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Reading Group: Future Tense. Languages of the Future

29 April 2025, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm

The yellow and orange setting sun.

Session eight of the Future Tense reading group, this time under the theme of 'Protecting the Future.'

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

IAS Common Ground
G11, ground floor, South Wing
UCL, Gower St, London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

In this session, we discuss the ways in which language can be used to safeguard and protect future. In particular, we will discuss the ways in which legal language is being applied to the natural world by examining the current legal case brought by Cosmo Sheldrake and the MOTH activist group, which seeks to recognise a forest in Ecuador as the co-creator to a piece of music. We will discuss the precedents set, the rights of nature debate, and what it might mean for creative disciplines to have the natural world as legally recognised co-creators of art. In launching legal bids to have the intellectual property rights of a forest recognised, questioning whether a river is alive, and legislating on health inequalities caused as a result of climate change, legislators and activists are listening to the languages of the natural world and incorporating them (quite literally) into existing legal frameworks and languages. We look to discuss the possibilities and limits of such work, and the promises of the future to come.

Materials (excerpts from):
César Rodríguez-Garavito (ed): More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing. NYU MOTH Project, 2024.
Legal Clinic, Kings College London: A Rights of Nature Toolkit: How to Protect Rivers in England and Wales. Kings College London, 2024.
Jonathan Watts: "Could 2024 Be the Year Nature Rights Enter the Political Mainstream?" in: The Guardian (2024).
Patrick Barkham: "Legal Bid for Ecuador Forest to Be Recognised as Song Co-Creator," in: The Guardian (2024). 


This reading group is run by IAS Postdoctoral Fellows Peter Browning, Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks, and aims to provide participants with reading materials that consider the future in a multitude of different ways, and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Whether excavating the past in search of the future, considering apocalyptic understandings of the absence of a future, or thinking through the affects which are future oriented, it aims to provide a number of short extracts per session to accommodate for breadth of knowledge and disciplines and allowing for a depth in our discussions.