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Still Here: an alliance of care for the Szenne River and a Living Preamble

Since 2021, Natural Contract Lab has been — growing an alliance of care with its kin, and more-than-human communities. From this practice has emerged the Living Law: a proposal for the legal recognition of the Szenne's rights in Belgium, woven from ecological grief, restorative justice, embodied knowledge and three years of river stewardship.
Project Leads
Maria Lucia Cruz Correia — Artistic Initiator, Natural Contract Lab
Project Team
Natural Contract Lab was initiated in 2021 by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia in ongoing co-creation with Vinny Jones (sensory scenography/dramaturgy), Brunilda Pali (restorative justice), Lode Vranken (design/philosophy)
Overview of collaborators with different temporalities of engagement
Marzia Dalfini (design), Jef Seghers (SZenne Living Law), Caroline Daish (vocal archivist), Julie Vanderhaegen/Atelier Cartographique (digital companion), Xandra van der Eijk (river oracles design), Melanie Matthieu (creative producer), Patricia Van Cutsem ( singer/song writer), Tania Soubry (choreographer), Christel Stalpaert (hyphenated thinker), Thessa Kruger (intern/sound research), Saartje Monden (river guardian pedagogies), Laura Eva Meuris (weaver). Past collaborators Flore Herman (mediation dramaturgy), Melanie Ganino (artistic assistant), Matteo Deblasio (river vessel design/conception).
Project Duration
2023 – 2027 (ongoing)
Affiliated Organisations
HIROS vzw, VIERNULVIER, Kanal Centre Pompidou, Workspacebrussels, UGent S:PAM Research Centre S:PAM, SoAP

What does it mean to propose a law rooted in ecological grief, care and embodied relationship — weaving reciprocity, kinship and restorative justice with a river and its more-than-human communities?

Natural Contract Lab is a transdisciplinary artistic practice weaving an alliance of reciprocal care with bodies of water undergoing environmental loss. Hybrid and adaptable, Natural Contract Lab’s interventions emerge in dialogue with each river — as collaboration, reciprocal sensing and a gesture of care — with the intention to fabulate new forms of justice. Since 2021, NCL has been Walking-with the Szenne River — from its source under a willow tree in Naast to its confluence at Zennegat — listening to its waters, learning modes of care from its beings, and growing an alliance of care with its kin.
As a site-responsive practice, Walking-withs are river gatherings that activate listening, sensing, attuning, conversational circles of water memories, river stories and ecological grief — an act of accountability, a gesture of solidarity, a moment for unlearning and reconciling with the river as teacher. NCL invites Szenne neighbours, allies and kin to evolve as river stewards, learning from the river’s beings as keepers, becoming witnessing bodies giving and receiving care alongside the river, reconciling and remembering.
At the heart of NCL’s practice is the Protocol of Reciprocal Care, rooted in an environmental restorative justice proposal by Brunilda Pali (2021) and shaped in ongoing learning with the Zenne River. This evolving transdisciplinary framework holds together rights of nature, ecological grief, sensory scenography, embodied literacies and ancestral cosmology — adapting continuously to the waters and communities NCL collaborates with, flowing and mutating like a river through an ecosystem.
Learning from the river as a teacher and its beings as its guardians, this practice questions modes of representation in legal systems and proposes a cycle of Enchoiring-with: an exploration of whether our bodies can resonate with the river in stewardship — attuning, listening, giving space and silence to receive the river reciprocating in song. In this song, NCL acknowledges the river beings as the guardians and therefore the challenge of understanding what does it mean to be a steward? Perceiving the river beings as collaborators, teachers and companions — ones who reciprocate in wind, flow, movement, song, warbling, caroling and many other ways that exceed human vocabulary.
The Szenne begins under a willow tree in Naast, humbly seeping to the surface before widening into a river that meanders 103 km to its confluence at Zennegat, where it meets the Dyle, Nete, Rupel and Scheldt and eventually the salt of the North Sea. Once considered dead as one of Europe’s most polluted rivers, it has revived through the solidarity of its companion plants, bacteria and restorative projects — teaching a story of resilience and survival rooted in the cooperation and care of the beings that cohabit its waters.
From this long-term practice of reciprocal care has emerged the Living Law: both a legal document and a Living Preamble, not written to represent the river but emerging from its remembrance as embodied knowledge. A sensing cartography of stories, songs and memories that recognises the Szenne as an ecosystem of meaningful relationships and a living entity. A proof of evidence — of reciprocal care, of kinship, of a legitimate alliance calling for the river’s recognition in Belgian law. The Living Law was co-written by restorative justice scholar Brunilda Pali and environmental lawyer Jef Seghers in close collaboration with Szenne neighbours, kin and allies.

Outputs
The Living Preamble is an embodied process emerging from the river and its kin — a proposal for an embodied law that transforms the concept from a static legal document into a layered and hybrid experience, reflecting what the more-than-human communities of the Szenne have taught them about stewardship and care.
It grows from a Protocol of Reciprocal Care developed since 2021 across seven phases, taking shape as an interconnected set of outcomes: a walking route from source to confluence, River Oracles — site-specific sculptures that restore and rebalance the river's soundscape through vibration, each engraved with a QR code linking to the Companion Digital Preamble — an open, geolocated archive of river stories, memories and the full text of the Living Law: a legal document proposing the Szenne's rights in Belgian law. A song developed through Enchoiring-with as a multispecies attunement completes the circle. Together, these elements form a permanently available walking pilgrimage, with the aim of becoming a lasting celebration of the Szenne's personhood OR. Together, these elements form a permanently available walking pilgrimage in recognition of the Szenne's as barrier
of rights. 
Acknowledgements
Deep gratitude to the Szenne River and its kin, to the Willow keeper of the source, the rain supporting us to become conscious of being a body of water, the knotweed who taught us resilience, the clay that shaped the many stories of loss, the seen and unseen whose teachings shaped this practice of care — and to all who have walked, grieved, sung and cared alongside it since 2023, including local partners Brussels Environment, Contrat de Rivière Senne, Coördinatie Zenne, Regionaal Landschap Rivierenland, Natuurpunt Mechelen.
©2026 MULTISPECIES JUSTICE COLLECTIVE
Multispecies Justice Collective

Melanie Challenger

Animals in the Room
United Kingdom

Writer and broadcaster, co-founder of Animals in the Room project, Co-Chair of Nuffield Council, and Vice President of RSPCA.

MSJ Rosalie Chapple

Rosalie Chapple

Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney
Australia

A conservation ecologist with a focus on wildlife and reimagining conservation to be more effective, inclusive and equitable; Rosalie Chapple is inspired to work with Indigenous peoples to disrupt the dominant ‘western’ paradigms. Chapple’s teaching and research centres on integrating diverse values and knowledge systems into environmental management, with a particular focus on socially and politically contentious issues such as bushfires, feral animals, wild horses, dingoes, and free-roaming dogs in India. Untangling the complex and often overlapping boundaries between animals regarded as pests, pets or wildlife remains a persistent and critical challenge in Chapple’s work, including the ethical implications of conservation and management decisions. They are a Senior Research Fellow at UTS. In 2004 Chapple co-founded the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute as a bridging organisation between research, policy and protected area management. From 2010-2025 Chapple taught into the Master of Environmental Management program at the University of NSW Sydney.

MSJ Sophie Chao

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney
Australia

Dr. Sophie Chao is Chair of Discipline and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022) and Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026), all published by Duke University Press. Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Alasdair Cochrane

University of Sheffield
United Kingdom

Alasdair Cochrane is Professor of Political Theory and Co-Director the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC) at the University of Sheffield. He has been at the forefront of the so-called ‘political turn’ in animal ethics and has written many books and articles on the question of animal politics, including: Should Animals Have Political Rights? (Polity, 2020); Animal Rights without Liberation (Columbia 2012); and Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice (Oxford, 2018), which won the Susan Strange prize for the best book of 2018 from the British International Studies Association.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Hannah Della Bosca

Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney
Australia

Hannah Della Bosca is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sydney and an interdisciplinary Research Assistant focused on critical environmental justice and multispecies justice. She specialises in place-based methods that centre community identities, lived experiences, and everyday practices, and has contributed to projects at the Sydney Environment Institute exploring environmental governance, disaster events, environmental justice activism, and multispecies interventions. Her recent publications on sweat and thermal comfort bring a sensory-materialist lens to questions of systemic climate justice. Her doctoral research explores vulnerability as a framework for multispecies justice, with an applied focus on ant-human relations.

MSJ Thom Van Dooran

Thom van Dooren

University of Sydney
Australia

Thom is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Humanities and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia.

