Law and Humanities Anthropocene Reading Group
We invite you to join an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional reading group, focused on encounters between laws and different scholarly traditions in the context of the Anthropocene. In 2022, we are exploring texts that consider intersections between subjectivity and matter, the human/inhuman, and the idea of the inhumanities as jurisgenerative.
We are associated with and share common intellectual and activist pursuits with the La Trobe Climate Network.
The group is convened by Dr Kathleen Birrell. We meet fortnightly, in hybrid mode (in person and online). In person participation will be at La Trobe Law School, Martin Building (MB) Room 241 - Please see H6 of the Inner Campus Map
Please email Kathleen Birrell to RSVP and for access to reading resources.
Register now
Semester 1, 2022
Tuesday 29 March
Margaret Davies, ‘A New Legal Materialism’ in Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism, and Legal Theory (2017) 56-73.
Tuesday 12 April
Hyo Yoon Kang, ‘Law’s Materiality: Between Concrete Matters and Abstract Forms, or How Matter Becomes Material’ in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed), Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory (2021) 453-474.
Tuesday 26 April
Barad, Part I
Karen Barad, ‘Agential Realism: How Material-Discursive Practices Matter’ in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) 132-153.
Tuesday 10 May
Barad, Part II
Karen Barad, ‘Agential Realism: How Material-Discursive Practices Matter’ in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) 153-185.
Tuesday 24 May
Jana Norman, ‘Introducing the Cosmic Person’ in Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene (2021). 114-156.
Tuesday 7 June
Astrida Neimanis, ‘Alongside the Right to Water, a Posthumanist Feminist Imaginary’(2014) 5(1) Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5-24.
Tuesday 21 June
Marie-Catherine Petersmann, ‘Response-abilities of Care in More-than-Human Worlds’ (2021) 12 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 102-124.
Tuesday 9 August
Tuesday 23 August
Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel, ‘The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation’ in Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti (eds), Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene (2020) 123-137.
Tuesday 6 September
Povinelli Part I
Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Four Axioms of Existence’ in Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (2021) 1-11 and 15-35.
Tuesday 20 September
Povinelli Part II
Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘Toxic Late Liberalism’ in Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (2021) 36-59.
Tuesday 4 October
Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time’ in Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti (eds), Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene (2020) 98-120.
Tuesday 18 October
Tuesday 1 November
Margaret Davies, Lee Godden and Nicole Graham, 'Situating Property Within Habitat: Reintegrating Place, People, and the Law' (2021) 6 Journal of Law, Property and Society 13-37.
