Anna Grear | Cardiff University (original) (raw)

Papers by Anna Grear

ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relations... more ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship’, began to trace outa new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the on-going work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE) – the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the ‘environment’. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Onati developed the on-going efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Onati Institute for the Sociology of Law – and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and representa weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Onati, Spain.

This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order... more This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order to explore embracing vulnerability as one way to re-imagine human rights for a more than human world.

The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', beg... more The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', began to trace out a new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the ongoing work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE)-the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the 'environment'. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Oñati developed the ongoing efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law-and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and represent a weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Oñati, Spain.

Posthuman Legalities, 2021

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017

Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably ne... more Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably never been more urgent, but the signs are that human rights discourse and environmental discourse have, at present, an uneasy and relatively under-theorized relationship.

Law and Critique, 2020

This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an ima... more This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/s for the Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2020

Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames m... more Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames matter. They bring into view, interpret andin a significant sense materializebring into matteringa set of assumptions, interpretations and practices of circumscription that shape (and interact with), as Gitlin puts it, 'what exists, what happens and what matters'. 1 Moreover, frames matter for law. They determine the conditions under which problems are apprehended by law, and thus can influence the assertion of authority, jurisdiction and institutional responsibility over particular issues. 2 Frames are central to this issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, their significance is apparent, overtly or tacitly, in each contribution. The frames discernible in the contributions are dynamic, emergent, and contested by counter-frames. It is clear that frames can take hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions depending on their location in the emergent energies and contestations at stake in the field in which they function as shape-givers. Frames signal intensities of both focus and of action/inaction, and it seems clear that every framing inevitably involves selection, if not pre-selectionand in that, represents an exercise of power. Contestation, between frames, between the ideological commitments that can underwrite them, between communities and movements both semiotic and material, are also present in this issue. Contestation perhaps inevitably underwrites key contemporary tensions surrounding the dense entanglements between humans and non-humans and convergent and divergent forces, energies and futures in the climate-pressed posthuman ecology of the Anthropocene. In 'Contesting human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council', M Joel Voss is explicit about the centrality and power of framingand of contestationin his analysis. The context for Voss's analysis is provided by discussions concerning the relationship between human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council. Noting how hotly contested the issues are and how fraught the discussions become, Voss conducted participant observation of climate change resolutions at the Council between 2006 and 2019 in order to expose the rival framings of climate change enlivened in the discourses of state participants. Drawing on Payne's work on framing, persuasion and norm-contestation, Voss conceptualizes frames in a way that implies, to our mind, their operation as modes of organizing power: they provide, after all, 'a singular interpretation of a particular

Human Rights Quarterly, 2018

Vulnerability, 2016

Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependenc... more Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the ‘autonomous’ subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her ‘vulnerability thesis’ represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's ‘vulnerability thesis’. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman’s work, as well as those for whom Fineman’s work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019

Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this art... more Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this article offers a critical reading of legal personhood and jurisdiction as mechanisms of privilege and predation. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are, we suggest, the ultimate insider construct for the neoliberal capitalist-techno order. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of corporeal human beings on the move as the marginalized products of that same order (especially refugees and migrants) are confronted by boundaries and barriers all too material in their effect. In an age of anxiety-driven border hardening against mass human migration and of seamless, instantaneous movements of transnational capital and corporate location across jurisdictional boundaries, we examine the patterns of injustice implicated in and between these phenomena, tracing a Eurocentric logic visible in the complex continuities between coloniality, capitalism and the production of precarity in the Anthropocene.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2017

The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism i... more The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments.

Feminist Legal Studies, 2018

This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the... more This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the environment. With an Editorial Board of excellent quality, the journal has already been praised for the high quality of its contributions. Future contributors include: Laura Westra, Louis Kotze, Naomi Roht-Arriaza, David Nibert, David Kinley, Sarah Joseph, Martha Fineman, Paedar Kirby and a host of others.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2013

Research Handbook on Fundamental Concepts of Environmental Law

Redirecting Human Rights, 2010

We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its rel... more We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its related themes) in the context of discussing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the emergence of the modern discourse of rights. We have also noted the sense in which the dominant conception of the rights-bearer as an autonomous and rational subject has produced forms of closure in rights discourse, paying particular attention to the way in which the central case universal rightsbearer is an abstract entity: either ‘man’ (in the French Declaration) or the ‘human being’ in the UDHR. This abstractionism, it has been suggested, plays (and continues to play) a central role in the production of the quasidisembodiment of liberal legal theory, and is a key mechanism in the production of a system of legal rights in which the corporation is arguably the perfect fit for the quintessential legal subject, radically continuous with liberal law’s analytical and ideological closures. In the light of the role of disembodiment in the construction of the human rights universal and the legal subject of human rights, it is now time to explore the role of embodied vulnerability in the UDHR paradigm, and the extent to which it can be said that embodied vulnerability undergirds a rather different theoretical reading of universal human rights discourse — one in which the corporation would appear to be disqualified as a suitable beneficiary of human rights protections.

ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relations... more ABSTRACT The 2012 Onati Workshop, ‘Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship’, began to trace outa new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the on-going work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE) – the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the ‘environment’. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Onati developed the on-going efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Onati Institute for the Sociology of Law – and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and representa weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Onati, Spain.

This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order... more This chapter follows human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order to explore embracing vulnerability as one way to re-imagine human rights for a more than human world.