MSJ Claudia Fernandez

Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini

Living Imaginaries
Spain

Claudia is a cross-pollinator bridging food, climate, health, and more-than-human governance. She has shaped regional and national strategies, co-leading WHO’s food systems and climate change strategy across 38 Asia–Pacific countries, leading the UK’s first One Health strategic vision at DEFRA with eight teams, and contributing to the UK’s negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Accord to advance upstream socio-ecological approaches. She founded Living Imaginaries as a space to integrate imagination, care, and multispecies justice into how we design governance, co-create knowledge, and drive institutional change. The initiative grows out of the intersection of her policy and practice work and her PhD research at UCL, which reimagines biodiversity governance through more-than-human ways of relating with the North Sea and its connected rivers.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Stefanie R. Fishel

University of the Sunshine Coast
Australia

Dr. Stefanie Fishel is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations whose work focuses on multispecies justice and rethinking politics beyond the human. She examines how concepts like rights, governance, and citizenship transform when extended to animals, ecosystems, and other nonhuman beings. Drawing on science and technology studies, political ecology and theory, her research highlights the interdependence of all life and advocates for political institutions that support multispecies flourishing.

MSJ Erin Fitzhenry

Erin Fitz-Henry

University of Melbourne
Australia

Erin Fitz-Henry is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent research focuses on solidarity-building between racial and ecological justice movements, with a particular interest in movements for climate reparations in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Before that, she worked for almost 10 years on the ‘rights of nature’ in Ecuador, Australia, and the United States. She is the author of US Military Bases and Anti-military Organizing (2015), co-author of Institutionalizing Multi-species Justice (2025), and co-editor of Reparations as Worldmaking (forthcoming). She is currently completing a manuscript about the lessons of anti-colonial thought for contemporary environmental justice movements.

MSJ Jo Gillespie

Jo Gillespie

The University of Sydney
Australia

Jo is an academic in the field of environmental legal geography.  Her research unpacks environmental law and policy impacts for places throughout the Australasian region. Jo is especially concerned with assessing protected area and biodiversity conservation regimes together with environmental rights and rights-of-nature perspectives.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Agustin Grijalva

CELID PLURAL
Ecuador

Agustin Grijalva holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Kansas. He also has a specialisation in Latin American Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a lawyer and holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, where he also completed studies in the Humanities. He was a Justice of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador and was the reporting judge of Los Cedros ruling and other decisions related to nature, indigenous peoples and social rights.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Method Gundidza

EarthLore Foundation
South Africa

Method Gundidza, Director of EarthLore Foundation-Southern Africa and a founding member of the Earth Jurisprudence (EJ) Collective, is a Zimbabwean national who left a successful career in accounting to dedicate his life to work with rural farming communities who are reviving their lost or forgotten traditional seeds, indigenous knowledge and governance systems, underpinned by Earth Jurisprudence. Method discovered his calling in his early 40s through immersing himself in the philosophy and practice of Earth Jurisprudence and accompanying farming communities in South Africa and Zimbabwe as they restore their Earth-centered ways of life, including their sacred natural sites and associated rituals and ceremonies. In April 2018 he was invited to speak at the UN Harmony with Nature dialogue. His capacity to communicate is contagious reflecting his passion, good humour, and deep respect for all communities of life.

MSJ Dieter Hochuli

Dieter Hochuli

The University of Sydney
Australia

Dieter Hotchuli leads the Integrative Ecology research group at the University of Sydney. Their research focuses on how biodiversity responds to the unique pressures of urbanisation, with particular interest in the ecology and natural history of iconic birds, mammals, insects, and spiders of cities, and their interactions with the environment and the humans who share their world. Hochuli is a generalist working on a diverse range of taxa and systems, and enjoys learning from the challenges of collaborating across disciplines.

MSJ Sutej Hugu Guassa

Sutej Hugu

Indigenous Taiwan Self-Determination Alliance
Taiwan

Sutej Hugu, from Tavokan of Siraya people, is an Indigenous transformation mobilizer, co-founder and chief advisor of Indigenous Taiwan Self-Determination Alliance that promotes an inclusive new nation building process for all creatures and beings. He has been the founding Regional Coordinator for East and North Asia of ICCA Consortium from 2013 to 2023, and is currently working with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives on building a global alliance for radical democracy and autonomy following the Nature sovereignty over the state sovereignty for the trinity of language, cultural and biological diversity.

MSJ Ashish Kothari

Ashish Kothari

Vikalp Sangam / Global Tapestry of Alternatives
India

One of founders of Kalpavriksh, and involved in many people’s movements. Taught at Indian Institute of Public Administration and as guest faculty in several universities around the world. Coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan. Served on steering committees of Greenpeace International & India, IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy, and the ICCA Consortium. Member of committee to formulate India’s Biodiversity Act. Serves as a judge on the International Tribunal on Rights of Nature. Helps coordinate Vikalp Sangam (www.vikalpsangam.org), Global Tapestry of Alternatives (www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org), & Radical Ecological Democracy (www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org). Co-author/co-editor, Churning the Earth, Alternative Futures, and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary.

