Masterclass
Defending Nature’s Rights: Paradoxes and Challenges
- Date
- Monday 30 September 2024
- Time
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.30 (KITLV Conference room)
On September 30th the LeidenGlobal Annual Event is organised by KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology at Leiden University. Prior to this event is this Masterclass for PhD candidates and (Research) Master Students
Defending Nature’s Rights: Paradoxes and Challenges
Over the past 15 years or so, the global rights-of-nature movement has steadily gained strength. In 2008, Ecuador added the rights of nature to its Constitution, and the State of Uttarakhand High Court in India recognized the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as legal persons, rulings about non-human entities’ right to exist.
These decisions are characterized as much by tensions and paradoxes as by success, and have created new legal and political challenges. Who decides where a mountain begins or ends, or where it needs? Is the idea of giving rights to nature the best way to change how humans and nature interact? Which beliefs should guide these decisions, and why? Is there a risk that giving rights to ecosystems might harm indigenous communities, whose traditions support these rights?
In this Masterclass you will explore those questions together with dr. Shivant Jhagroe (Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University), who is studying and promoting the rights of water bodies in the Netherlands, and dr. Diana Vela Almeida (Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University), a scholar and activist working on indigenous land rights in Latin America.
Programme
13:00 - 13:30: Walk-in
13:30 - 15:15: Masterclass
15:15 - 15:45: Wrap up and jointly go to the Public panel discussion: Should Nature be given Rights? (16:30 - 19:00, Wereldmuseum Leiden)
Registration
As we will have to set a maximum number of participants to the master class, we urgently advice you to register at events@leidenglobal.nl, providing us your name, email address, faculty, advisor and study area.
Participants will receive reading material in advance, to prepare for the Masterclass.
Masterclass tutors
- Dr. Shivant Jhagroe, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University. His current research focusses on marginalised and more-than-human actors in policy and politics (e.g. racialised/low-income groups, ecosystems, algorithms).
- Dr. Diana Vela Almeida, Assistant Professor on Political Ecology of Sustainability, Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University. She works at the interface between the fields of political ecology, ecological economics and feminist critical geography and her research focuses on resource extraction and political participation, green neoliberal schemes, the energy transition, social movements and socio-environmental transformation.
