Event organisers: Dr Connal Parsley, Dr Conor Heaney, Professor Margaret Davies, Professor Christine Parker, Dr Jake Goldenfein

Event partners: ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Melbourne Law School

Ecological crises, algorithmic technologies, and rapid organisational change are placing under strain the normative conceptual vocabularies of existing legal and political institutions. This workshop proposes to respond by facilitating a collaborative exploration of the notion of ‘econormativity’ in relation to law and legal theory. It brings together two discourses on ecology and normativity that have until now remained almost entirely separate: On the one hand, eco-law approaches that focus mainly on biological and planetary life. On the other, contemporary philosophies of technology that rethink life as intrinsically technical. The former have made significant inroads into rethinking legality, norms and values ‘ecologically’, whether in a bottom-up way based on a fundamental connection to life’s processes (Davies 2022) or by highlighting law’s interrelation with scientific, environmental, economic and social systems in a ‘legal ecology’ (Capra and Mattei 2015). The latter have developed sophisticated approaches to the political evaluation of evolving technosocial ecologies, building principally on twentieth-century French theory (Stiegler, Hui). There, specialist work has emerged on the normativity of technology (van de Poel and Kroes 2006, Hui 2023), but its relations with legal institutions, reasoning and normative frameworks have not been explored.

By bringing these two approaches together, we will explore the conceptual and normative underpinning for ‘general ecological’ ideas of normativity, working towards a conception of law that is intrinsically connected with basic principles of living and technical processes.

The workshop will cover a wide range of themes and approaches, including:

• Key thinkers and texts common to both strands;

• Histories of ecological thought;

• Conceptual resources for ‘thinking together’ the bio-, techno-, geo- in relation to ecology and/or normativity;

• ‘Resonant’ terms for bridging ecological thought with legal thought and institutions, including emerging new meanings of existing categories and concepts;

• Histories of normativity and critical rationales for the turn to an ecological conception of normativity;

• Experimentation with new normative concepts appropriate to changing ecological and technical conditions;

• Mapping varieties and registers of normativity and their interactions;

• Key practical settings and contexts the emergence of new senses of normativity.

This workshop will appeal to those interested in how political and legal systems are evolving under contemporary conditions, as well as those working more specifically on legal responses to environmental and technological problems. More broadly, it will be relevant to contemporary debates on law and technology, which remain largely premised on the defense and reinstitution of liberal legal thought, along with its conceptions of norms and agency. It will expand the project of a ‘general ecology’ (Hörl 2017), which has not yet addressed the question of law or its normativities, thus deepening the reach and resonance of ecological thinking. Finally, it will offer an alternative to systems theoretical and cybernetic approaches to law, which typically understand law as a discrete system, and yet are often difficult to bring into connection with existing normative-institutional thinking and values.

Participants:

• Mark Andrejevic, Monash University

• Kathleen Birrell, La Trobe Law School

• Lev (Leo) Bromberg, Melbourne Law School

• Margaret Davies, Flinders University

• Julia Dehm, La Trobe Law School

• Lee Godden, Melbourne Law School

• Jake Goldenfein, Melbourne Law School

• Ben Gook, University of Melbourne

• Conor Heaney, Kent Law School

• Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University

• Geoffrey Hondroudakis, University of Melbourne

• Stephanie Lavau, University of Melbourne

• Marc de Leeuw, University of New South Wales

• Nicholas Mangan, Monash University

• Roanna McClelland, Melbourne Law School

• Shaun McVeigh, Melbourne Law School

• Caitlin Murphy, Melbourne Law School

• Timothy Neale, Deakin University

• Dr Erin O’Donnell, Melbourne Law School

• Christopher O'Neill, Deakin University

• Christine Parker, Melbourne Law School

• James Parker, Melbourne Law School

• Connal Parsley, Kent Law School

• Stanislav Roudavski, University of Melbourne

• Jathan Sadowski, Monash University

• Fan Yang, Melbourne Law School