MSJ Janet Laurence

Janet Laurence

studio practice
Australia

JANET LAURENCE is a leading Sydney-based artist who exhibits  nationally and internationally. Her practice examines our physical,  cultural and conflicting relationship to the natural world. She creates  immersive environments that navigate the interconnections between  organic elements and systems of nature. Within the recognized threat of  climate change she explores what it might mean to heal, the natural  environment, fusing this with a sense of communal loss and search for  connection with powerful life-forces. She reminds us that art can act as a  kind of transformation point for ideas and it can provoke its audience into  a renewed awareness about our environment.” Her work is included in museum, university, corporate and private  collections as well as within architectural and landscaped public places.  More recently her work has included performance with her group of Dirt  Witches. Laurence is an Adjunct Professor at UNSW Faculty of Art and Design.  She has been a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill and Australia Council  fellowships; the Alumni Award for Arts, UNSW. She was visiting fellow of Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Germany 2017 and Artist in  residence at the Australian Museum. 2015, she was the Australian  representative for the COP21/FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate. exhibition  21 and the Biocenosis 21 IUCN Marseilles. She was the 2021 recipient of  the Antarctic Fellowship and completed her residency there in 2022. She has had many museum and gallery exhibitions including a major solo  survey exhibition at the MCA 2019 and at the Yu Hsui Museum of Art in  Taiwan in 2020. She was featured in Know My Name at the Australian  National Gallery in 2022.

MSJ Liza Lim

Liza Lim

Univeristy of Sydney
Australia

Liza Lim is an Australian composer, educator, and researcher whose music is deeply rooted in ecological thinking, ritual, and multispecies perspectives. Holding the Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, she leads the ARC Laureate Fellowship Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication, a five year initiative bringing together artists, scientists, activists, and communities to explore creative methodologies for more than human relations and cultures. The research group investigates how music and the arts can serve as conduits for environmental justice, engaging with social and ecological challenges through arts led approaches that advance sustainability with creativity, care, and critical inquiry. for more info, see: https://www.sydney.edu.au/music/our-research/cross-disciplinary-research/resonant-earth-music-ecology-and-climate-justice.html

MSJ Eva Meijer

Eva Meijer

Eva Meijer
The Netherlands

Eva Meijer is a writer, philosopher, visual artist, and singer-songwriter. They’ve written over twenty books: novels, philosophical essays, poetry and academic monographs, including the international bestsellers Animal Languages and Bird Cottage. Their work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Recurring themes are language, politics and nonhuman animals. Meijer writes essays and columns for Dutch newspapers, and is a member of the Multispecies Collective, a multispecies art collective. More information can be found at www.evameijer.nl.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Simon Mitambo

Society for Alternative Learning and Transformation (SALT)
Kenya

Simon Mitambo is a respected cultural expert and community leader, feted as a National Hero for his outstanding role in preserving and promoting cultural values and practices among the Tharaka people. Simon, a respected cultural expert and community leader, was being feted for his outstanding role in preserving and promoting cultural values and practices among the Tharaka people. He founded the Society for Alternative Learning and Transformation (SALT), an organization dedicated to revitalizing indigenous knowledge systems and safeguarding traditional heritage. He also founded Kithino Learning Centre, nature-based school in Kenya that is emerging as a centre for stimulating, awakening and regenerating bio-cultural diversity. Simon has championed the promotion of African values and the unique Tharaka culture, particularly Gaaru – a traditional governance structure that embodies wisdom and justice for multispecies. Born and raised in Tharaka, Simon is an Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner and a teacher of the ancestral wisdom of Tharaka.

MSJ Philiip McKibbin

Philip (Piripi) McKibbin

Sydney Environment Institute, the University of Sydney
Australia

Philip (Piripi) McKibbin is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, of Māori (Kāi Tahu) and Pākehā (NZ European) descent. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Piripi holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy with first class honours from the University of Auckland, and diplomas in te reo Māori (the Māori language) from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. His research, which is transdisciplinary, engages with political philosophy, Black feminism, critical animal studies, the environmental humanities, and Indigenous theory—especially Māori methodologies—as well as progressive movement for social change in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. His article ‘Kaupapa Māori and Multispecies Justice: A Reciprocal Critique’ appears in AlterNative, and another article, ‘Critiquing Indigenous Relationships with Non-Human Animals’, is forthcoming in Environmental Humanities.

