Multispecies Justice

Utilizing a multispecies lens and anticolonial framework, contributors to this special issue seek to reconceptualize justice to include beings beyond the human realm. The authors imagine how existing political institutions—which determine the meaning and distributions of value and power—might be formed and transformed in ways that respond to and afford justice in the lives, relations, and socialities of other-than-human beings. This institutional shift, the authors argue, would disrupt uneven fields of identity-based power, inequality, marginalization, and privilege. It would also foster practices of living together in ways that are hospitable to a broader range of subjects, both human and nonhuman, at a time of socio-ecological unraveling, threat, and instability. Essays cover a variety of topics, including the subterranean estrangement of stygofauna, slaughterhouses and factory farms, anticolonial conceptions of justice, critical plant studies, ecofeminism, and Indigenous cosmopolitics. The authors of this collection engage with methods and concepts derived from fields including cultural theory, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, art, history of science, queer/feminist theory, law, and conservation science.

Contributors: Ravi Agarwal, Margaret Barbour, Danielle Celermajer, Sophie Chao, Sria Chatterjee, Janet Lawrence, Dalia Nasser, Astrida Neimanis, Susan Reid, Daniel Ruiz-Serna, Hayley Singer, Christine Winter