Professor of Law and Theory, Cardiff University, Wales, UK and Adjunct Professorship at the University of Waikato, New Zealand
Anna’s work focuses largely upon questions related to the law’s construction of the human being and the human relationship with the world, broadly conceived. Her scholarship calls on insights from a range of disciplines despite being firmly located within a combination of critical legal theory and jurisprudence. She has a particular interest in the themes of legal subjectivity and vulnerability, locating these themes in relation to contemporary globalisation and to a central concern with the implications of the materiality of the living order – including the theme of embodiment. Her monograph on international human rights, published in 2010, was described as ‘marking a new start towards understanding the ontology of human rights.’ If you want to know more about Anna please visit her profile here.
1. What led you to work on human rights and the environment?
I started my academic career (quite late in life) as a theory-leaning critical human rights law scholar. I have always been passionately concerned about patterns of injustice, and as my theoretical interests developed, I turned increasingly to thinking about the materiality at stake in such patterns. This kind of thinking leads quite naturally to thinking about the networked ‘environmental’ relationality of humans and non-humans and the porous continuities between different bodies of all kinds.
At around the time that I was thinking more deeply about these things, I was working alongside environmental lawyers in a human rights unit at Bristol UWE Law School, and one day, after a conversation with Jona Razzaque, I decided to set up a scholarly journal to create a space in which issues at the nexus between human rights and the environment could be examined from a wide range of perspectives: mainstream and critical. That idea became the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. It was quite a struggle at first. Various publishers rejected the idea for being ‘too niche’. However, Edward Elgar Publishing could see the rising future, and the excellent Karen Morrow of Swansea University put her shoulder to the wheel alongside me — and here we are! At around the same time, I also initiated the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment with fantastic colleagues at Bristol UWE Law School and Swansea University Law School. I suppose then I was well and truly thrown into the human rights and environment field! I have stepped back from the GNHRE work in recent years for health reasons, and am now very much enjoying seeing the expansion of the network and its initiatives under Erin Daly’s leadership and that of the fantastic team involved!
2. What have you been working on recently and/or what is your next big project?
Recently, my work has become more deeply engaged with broadly New Materialist theories. My next big project will be to take that forward in some more developed way or other. I have some very early ideas to contribute to a growing effort among legal scholars to generate broadly New Materialist theories of law and ethics. I also have various publications on the go, including a co-authored book and a co-edited book. I very much hope that both publications will contribute to these important collective conversations. Nothing could be more important than re-storying law and tracing out proposals for the non-oppressive cultivation of responsibility towards ‘others’ of multiple kinds.
3. Which scholars, writers or activists do you think are not getting the attention they should be getting?
That’s a very difficult question to answer. To my mind, Indigenous and other environmental defenders should be at the forefront of all our attention. These are people literally laying down their lives in some cases to defend a planetary future for all life — and they absolutely don’t get the attention they deserve, the protection they need, or the respect they are owed. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. There is so much excellent work going on — so many emergent conversations, critiques, and engagements with such a wide range of relevant issues and concerns.
4. As briefly but as specifically as you can say, what are the most compelling challenges in human rights & the environment right now? Can you briefly describe any proposed solutions?
The greatest challenge, to my mind, is the fundamental necessity of displacing old onto-epistemic assumptions that import the outmoded subject-object relations underlying the very destruction and dysfunction that makes our field so necessary and urgent in the first place. It is very difficult indeed to get beyond the ‘what does this mean in practice’? limitation on the imagination of lawyers. What the old assumptions mean in practice is tragically clear. We don’t yet know what a radical shift of onto-epistemology might mean for law, but that’s not a problem. We live, after all, in an age of immense complexity and uncertainty, and it’s vital to have the vision and courage to be tentacular, to creep along, to feel our way, and work things out as we go along. All our practice is theory-soaked anyway. It can’t be otherwise. So, the greatest challenge, for me, is to see less theory-aversion and more empirical and legal realism about complexity, systemic entanglement, the inappropriateness of Promethean legal aspiration. There is a deep need to change legal consciousness itself in relation to ‘our’ (human’) sense of situatedness in a world that emerges not just from human actions but from its own self-organizing dynamics. I guess it’s about letting go of the juridical ‘ego’ that always puts ‘us’ and our ‘problem solving’ at the centre.
Helpfully, there are a range of practices out there that are pointing potential ways forward: commons-based communities of various kinds, Indigenous decolonial initiatives, posthumanist and new materialist interdisciplinary projects, art-science collaborations, and much, much more. There are no easy answers, but there are far better questions to be asked and far better arts of living to be discovered. So, yes: a deep onto-epistemological shift is the most urgent necessity.