Underworlds - Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering Underworlds

Breath as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how the right to breathe is formally recognised (or not) in international law, this event foregrounds the patterns of dis/ordering that are embedded in infrastructures of toxicity, and the unevenly allocated affordances of breath and breathing these engender. This entails an attentiveness to forms of political resistance, new approaches to law and normativity, and modalities of political subjectivity that this focus on breath and breathability can foster (as investigated by the Logische Phantasie Lab’s Decentralized Right to Breathe). How, Breathing Aesthetics asks, are forces of ‘extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism’ tied to and materialized in the ‘contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air’? Which political coalitions and practices of resistance can emerge from such emergent configurations of breathing injustice?

The speakers:

Daniela Gandorfer is Lecturer at University of Westminster Law School, London, an affiliate of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, Boston, and the co-founder of Loph, a non-profit organization dedicated to decentralized and community-based approaches towards governance at the intersection of climate change, political reorganization, and new digital technologies. Before joining Westminster University, Daniela held postdoc positions at Princeton University and UC Santa Cruz, California. She received her PhD from Princeton University and is currently pursuing a MSc in Finance at LSE. Daniela’s research focuses on legal theory as well as on scientific and technological frontier spaces – such as web3, quantum physics, and psychedelics – and their implications for emerging forms of normativity and governance. Her book Matterphorics: On the Laws of Theory is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics, a co-author with Steven Swarbrick of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, and a co-editor with Andrew Strombeck of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s. His monograph in progress, The Art of Climate Inaction, challenges the absorption of climate action by expansionist models under late liberalism.

Event Resources:


A Decentralized Right to Breathe, Logische Phantasie Lab (co-directed by Daniela Gandorfer)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, ‘Feminist Breathing’
Lenart Skof and Emily A. Holmes (eds), Breathing with Luce Irigaray
Arthur Rose, Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object
Timothy Choy, ‘Museum of Breathers’
All that Breathes
Natalie Dederichs, Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction
Tatiana Konrad (ed), Imagining Air: Cultural Axiology and the Politics of Invisibility
Achille Mbembe, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
A quote from Patricia J William’s Alchemy of Race:

‘In discarding rights altogether, one discards a symbol too deeply enmeshed in the psyche of the oppressed to lose without trauma and much resistance. Instead, society must give them away. Unlock them from reification by giving them to slaves. Give them to trees. Give them to cows. Give them to history. Give them to rivers and rocks. Give to all of society’s objects and untouchables the rights of privacy, integrity, and self-assertion; give them distance and respect. Flood them with the animating spirit that rights mythology fires in this country’s most oppressed psyches, and wash away the shrouds of inanimate-object status, so that we may say not that we own gold but that a luminous golden spirit owns us’.

Additional credits for Daniela’s talk:

Researchers (audio):


Layla Varkey
Ananya Malhotra
Tiffany Critchlow
Ariane Fong
Nadin M

Oil / Coal as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how the commodities of oil and coal are regulated as objects of international law, this episode foregrounds patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that these materials generate. It thereby traces the multiple entanglements between fossil fuels and the infrastructural and institutional conduits of global power. This also entails an attentiveness to the relation between the carbon world and forms of political violence, collective resistance, and the chains and geographies of global capitalism through which these unfold. How are histories of empire and its reverberations in current economic and geopolitical conditions intertwined with the materiality of carbon – as expressed in patterns of ‘coalonalism’? Which arteries of power and authority can be traced to the infrastructures of rule that the extraction of oil and coal require and enable? How can these be diagnosed and disrupted?

The Speakers:

Dr. Lys Kulamadayil is Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University in Hamburg, and incoming Fellow at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, where she will lead a project on Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law, funded by an FNS Ambizione Grant. Lys holds an LLM from the LSE, and a PhD from the Graduate Institute. Lys’s research interests include mineral resources, corruption, climate change, development, international legal knowledge production, and human rights legal theory. In her forthcoming book with Hart Publishing – titled The Pathology of Plenty – she explores the role international law has played in the extraction of mineral resources in post-colonial countries. 

Professor On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He is specialized in the history and current politics of the climate crisis in the Middle East and the Global South. On is Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of four books: Rishumey Peham (2024), Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (2006). His latest book, Heat, A History: Lessons from the Middle East for A Warming Planet is forthcoming with University of California Press in 2024. Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, he was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a Lecturer at the History Department at Princeton University. In 2009, he received a joint PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from NYU. 

Event Resources:

·      Lys Kulamadayil, ‘Petro-States’ Shaping of International Law’ (2022) Journal of the History of International 

·      Lys Kulamadayil, The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law (forthcoming) 

·      On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (UCP, 2020)

·      On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (UCP, 2013)

·      Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023)

·      Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020)

·      Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2013)

Oceans as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how oceans are formally framed or regulated as objects of international legal ordering, this episode foregrounds the patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that thinking through the ocean reveal. Which material historical conditions have shaped the current legal constitution of oceanic space? Which new legal and political temporalities, geographies, and subjectivities might ‘thinking oceanically’ generate? How are international law and the ocean co-constituted – through its specific spatial zones, its depths and bottoms, its vexing vents, and amphibious legalities? Which critical practices can enable us to think and act in unruly oceans – through its waves, marine mammals, and blue legalities – as the ever-shifting terrain of violence, struggle, and political imagination?

Convened by Marie Petersmann (LSE) and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (QMUL).

The Speakers:

Surabhi Ranganathan is Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. Her work on the law of the sea, its biodiversity within and beyond national jurisdiction, and the techno-utopian imaginaries that today drive the licensing of mining activities in the deep seabed, offers insights into the ordering and disordering of the ocean, its colonial history, and political economy.

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories, Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and currently Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London School of Law. Her work on ‘oceans as method’, the imperial history of the jurisdiction of the sea, the legal personification of slave ships and legal objectification of slaves raises important and urgent questions about ocean ontologies and ecologies.

Event Resources:


Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘The Law of the Sea’
Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘Decolonization and International Law: Putting the Ocean on the Map’.
Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘Ocean Floor Grab: International Law and the Making of an Extractive Imaginary’.
Renisa Mawani, ‘The Law of the Sea: Oceans, Ships, and the Anthropocene’, in The Routledge Handbook of Law and the Anthropocene.
Renisa Mawani, ‘The Ship, The Slave, the Legal Person’ (2022) 87 Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 19-42
Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire.

Additional Resources:


Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setay Adamu Boateng.
Ranjit Hoskote, Jonahwhale.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.
Lee Maracle, ‘Whale Watching, Salish Style’.
Stefan Helmreich, A Book of Waves.
Elizabeth Deloughrey, ‘Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene’.
Astrida Neimanis, ‘The Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism, and the Breathless Sea’.
Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method’.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.

Collections:


The Dial, Issue 4: Shipwrecks (2023)
Christen A. Smith et al. (eds), The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento
Irus Braverman (ed.), Laws of the Sea – Interdisciplinary Currents, including Surabhi Ranganathan's ‘The Vexed Liminality of Hydrothermal Vents: An Opportunity to Unmake the Law of the Sea’
Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson (eds.), Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea.
David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram (eds.), Oceanic Histories.

Reportage:


The Southern Collective, Occupation of the coast – Blue economy in India
Mongabay India
Deep Sea Conservation Coalition
Marie Tharp, Mapping the Ocean Floor

Listening:


The Deep Sea Podcast

Watching:


Deep Ris