QMUL

The Underworlds series explores oceans as global sites of dis/ordering, going beyond formal legal framing. It delves into the historical conditions shaping oceanic law, generating new temporalities, geographies, and subjectivities. This event investigates the co-constitution of international law and oceans, including spatial zones, depths, and amphibious legalities. Discover critical practices for navigating unruly oceans, addressing waves, marine life, and blue legalities in the dynamic realm of politics and imagination.
 
Speaker: Surabhi Ranganathan and Renisa Mawani

As part of the Underworlds series, this event focuses on oil / coal as sites of global dis/ordering.
Rather than concentrating only on how the commodities of oil and coal are formally framed or regulated as objects of international law, this event aims to foreground the patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that these materials generate. It thereby aims to trace the multiple entanglements between fossil fuels and the infrastructural and institutional conduits of global power.
 
Speaker: Lys Kulamadayil and On Barak

As part of the Underworlds series, this event focuses on debt as site of global dis/ordering.
Rather than concentrating only on how (sovereign) debt is formally recognised or regulated in international law, this event aims to foreground the material patterns of global dis/ordering that debt generates.
 
Speakers: Vasuki Nesiah and Kojo Koramr

As part of the Underworlds series, the event focuses on frontiers as sites of global dis/ordering. It foregrounds how frontier spaces are legally, materially, and discursively produced and what kinds of activity this production enables and forecloses.
 
Speakers: Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Cait Storr

As part of the Underworlds series, the event focuses on waste as a site of global dis/ordering.
Rather than concentrating only on how waste is defined or regulated in (international) law, the event foregrounds the material patterns of dis/ordering that thinking through waste can reveal and generate.
 
Speakers: Heather Davis and Michael Hennessy Picard

As part of the Underworlds series, this event focuses on hope as a site of global dis/ordering.
Moving beyond modernist modes of seeing and ordering the world – ways of governing often entangled with sentimental tropes of liberal hope.
 
Speakers: Claire Colebrook and David Chandler

As part of the Underworlds series, this event engages with the wild / feral as a site of global dis/ordering. Rather than focusing only on how wildlife is formally recognised or regulated in (international) law, the event foregrounds the material patterns of dis/ordering that the ‘wild’
 
Speakers: Irus Braverman and Floris De Witte

The rippling awareness of planetary-scale phenomena has layered onto existing socio-political challenges a raft of new concerns about knowledge-making, institutions, and the adequacy and durability of arrangements capable of sustaining and improving life in common. Organized around two pivotal ideas—planning and publics—this research project seeks to foster a wide-scope collaboration on a set of practical concepts and tools for better articulating and engaging with our shared futurities. These concepts and tools include infrastructure, resilience, scale, repair, the planetary, law, futurity.