Keynote Speaker

Multispecies Justice in Beyond Bios Worlds

by Dr. Sophie Chao

Time: 31 Jan (Sat) 15:00-16:30
Venue: Room 201, Yasumoto International Academic Park (YIA)
Registered Audience Only
Register now: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/mycuform/view.php?id=4006335

Abstract: Multispecies studies challenge anthropocentric logics by uncovering how worlds come into being through the situated entanglements of humans with other-than-humans – from plants, animals, and microbes, to landscapes, ecosystems, and climates. In recent years, the question of justice beyond the human has taken center stage in multispecies and related debates, inviting us to imagine new ways of understanding, achieving, and sustaining fair relations in unevenly shared more-than-worlds. Drawing on two interdisciplinary research collaborations with scholars in anthropology, geography, Indigenous studies, political theory, and feminist theory, this keynote explores the opportunities and challenges of achieving multispecies justice as principle, practice, and protocol. It further draws attention to forms of matter and materiality that may not be “alive” in a biological or scientific sense, but that must nonetheless be accounted for in attempts to theorize and enact justice beyond the human – from soils, waters, and mountains, to ancestors, spirits, and ghosts. In doing so, the keynote asks: what forms of everyday and institutionalized justice do beyond-human subjects demand of us? How can multispecies justice reconcile the needs of more-than-human beings while also remaining attentive to injustices committed against humans themselves deemed sub-human before the law? How does a beyond bios approach offer new ways of thinking about life and non-life, and their historical and contemporary relationship to justice? 

Bio: Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. Dr. Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022) and Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026), all published by Duke University Press. Prior to her academic career, she worked for the Indigenous rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Dr. Chao of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.