MSJ Abhayraj Naik

Abhayraj Naik

Krea University / Initiative for Climate Action 
India

Abhayraj Naik is an India-based activist, educator, community builder, and system change practitioner. His work focuses on decolonial climate justice, spiritual ecology, and transformative learning. Abhayraj is a Visiting Associate Professor of Practice at Krea University (https://krea.edu.in), coordinates strategy and research at a nonprofit development organisation Pipal Tree (https://www.pipaltree.org.in), is a co-founder of the nonprofit organisation Initiative for Climate Action (https://actionclimate.org), and serves as an advisor to a number of progressive social and environmental causes in India and other parts of the world. He is also the vision-holder for: an online resource space – “Climate Justice India” (https://climatejustice.in), an emergent educational network called the South Asia Network for Justice Education (https://sanje.org), and an upcoming centre for spiritual ecology in India. Abhayraj is a graduate of the National Law School of India University and Yale Law School. He is a member of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and the IUCN World Commission for Environmental Law.

MSJ Danielle Celermajer

Danielle Celermajer

Sydney Environment Institute
Australia

Danielle (Dany) Celermajer is Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project at the University of Sydney Over the last decade, she has turned her attention from uniquely intra-human injustice and human rights to injustices and violence against the more than human world and their intersection with injustice against particular groups of humans. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires as part of a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. Her creative non-fiction book, Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin Random House, 2021) was written in recognition of the critical urgency of conveying the complex conceptual recognition of the multispecies harms of the climate catastrophe. Her latest book, co-authored with other members of the Multispecies Justice Collective is Institutionalizing Multispecies Justice, Cambridge University Press, 2025.

MSJ Pablo P. Castello

Pablo P. Castello

Sturm College of Law, University of Denver
United States

Pablo P. Castello is a Research Fellow at the Animal Law Program, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver. Drawing on his previous work at Harvard, he is currently developing a book project on the relationship between language, recognition of violence, and advocacy. His book challenges the idea that “seeing is believing” and explores new ways to change people’s hearts and minds. His research also engages themes such as dominion, the legal recognition of wild animals’ right to self-determination, the inclusion of nonhuman animals’ voices in decision-making, and critical perspectives on biodiversity-based conservation. Pablo’s work has been published in top-ranked, peer-reviewed journals, including the American Political Science Review, Biological Conservation, and Hypatia, and has also been featured in popular outlets like The Conversation, ABC, and Medium.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Anthony Burke 

University of NSW
Australia

Anthony Burke is professor of environmental politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. He is co-principal of the Planet Politics Institute and a senior fellow of the Earth System Governance network. His works include The Ecology Politic, with Stefanie Fishel, and Institutionalising Multispecies Justice, with Danielle Celermajer et al.

MSJ Christine Bosman

Christiane Bosman

Embassy of the North Sea / Confluence of European Water Bodies / GARN
The Netherlands

Christiane Bosman is part of the management team of the Embassy of the North Sea, an interdisciplinary collective based in the Netherlands aimed to represent the North Sea as cultural, political, legal person. After her studies in art history, heritage and communications she worked as an independent public art producer, curator and communicator, with a specific focus on human-non-human relations since 2019. She co-founded, together with TBA21-Academy and ILP Mar Menor the Confluence of European Water Bodies, a network of over 35 water bodies in 15 countries confluencing to give a voice to the rivers, seas, glaciers, lakes and lagoons of Europe. Starting 2026 she is also part of the facilitators team of GARN Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

MSJ Karin Bolender

Karin Bolender

Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.)
UNITED STATES

Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher engaging methods across contemporary art and environmental humanities. She is the founder of an experimental ecological art platform called the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), which cultivates collaborative practices that dig into dirty words and the hidden wisdoms of earthly ecologies through performance, video/sound installations, experimental book arts, and more. A not-monograph called The Unnaming of Aliass was published by punctum books in 2020. She is currently a co-researcher with Kultivator’s three-year artistic research project, Tell It to the Field She Wants to be a Meadow, investigating modes of more-than-human self-determination on former agricultural land in Sweden’s midland region.

MSJ Astrida Neimanis

Astrida Neimanis

UBC Okanagan
Canada

Astrida Neimanis is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities and Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan, on the unceded lands of the syilx people. As a practice-led feminist theorist, Astrida writes about water, weather and bodies, often in collaboration with artists, scientists, writers and other community members. They are author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), and co-author of How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change (2026), with Jennifer Hamilton. Astrida is also Director of The FEELed Lab – a feminist environmental humanities creative research lab in Kelowna, BC, Canada.

MSJ Marieke Nooren

Marieke Nooren

freelance artist and creative producer, working for and with: Elmo Vermijs/ Utrecht University, Polymorf and Gouden Haas
The Netherlands

Marieke Nooren is a program maker and dramaturg working at the intersection of art, climate, and ecology. Since 2020, she has been a key creative at Gouden Haas, where she develops theatrical forms to explore how we navigate the climate crisis. Her work is driven by a commitment to shifting from an egocentric to an ecocentric worldview, fostering a deeper connection with the more-than-human world. Beyond theater, Marieke collaborates with the award-winning design collective Polymorf, known for immersive multisensory experiences like Symbiosis, and artist Elmo Vermijs, whose work explores rights of nature and multispecies thinking and makes these concepts experiential. Through partnerships with Utrecht University, she bridges the gap between artistic research and scientific inquiry. Marieke specializes in multispecies thinking, creating spaces where new narratives and connections can emerge to redefine how we live together on a changing planet.

MSJ Shristee Bajpai

Shrishtee Bajpai

Kalpavriksh
India

Shrishtee is a writer, researcher, working at the intersections of environmental justice, earthy governance, worldviews and systemic transformations. She is part of environment action group-Kalpavriksh (India), Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence), Global Tapestry of Alternatives and serves on the executive committee of Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

MSJ Myles Oakley

Myles Oakey

The University of Sydney
Australia

Myles Oakey is an early career researcher in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney and a research member of the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI). His research is situated in the broad field of the environmental humanities, but emerges at the intersection of multispecies studies, science and technology studies, philosophical ethology, and extinction studies. His research critically engages with various epistemic practices within the natural sciences, particularly ecological and ethological literatures, to explore their world-making effects in the context of endangered-species conservation and extinction. His PhD research, The Death of a Songbird: Listening to Worlds in their (Un)Making, focused on the conservation efforts for the regent honeyeater (Anthochaera phrygia), a critically endangered songbird endemic to the southeast of Australia.

MSJ Anne Obrien

Anne O'Brien

Health Research Institute, University of Canberra
Australia

Anne O’Brien works on climate change and health at the Australian Centre for Disease Control, and is a visiting fellow at the Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Global Research Centre at the University of Canberra. She is interested in questions of how to build the conditions for justice, conviviality and wellbeing for humans and nonhumans in cities and in other human-altered landscapes. Her 2017 PhD, Ethical Relationships to Soil in the Anthropocene, explored how Australian farmers learn to care for soil biodiversity using tools such as microscopes to identify multitudes of life invisible to the naked eye. She has also worked in air quality, waste regulation, regional development and transport research. She is a mum of a 5 and a 1 year old, and enjoys playing music and gardening.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Paul Powlesland

Lawyers for Nature
United Kingdom

Paul is a leading Barrister for Nature in the UK. He co-founded Lawyers for Nature, which campaigns for the Rights of Nature and he is the guardian of the River Roding, London’s third biggest river.

MSJ Daniel Ramp

Daniel Ramp

University of Technology Sydney
Australia

Daniel Ramp is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), where he is an Associate Professor in the Transdisciplinary School. He leads the development of research, teaching, and public outreach in the centre, where the goal is to stimulate innovation, novel research, and conservation practices that promote the flourishing of the more-than-human world. Dan conducts scientific research on human-wildlife cohabitation, wildlife trade, conservation practice, and wild animal welfare, while also collaborating widely across disciplines. He has led multiple ARC and CRC projects, working with government and industry to engage in evidenced-based policy transformation that promote multispecies coexistence and sustainability, particularly in production landscapes. He has published over 170 journal articles and book chapters.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Christopher Raymond

University of Helsinki
Finland

Professor Raymond is the Director of the “Enabling multispecies transitions of cities and regions (MUST)” Strategic Research Council project and Director of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), University of Helsinki, Finland. He has expertise in inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to environmental valuation, environmental and multispecies justice, knowledge co-creation, nature-based solutions co-benefit and cost assessment and sustainability transformation.

MSJ Susan Reid

Susan Reid

UBC and DeepCurrentsCollective
Australia / Canada

Dr Susan Reid explores multibeing ontologies with a focus on human-ocean relationships, multibeing justice, and extractivism. She is a cultural theorist, environmental philosopher, artist, and lawyer whose transdisciplinary work engages feminist and queer environmentalisms, contemporary arts, and science and technology studies. Dr Reid is a postdoctoral research fellow with UBC’s Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies. She is a co-founder of the Deep Currents Collective and of the online project Extracting the Ocean, as well as a member of the FEELed Lab, and the University of Sydney’s Critical Minerals Network and Sydney Environment Institute. Published essays include Multibeing Ocean, Ocean Justice: Reckoning with Material Vulnerability, Imagining Justice with the Abyssal Ocean, Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones, Taking Code to Sea. Dr Reid has also coauthored several essays and co-edited the volume Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive.

