CFP: Special Issue: Posthuman Legalities: New Materialism and Law Beyond the Human

From Edward Elgar Publishing: CFP

Special Issue: 'Posthuman Legalities: New Materialism and Law Beyond the Human'

The Journal of Human Rights and the Environment (JHRE) warmly welcomes submissions for the upcoming Special Issue: 'Posthuman Legalities: New Materialism and Law Beyond the Human'.  Contemporary pressures emerging from both climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic suggest the urgent need to move beyond the longstanding centrality to law of the human subject that acts upon ‘the world’ as object. Such juridical humanism is now clearly not only unsustainable and increasingly implausible, but profoundly dangerous to all life.

How might law, then, in the words of Gustavo Wilshes, ‘learn how to come to terms with other agents of the territory that are not resources’? How can legal systems move beyond reductive objectifications and learn to negotiate (or not) with soils, hydro-meteorological dynamics, volcanoes, viruses, and ecosystems as lively, agentic, more-than-human participants in world-making? Wilshes’ call is an invitation to reflect on rights, responsibilities, agreements, and other legal concepts in an entirely different way. It invites probing new epistemological and ‘ontological openings’ for legal thought and practice in times of planetary crisis. What kind of law is a law after the Human? What posthuman legalities might alternative onto-epistemic reflection make possible?

This Special Issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment invites reflections on posthuman legalities drawing primarily upon two lively approaches to other kinds of law that might emerge from an ‘ontological otherwise’. The first approach is the ‘law beyond the human’ approach; the second is new materialism. How might tracing ontological plural legalities through these related but distinctive thought-ways open new puzzles and possibilities for the legal? How might drawing upon indigenous cosmovisions, cutting-edge science-inspired complexity-sensitive openness, and diverse onto-relationalities re-story law in a way that enables a posthuman capaciousness of concern—a passionate legal ethics of the more-than-human? The editors invite submissions for this issue that engage with the need to speak both beyond and in excess of ‘the human’ so as to hold open spaces of more-than-human meaning in the legal field. For more information, visit the JHRE homepage on Elgaronline, and for details on how to submit please see below. We look forward to hearing from you. Anna Grear, Julia Dehm & Samvel Varvastian Editor-in-Chief, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor

Special Issue Submission Process

If you are interested in submitting to this edition, please in the first instance send abstracts for consideration to the editors via email (listed below). Full and final submissions for the edition should be made via the Journal of Human Rights and Environment submission portal, and should not exceed 10,000 words (including references). The submission deadline is December 1st 2020. The issue is scheduled for publication in June 2021.