The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', beg... more The 2012 Oñati Workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', began to trace out a new, imaginative and paradigm-challenging framework calling on philosophy, legal doctrine, policy, praxis and activism and drawing them together in a coherent, but non-monolithic new socio-juridical approach to the important relationship between human rights and the environment. The workshop was part of the ongoing work of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment (GNHRE)-the largest existing network of scholars in the world specifically addressing the important nexus between human rights as the dominant global language of ethical claim and the 'environment'. In short, the GNHRE workshop at Oñati developed the ongoing efforts of the GNHRE network and its partners to contribute to the important task of re-imagining the human relationship with the living world. We were incredibly fortunate to be awarded an International Workshop by the Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law-and the papers in this collection were, in the main, presented as part of the workshop. The others (by Grear; and by Morrow, Kotze and Grant) were written later, in the light of the conversations and notes taken at the Workshop, and represent a weaving together of insights and provocations emerging from the rich discussions taking place in June 2012 in Oñati, Spain.

Posthuman Legalities, 2021

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017

Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably ne... more Sustained reflection on the relationship between human rights and the environment has arguably never been more urgent, but the signs are that human rights discourse and environmental discourse have, at present, an uneasy and relatively under-theorized relationship.

Law and Critique, 2020

This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an ima... more This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/s for the Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2020

Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames m... more Frames and contestations: environment, climate change and the construction of in/justice Frames matter. They bring into view, interpret andin a significant sense materializebring into matteringa set of assumptions, interpretations and practices of circumscription that shape (and interact with), as Gitlin puts it, 'what exists, what happens and what matters'. 1 Moreover, frames matter for law. They determine the conditions under which problems are apprehended by law, and thus can influence the assertion of authority, jurisdiction and institutional responsibility over particular issues. 2 Frames are central to this issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, their significance is apparent, overtly or tacitly, in each contribution. The frames discernible in the contributions are dynamic, emergent, and contested by counter-frames. It is clear that frames can take hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions depending on their location in the emergent energies and contestations at stake in the field in which they function as shape-givers. Frames signal intensities of both focus and of action/inaction, and it seems clear that every framing inevitably involves selection, if not pre-selectionand in that, represents an exercise of power. Contestation, between frames, between the ideological commitments that can underwrite them, between communities and movements both semiotic and material, are also present in this issue. Contestation perhaps inevitably underwrites key contemporary tensions surrounding the dense entanglements between humans and non-humans and convergent and divergent forces, energies and futures in the climate-pressed posthuman ecology of the Anthropocene. In 'Contesting human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council', M Joel Voss is explicit about the centrality and power of framingand of contestationin his analysis. The context for Voss's analysis is provided by discussions concerning the relationship between human rights and climate change at the UN Human Rights Council. Noting how hotly contested the issues are and how fraught the discussions become, Voss conducted participant observation of climate change resolutions at the Council between 2006 and 2019 in order to expose the rival framings of climate change enlivened in the discourses of state participants. Drawing on Payne's work on framing, persuasion and norm-contestation, Voss conceptualizes frames in a way that implies, to our mind, their operation as modes of organizing power: they provide, after all, 'a singular interpretation of a particular

Human Rights Quarterly, 2018

Vulnerability, 2016

Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependenc... more Martha Albertson Fineman’s earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the ‘autonomous’ subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her ‘vulnerability thesis’ represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's ‘vulnerability thesis’. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman’s work, as well as those for whom Fineman’s work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2019

Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this art... more Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this article offers a critical reading of legal personhood and jurisdiction as mechanisms of privilege and predation. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are, we suggest, the ultimate insider construct for the neoliberal capitalist-techno order. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of corporeal human beings on the move as the marginalized products of that same order (especially refugees and migrants) are confronted by boundaries and barriers all too material in their effect. In an age of anxiety-driven border hardening against mass human migration and of seamless, instantaneous movements of transnational capital and corporate location across jurisdictional boundaries, we examine the patterns of injustice implicated in and between these phenomena, tracing a Eurocentric logic visible in the complex continuities between coloniality, capitalism and the production of precarity in the Anthropocene.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2017

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2017

The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism i... more The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments.

Feminist Legal Studies, 2018

This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the... more This journal was founded in 2009 to examine the importance interface between human rights and the environment. With an Editorial Board of excellent quality, the journal has already been praised for the high quality of its contributions. Future contributors include: Laura Westra, Louis Kotze, Naomi Roht-Arriaza, David Nibert, David Kinley, Sarah Joseph, Martha Fineman, Paedar Kirby and a host of others.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2013

Research Handbook on Fundamental Concepts of Environmental Law

Redirecting Human Rights, 2010

We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its rel... more We have already noted the paradoxical interplay between disembodiment and embodiment (and its related themes) in the context of discussing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the emergence of the modern discourse of rights. We have also noted the sense in which the dominant conception of the rights-bearer as an autonomous and rational subject has produced forms of closure in rights discourse, paying particular attention to the way in which the central case universal rightsbearer is an abstract entity: either ‘man’ (in the French Declaration) or the ‘human being’ in the UDHR. This abstractionism, it has been suggested, plays (and continues to play) a central role in the production of the quasidisembodiment of liberal legal theory, and is a key mechanism in the production of a system of legal rights in which the corporation is arguably the perfect fit for the quintessential legal subject, radically continuous with liberal law’s analytical and ideological closures. In the light of the role of disembodiment in the construction of the human rights universal and the legal subject of human rights, it is now time to explore the role of embodied vulnerability in the UDHR paradigm, and the extent to which it can be said that embodied vulnerability undergirds a rather different theoretical reading of universal human rights discourse — one in which the corporation would appear to be disqualified as a suitable beneficiary of human rights protections.