MSJ Lauren Rickards

Lauren Rickards

La Trobe University
Australia

A Geographer by training, Lauren leads the La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab that is exploring the complexities of climate change risks, impacts and adaptation in society’s foundational sectors, including the environment sector, broadly defined. This work underlines the importance of centring environmental sustainability in climate change adaptation. Lauren has previously worked at the University of Melbourne and RMIT and has degrees from Melbourne and Oxford. She does a large amount of service work, including contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Chairing the Board of the Climate Change Exchange – a not-for-profit set up to foster knowledge exchange on climate change adaptation between academics and practitioners. 

MSJ David Schlosberg

David Schlosberg

Sydney Environment Institute
Australia

David Schlosberg is Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of Sydney. Schlosberg’s main interests are in environmental politics, environmental movements, and political theory, and in particular the intersection of the three with his groundbreaking work on environmental, ecological, and multispecies justice. He is best known for developing a key framework for understanding environmental justice that encompasses equity, recognition, participation, and capabilities. His other work focuses climate justice, climate adaptation and resilience, and environmental movements and the practices of everyday life. Schlosberg’s more applied work, with a range of government and civil society partners, includes justice in adaptation and resilience planning and community-based responses to climate disasters. Schlosberg is the author, co-author, and co-editor of numerous books, including Defining Environmental Justice (Oxford, 2007), Sustainable Materialism: Environmental Movements and the Politics of Everyday Life (Oxford 2019), and Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (Cambridge 2025).

MSJ Krithika Srinivasan

Krithika Srinivasan

University of Edinburgh
India / United Kingdom

Krithika Srinivasan is Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, and human-animal studies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations. A key focus of her scholarship is on decolonising and reconfiguring approaches to multispecies justice.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Makere Stewart-Harawira

University of Alberta
Canada

Professor in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, in Treaty Six territory in Alberta, Canada, Makere is an enrolled member of the Waitaha ki Te Waipounamu iwi in Aotearoa New Zealand, also of Celtic and English heritage. Her work focuses on Indigenous knowledge systems, ethics and values in relation to integrative approaches to ecosystem wellbeing, multispecies justice, planetary stewardship and global governance. Makere leads the I-STEAM Pathways environmental education and research program for Indigenous undergraduate students program at the University of Alberta. Current works in press are ‘Afterword’, in Worlds Beyond Bios: The Matter of Life and the Matter of Death, Sophie Chao, Christine Winter, David Scholsberg (Eds.) (US: Duke University Press), in press, and Inter-Species Justice and the Right to Thrive: biodiversity in crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand, Ethics and Planetary Boundaries, Jeremy Schmidt, Simon Meisch (eds). (UK: Cambridge University Press).

MSJ Thaler Mathias

Mathias Thaler

University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom

Mathias Thaler is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interest is in contemporary political theory. Thaler regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights and the morality of war and violence. Thaler is the author of No Other Planet (Cambridge University Press 2022), Naming Violence (Columbia University Press 2018), Moralische Politik oder politische Moral? (Campus 2008), and co-editor (with Mihaela Mihai) of Political Violence and the Imagination (Routledge 2020) and of On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies (Palgrave 2014). His papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Environmental Politics, European Journal of Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies, Political Theory, and Review of Politics, amongst others. His recent research has been funded through a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Commission (2013–2017), through a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020–2021) and through an AHRC Networking Grant (2023–2026). Over the past 15 years, Thaler has held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, the Université de Montréal, KU Leuven, the University of Sydney, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

MSJ Petre Tschaker

Petra Tschakert

National University of Singapore
Singapore

Petra Tschakert, Professor of Geography at NUS, is trained as a human-environment geographer and applied anthropologist. Her research focuses on climate change adaptation and everyday limits, structural and intersectional inequalities, and loss, grief, and hope, drawing on scholarship grounded in political ecology, feminist methodologies, and social, climate, and energy justice. Some of her recent scholarly interests entail urban thermopolitics, heated urban bodies, counter-hegemonic heat mapping, energy humanities and energy precarity, environmental humanities, multispecies justice, and resilience governmentality.

MSJ Blanche Verlie

Blanche Verlie

University of Sydney
Australia

Blanche Verlie is a feminist cultural geographer and environmental humanities scholar whose work focuses on climate change. Her research investigates how people understand, experience, and respond to climate change, and how we might do this differently and better. Verlie draws on feminist, anti-colonial and more-than-human philosophy to consider the complex, diverse and intimate ways that climate changes manifests in contemporary life, and how this analysis could contribute to more just and ecological modes of living with the world. Verlie’s work focuses specifically on the ways climate change is felt, lived and imagined, and how this informs and inspires bottom-up approaches to climate justice activism. This work spans climate change education, communication and activism, environmental politics, cultural geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Learning to live-with climate change: From anxiety to transformation is available as a free e-book. At the University of Sydney, She is a Sydney Horizon Fellow in Gender and Cultural Studies.

