Legal and political institutions today are faced with new pressures, from escalating ecological crises and the increasing use of algorithmic technologies, to rapid political and organisational change. These pressures place a strain on institutions’ existing conceptual vocabularies, processes, and underlying paradigms of law. As the humanities and social sciences experience an ecological, planetary, and techno-social turn, how can their insights combine with legal and political scholarship to cultivate a new kind of legal thinking? This event explores the notion of a general ‘econormativity’, as a way to understand the interrelation of the biological, environmental, geological, technological and the social – working towards a law that is intrinsically connected with basic principles of living and technical processes. Join us for an afternoon of panel discussions and an open exchange of ideas.

In the first panel, ‘Towards Econormativity’, Prof Margaret Davies will elaborate on the work undertaken in her recent book ‘Ecolaw: Legality, Life and the Normativity of Nature’. Professor Davies is joined by Connal Parsley and Conor Heaney (Kent Law School) to explore promising connections with contemporary philosophies of evolving techno-social ecologies.

The second panel, ‘Nonhuman Sensing’, uses Prof Michael Richardson’s (UNSW Media & Comms) new book as a springboard for discussions about ecology, crisis, and witnessing. Panellists will discuss their shared interests in the relationship between nonhuman sensing and knowledge production, ecological thinking, and how law responds to nonhuman, logistical, and technological normativity.