Multispecies Justice

The Sydney Environment Institute is fostering the world’s leading project on Multispecies justice. Historically, justice has most commonly been thought of as the preserve of humans, and critical scholarship and advocacy have principally sought to ensure that all humans were recognised as subjects of justice.

More recently, the grave harms inflicted on non-human animals and the environment have come to be recognised as injustices, demanding that we ask, ‘what would justice across the human-more-than-human world look like and entail?’ To date, scholars of human rights, animal ethics and environmental studies have worked to conceptualise justice, analyse the production of injustice, and reimagine institutions with a view to their respective subjects of concern (humans, animals, environment).

The impacts of the most pressing problems of our era, however – climate change, indigenous rights, resource depletion, and industrial farming for example – cross the boundaries of these fields and subject categories. This project is the first of its kind explicitly dedicated to multispecies justice, challenging scholars to reconceptualise justice in a way that is sufficiently capacious and fluid to accommodate the vast breadth of our multispecies world. 

Through collaboration, shared imagining and interdisciplinary, multispecies conversations, the Multispecies Justice collective has worked to produce scholarship that penetrates and transforms the three areas of research (human rights, environmental studies, human-animal studies) and scholarship in various disciplines, at the same time as defining a new field.

Looking forwards, with interdisciplinary, multi-institutional and more-than-human co-operation at the core of this project’s design, the Multispecies Justice collective, alongside collaborating academics, artists, activists and practitioners aims to bring desperately needed insights, perspectives and practical ideas to a world where all species and multispecies relations are beset by grave injustices.

To be successful in your PhD application you will have a strong and relevant academic background in the humanities or social sciences, the aptitude to work as part of a team, a strong interest in, and commitment to research that makes a contribution to issues concerning animal and/or environmental justice. 

We strongly encourage First Nations candidates to apply.

The Chief Investigators will supervise the student based on their expertise and candidate preference.

• Professor Danielle Celermajer, Multispecies justice, human rights, political theory, transitional justice, animal justice, institutional transformation and imaginaries;
• Professor David Schlosberg, environmental justice, including climate, adaptation, energy, and food justice; justice theory;
• Associate Professor Thom van Dooren, environmental humanities, extinction studies, multispecies studies;
• Associate Professor Anik Waldow, History of the human-animal difference, communication and the use of language (in humans and animals); affective Embodiment in an interdependent world;
• Dr Dinesh Wadiwel, critical animal studies, disability rights, critical race theory;
• Dr Sophie Chao, environmental anthropology, multispecies studies, plant-human relations, Indonesia, Melanesia, Indigenous studies
• Dr Christine Winter, Environmental justice, multispecies justice, intergenerational justice, decolonial theory, Māori  philosophy

The successful PhD candidate will be based at the Sydney Environment Institute.  

If you are looking to undertake doctoral research that speaks to this moment, takes place at the edge of academic knowledge production and will challenge you intellectually, ethically and personally, we look forward to conversations with you.