MSJ Elmo Vermijs

Elmo Vermijs

Studio Elmo Vermijs
The Netherlands

Elmo Vermijs investigates how art, architecture, and land intersect. His practice delves into the intricate relationships between space, materiality, and regenerative processes, offering fresh perspectives on contemporary challenges. Through research that considers the dynamic interactions between human and non-human actors, Western societal structures, and local ecologies, his work is situated within broader historical, political, and environmental contexts. Working closely with local (non-)human communities and stakeholders, Vermijs weaves material research together with environmental insights as part of his creative process. His projects are often accompanied by publications, workshops, and conversations, inviting visitors to physically engage with the installations and their materials. These embodied encounters encourage reflection on a range of social issues and invite viewers to reconsider their relationship with both themselves and the environment.

MSJ Dinesh Wadiwel

Dinesh Wadiwel

University of Sydney
Australia

Dinesh Wadiwel is Associate Professor in socio-legal studies and human rights in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. His research interests include theories of violence, critical animal studies, and disability rights. He is the author of The War against Animals (Brill, 2015), Animals and Capital (Edinburgh UP 2023) and co-editor (with Matthew Chrulew) of Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016).

Multispecies Justice Collective

Scott Webster

Sydney Environment Institute
Australia

Scott Webster is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. His research spans cultural studies, anthropology, memory studies, postcolonial theory, and environmental humanities. Scott is investigating how bushfire recovery is differently experienced, understood and practiced among multispecies communities in New South Wales, Australia. This research is for the ERC-funded (ID: 101043231) ABIDE project in partnership with researchers at the University of Lisbon. Other recent work explores community-led actions in climate-induced disasters and how universities can best work with host communities to build local climate adaptation. Scott’s research is centrally concerned with connection to place: understanding the knowledges and ways of being that emerge from close familiarity with place and (more-than-human) community; the loss experienced when that connection is severed through human action and climate disaster; and, the transformative possibilities of recognising multiple and multispecies belonging. Additionally, Scott’s work explores how mnemonic, multispecies, and climate injustice are often co-constitutive and entangled.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Christine Winter

Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago
New Zealand

Christine Winter (Ngāti Kahungunu, Pākehā) is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Otago and Research Affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute. A political theorist, Christine’s research engages with decolonial framings for multispecies, environmental, climate and planetary justice. At the heart of her work is an examination of the incompatibilities between western and Māori philosophies and ways in which theories of justice continue the colonial project, as demonstrated in The Subjects of Intergenerational Justice: Indigenous philosophy, the environment, and relationships (2022). In decolonizing justice theory so she has two aims: to identify what is required if justice theory is to be just for Māori; and to expand the boundaries of theories of justice to protect the environment for future generations of Māori, settler compatriots and the multispecies community. See also Institutionalizing Multispecies Justice a collaboratively co-authored Cambridge Element.

MSJ Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Case Western Reserve University
USA / RLOMN (Rightful Land of Many Nations)

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer works as Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.  His work investigates and explores how anti-narcissistic formations can be developed in the midst of deeply narcissistic societies and social forms.

Multispecies Justice Collective

Hans Asenbaum

University of Canberra
Australia

Hans Asenbaum is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra. His research interests include radical democracy, queer and gender studies, new materialism, digital politics, and participatory research methods. In 2022 he received the ECPR Rising Star Award. Hans is the author of The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022) as well as co-editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, New Media & Society, Politics & Gender, and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

MSJ Brontie Ansell

Brontie Ansell

Lawyers for Nature
united kingdom

Brontie is the Managing Director and co-founder of Lawyers for Nature. Her work is grounded in the philosophy and practice of Rights of Nature and is centrally concerned with advancing multispecies justice through law and governance. She works to create legal and institutional structures that enable Nature and Earth others to be meaningfully represented within human decision-making spaces, including corporate, regulatory, and public law contexts.  Brontie was a lead legal architect of the 2022 Faith in Nature: Nature on the Board intervention and subsequently became the first person to sit as the legal guardian for Nature on a corporate board, a role she held for two years. She now sits on a number of corporate and non-profit boards both as a non-executive legal expert and explicitly as ‘Nature’.  She was named one of Vogue Business’ 100 Innovators of 2024 for her work as a sustainability thought leader.