The Promise of Multispecies Justice

What are the possibilities for multispecies justice? How do social justice struggles intersect with the lives of animals, plants, and other creatures? Leading thinkers in anthropology, geography, philosophy, speculative fiction, poetry, and contemporary art answer these questions from diverse grounded locations. In America, Indigenous peoples and prisoners are decolonizing multispecies relations in unceded territory and carceral landscapes. Small justices are emerging in Tanzanian markets, near banana plantations in the Philippines, and in abandoned buildings of Azerbaijan as people navigate relations with feral dogs, weeds, rats, and pesticides. Conflicts over rights of nature are intensifying in Colombia’s Amazon. Specters of justice are emerging in India, while children in Micronesia memorialize extinct bird species. Engaging with ideas about environmental justice, restorative justice, and other species of justice, The Promise of Multispecies Justice holds open the possibility of flourishing in multispecies worlds, present and to come.

Contributors. Karin Bolender, Sophie Chao, M. L. Clark, Radhika Govindrajan, Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar, Noriko Ishiyama, Eben Kirksey, Elizabeth Lara, Jia Hui Lee, Kristina Lyons, Michael Marder, Alyssa Paredes, Craig Santos Perez, Kim TallBear

Sophie Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, also published by Duke University Press.

Karin Bolender is an artist-researcher at the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Environmental Futures at the University of Oregon.

Eben Kirksey is author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power and Emergent Ecologies, both also published by Duke University Press, and The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans.