Multispecies Justice and Narrative

The connection between struggles for social justice and environmental conservation has transformed environmentalism over the last two decades under the labels of environmental justice, political ecology, and the environmentalism of the poor. Multispecies justice, a new paradigm that has emerged over the last decade, has sought to expand environmental justice thinking beyond the boundaries of the human species by reconceptualizing who or what is considered a subject of justice, who is included in communities of justice, and how concepts of justice differ across cultural communities. This lecture will explore what role different forms of narrative, from documentary films and popular scientific reporting to science fiction, play in defining and imagining multispecies communities of justice and multispecies diplomacy. It will focus on the strategies such narratives deploy to engage with more-than-human characters, plots, and policy decisions, in what ways they help concretize theories of multispecies justice, and the challenges they encounter in opening up a human – and typically anthropocentric – medium to more-than-human forms of experience.

Ursula K. Heise is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and co-founder of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (2024) and Unsettling Extinction (2026), as well as the book series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. In 2024, she was awarded the Biophilia Award for Environmental Humanities by Spain’s BBVA Foundation She is currently at work on a book entitled Reclaiming Ecotopia: Speculative Fiction and Environmental Futures.

Time: 4.00pm - 5.30pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 26 (South Spine)

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