Politics of Hope amidst Environmental Collapse: Toward Agency, Affect, and Law for Survival

The Multispecies Collective Dialogue series is our series of events that fosters conversation about multispecies flourishing in conversation with researchers and practitioners.

About

Amidst dystopian narratives of climate change, failing ecosystems, and mass extinction events, is hope possible amidst environmental collapse? And, if possible, how might hope affect how we feel, act, and legislate in response to environmental issues like climate change? This event features work on hope by three leading scholars cutting across disciplines to generate conversation about how we collectively response, survive and thrive on the other side of growing climate-anxiety.

This dialogue follows a roundtable format: a brief welcome, 20 minute presentations by three speakers, 30 minutes of discussant interventions, and 30 minutes of discussion and Q&A with all attendees.

Please register to attend; you may join in person (with light catering) or online. If you are attending online, joining details will be shared when you receive your ticket.

Presentations

Hope, academic community and environmental law by Professor Elen Stokes

As students, researchers and teachers of the subject will know, it can be hard to engage with environmental law and not feel despair.  Yet, of all the legal fields, environmental law is among the most keenly motivated by a sense of possibility and belief in a better future.  Whether in relation to carbon net-zero, biodiversity net-gain or environmental improvement plans, environmental law gives hope a certain legal significance.  In this talk, I want to shift the focus from rules and regulations as a locus of hope to the role of the academic community in cultivating hopeful modes of inquiry.

Hope and the politics of climate change disaffection by Professor Ben Anderson

The paper asks what different forms of hope might do amid a class of climate change feelings that appear to involve little or no feeling about climate change – disaffected feelings such as indifference, resignation, or boredom. Such feelings ‘de-realise’ climate change as an event-condition. Mediated by disaffection, climate change is simultaneously acknowledged and detached from. In this context, I home in on relations between climate hope and disaffection – arguing that an important but hidden form of climate hope today involves hopeful disaffection. Disaffected climate hope merges with other everyday hopes and raises important questions of how and why the intensity of feeling matters to climate politics today. 

Wild contagious hope by elin kelsey

In the midst of polycrisis, doomism and other human-centric dystopian narratives undermine our feelings of self-efficacy and our collective capacity to engage in meaningful ways. The climate crisis is also a crisis of hope. What happens when we embrace our multispecies identities and act in solidarity with the greater than human world? How does recognizing multispecies collaboration and the critical role of evidence-based hope support agency, resistance and thriving?

Speakers

Professor Elen Stokes, University of Bristol Law School

Elen is a professor in environmental law at the University of Bristol Law School. She is interested in the relationships between law and futures, including the roles and responsibilities of legal scholars in future-making, and the capacities of law in protecting the interests of future generations.

Professor Ben Anderson, Durham University

Ben Anderson is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. He has published extensively on affective life as articulated with politics, as well as how futures are governed amid uncertainty. He is co-author (with Prof. Anna Secor) of The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (Goldsmiths/MIT), and Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions  (Routledge, 2014). As well as theoretical work on conjunctural analysis and attachment and detachment as (non)relations, his current research focuses on the politics of intensity in right-wing populism and climate change disaffection. He is currently writing a public facing book on the politics of boredom for Pluto. 

elin kelsey

elin kelsey, PhD is an award-winning author, speaker and thought-leader for the evidence-based hope and climate justice solutions movement. elin’s influence can be seen through the hopeful, solutions-focus of her clients, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools and other powerful institutions where she has served as a visiting fellow including the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kone Foundation, UBC Green College, the Salish Sea Institute, ETF Leuven, the Cairns Institute, and Stanford University. She co-creates intergenerational collaborations to make evidence-based hope more shareable. A best-selling children’s book author, her picture books reveal the intimate connections between humans and the greater than human world. For more, please visit https://www.elinkelsey.org.

Discussants

Dr Jade Arbo, University of Birmingham

Dr Jade Arbo is a Brazilian scholar undertaking postdoctoral research at the University of Birmingham supported by Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Her project, Speculative Narratives for Climate Responsibility: Science Fiction as a Tool to Expand Ethical Horizons in Science and Sustainability, explores how speculative fiction fosters futures literacy and ethical deliberation, helping us imagine more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting our planet. She holds a PhD in Literature and a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel, Brazil). Her work brings together speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and philosophy of science.

Professor Ruth Gilligan, University of Birmingham

Ruth Gilligan is an award-winning author, academic and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She has published five novels to date including The Butchers which won the 2021 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, awarded to the book that best captures ‘the spirit of a place’. Her interest in climate storytelling – especially as it operates across different narrative forms – led to her writing her debut play We Love & Then We Drown, which toured the 2026 Camden Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe and Bloomsbury Festival. She is also an ambassador for the global empathy-building charity Narrative 4.

Professor Natasa Mavronicola, Birmingham Law School

Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham. She publishes widely on human rights issues in journals such as the Human Rights Law Review, the Modern Law Review and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. She is the co-editor of Coercive Human Rights: Positive Duties to Mobilise the Criminal Law under the ECHR (Hart 2020) and author of Torture, Inhumanity and Degradation under Article 3 of the ECHR: Absolute Rights and Absolute Wrongs (Hart 2021). She has advised litigants on the relationship between climate change and the prohibition of torture and related ill-treatment.

Chair

Dr Iyan Offor, Birmingham Law School

Dr Iyan Offor is an assistant professor in environmental law, founding leader of the Multispecies Collective, and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy. Iyan conducts socio-legal and theoretical research on animals, nature and society, focusing on global animal law, global environmental law, critical legal theory, posthumanism, queer theory, intersectionality, and law and literature. His current research projects are entitled: “Solarpunk legalities: prefiguring embodied multispecies futures through queer utopian and creative methods” and “Transqueer Ecological Justice”. Iyan’s monograph, entitled Global Animal Law from the Margins, was published by Routledge in 2023.

Hosts

The Multispecies Collective

The Multispecies Collective is a research group led by Birmingham Law School’s Dr Iyan Offor. The Multispecies Collective is a collaborative group of researchers working together with practitioners to create knowledge, theory and practice for positive change toward futures of flourishing for animals, nature and society. The collective’s work is guided by considerations of: multispecies flourishing, linking theory and practice, change-and future-oriented ways of working, interdisciplinary, and plural thinking. The collective aims to produce research and practice, maintain a community space, manage and connect with a network, share resources and generate impact all in the pursuit of multispecies flourishing. The collective connects with its network through its reading group, dialogue series, research showcase, and hosting platform. It manages a visiting research programme, PhD programme, and other opportunities.

BLS Environment & Sustainability Research Theme

The Environment & Sustainability Research Theme brings together Birmingham Law School researchers within the broad area of environment and sustainability, investigating how law can secure environmental justice—from intergenerational rights to multispecies flourishing—while turning research into real-world change. The theme creates space for cross-fertilisation of ideas to avoid treating environmental issues in siloes, applying a plurality of interdisciplinary perspectives including interactions between the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences. The theme's research is guided by four overarching enquiries into: environmental justice, care and theory; environmental conservation, preservation and natural resources; environmental risk, harm and regulation; and environmental law, protection and other regimes. The theme hosts various research projects and networks within this remit, connecting with its network via a research discussion series and other events.