering the Entangled World\u2019: 9-1pm Law Building 2.29\/2.29a<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n