Epistemologies of environmental justice are primarily centered around the critique of anthropocentrism. This critique has steadily advanced into theorizing multiple avenues of inclusion and connection between the human and the nonhuman. However, post-anthropocentrism is routed through modes—means, theory, and praxis—that remain essentially anthropocentric. The problem—envisioning post anthropocentric epistemologies through anthropocentric means—marks an impasse in the discourse. The emergent concept of multispecies entanglement has provided new possibilities of expanding conversation around this inherent paradox. Building on work by Donna Haraway, Thom Van Dooren, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rosi Braidotti, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Eduardo Kohn and Bruno Latour who theorize our entanglements with non-human others, this panel enlists literature and philosophy to envision new ethical and political frameworks of engagement in discourses of environmental justice.

The presentations take contemporary literary works of fiction and pedagogical praxis from diverse cultural settings to map out new directions in environmental humanities it reckons with anthropocentrism. In so doing, this panel proposes an epistemic intervention that attends to questions of equity, justice, and inclusion by highlighting the specific sites—literary and material— where contact between the human and the nonhuman occurs. The texts under consideration come from categories as diverse as literature, philosophy, plant sciences, and pedagogy. The presentations propose to reevaluate existing knowledge paradigms, embedded in the erasure of the marginalized ecologies, to chart new models of knowing and engaging politically and ethically with non-human others, modes essential to rendering environmental justice attentive to our world’s many species’ spatial and temporal entanglements. Beyond these specific considerations, the panel exemplifies the burgeoning “nonhuman” turn within humanities scholarship and demonstrates what might be gained by paying closer attention to non-human species and, accordingly, our interconnected web of relations beyond our immediate kin.

The panel begins with a pair of papers that interrogate the politics of silencing of the nonhuman and the necessity of new linguistic and epistemic models of nonhuman representation. Jessica Hawkes in the first presentation titled “Unmasking Injustice: New Ways of Knowing in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle” proposes the possibility of new knowledge systems that are embedded in cross-cultural and cross-species ethics of care. Hawkes’ project lays bare the limitations of the current Western epistemologies of progress rooted in colonial enterprise to argue for a turn to Indigenous modes of storytelling. To recuperate the silenced narratives of the marginalized communities, Hawkes offsets the narrative of Western scientific progress with an indigenous understanding of the relationship between environment and humans.

Komal Nazir’s paper extends this argument to foreground the erasures of historical and political agency of the fishing communities along Arabian Sea’s coastline in Pakistan. Her paper titled “Agential Erasures on the Margins of Neoliberal Economy in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing” explores the literal and epistemic marginal ecosystems in the novel where nonhuman agency remains compromised and attenuated under the logic of neoliberal governance. Khan’s novel weaves an ecology of injustice by foregrounding the erasure of agency of these marginal communities by highlighting neoliberal logic of extraction as it applies to the fishing communities, the silkworm industry, and the soon-to-be extinct tortoise species on the coastline.

Erin Greer’s paper “Speaking for the Voiceless: Cavell, Contemporary Fiction, and the Nonhuman” shifts the focus to the problem of speaking responsibly on behalf of the nonhuman. By drawing on Stanley Cavell’s investigation into “forms of life held in our language”, Greer foregrounds the perils of using language in public realm without attending to its structural biases and limitations. Greer’s paper stages a conversation between JM Coetzee’s Disgrace and the language philosophy of Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Hannah Arendt to attempt to incorporate voiceless, nonhuman entities into urgent conversations of environmental justice.

The final paper in this panel outlines an engaged pedagogical praxis which is alive to the productive entanglements between students and the campus ecology. Luke Rodewald’s paper titled “Arboreal Pedagogy: Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Trees, and Campus Ecology” proposes a reevaluation of conventional understanding of the sites of knowledge-making through emerging concept of arboreal pedagogy from critical plant studies. Rodewald’s paper proposes that by directly studying the campus’s flora—in this case, its trees—arboreal pedagogy brings abstract concepts of sustainability, resilience, reciprocity, and justice down to earth and shows how local beings (of all kinds) are enmeshed within shared, global futures.

Each panelist will be allotted maximum 10–12 minutes to speak, leaving approximately 25 minutes for discussion at the end of the session.