Reimagining Representation Through the More-Than-Human

Reimagining Representation Through the More-Than-Human

Co-hosted by Living Imaginaries and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy
University of Canberra
Wednesday 25 March | 2:30–4:00pm
In person and online

What counts as meaningful representation of the more-than-human?

Across Australia, Asia-Pacific, and internationally, new governance pathways are emerging. Rivers are being recognised as legal persons. Indigenous legal orders are reshaping how land and water are governed. Citizens’ assemblies are expanding democratic participation. Multispecies justice is entering institutional debate.

At the same time, trust in democratic institutions is uneven and often fragile. Many communities experience representation as partial, distant, or structurally constrained.

These tensions invite a deeper question.

Modern democratic systems were largely designed to mediate competing human interests within industrial, growth-oriented political economies. Representation has been structured around individual claims aggregated through electoral and deliberative mechanisms.

But human lives are not isolated interests. They are embedded in relationships with land, water, infrastructures, economies, and future generations. When representation focuses narrowly on individual preference, it may miss the relational conditions that make meaningful participation possible in the first place.

• What would democracy look like if it were grounded in interdependence rather than autonomy?

• If representation were understood not only as speaking for interests, but as institutionalising relationships of care, reciprocity, and continuity across generations and species?

• If political subjecthood were reconsidered in light of ecological embeddedness?

About the conversation

This event brings into dialogue two fields that rarely meet in sustained ways:

• Democratic innovation, deliberative systems, and representation theory

• Rights of nature, Indigenous law, river governance, and multispecies justice

Both fields are, in different ways, grappling with the limits of inherited democratic forms. One seeks to deepen participation and pluralise voice. The other seeks to reconfigure who and what can be represented within institutional frameworks.

Together, they open a space to reflect on whether we are witnessing incremental reform or the early contours of a more relational democratic paradigm.

This conversation is exploratory and forward-looking. There are no settled answers. Across Australia and beyond, governments, civic organisations, Indigenous leaders, and scholars are experimenting with new models. This event creates a space to examine what these alternatives reveal about the future of representation.

About the Project

This gathering forms part of an ongoing collaborative project developing a typology of emerging practices of nonhuman representation and participation, laying the groundwork for more-than-human democratic innovations. In collaboration with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA) – supported by the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, Participedia, and the University of Westminster.

Speakers

Hans Asenbaum
Director, Centre for Deliberative Democracy. His research explores democratic pluralisation, representation, and more-than-human democracy.

Danielle Celermajer
Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute, internationally recognised for her work advancing the institutionalisation of multispecies justice and more-than-human governance.

Erin O’Donnell
Internationally recognised for her work on legal rights for rivers and relational representation in water governance, including her role on the Birrarung Council.

Fern Hames
Director, Cultural Land Management at Taungurung Land & Waters Council, working in partnership with Taungurung Traditional Owners to advance restorative, place-based governance of cultural landscapes.

Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini

Founder of Living Imaginaries and doctoral researcher at UCL exploring multispecies justice, democratic innovation, and institutional transformation across marine, food, political-economy, biodiversity and health systems.

Andi Stapp-Gaunt

Māori–Dutch writer, educator, and PhD candidate at the University of Canberra whose work explores human–nonhuman connectedness through Indigenous research methodologies and feminist multispecies theory. Her creative practice experiments with “making stories with rabbits,” foregrounding relational creativity and interspecies storytelling.

Organisation hosts

Living Imaginaries reimagines how we govern, relate, and live in a shared more-than-human world. Working at the intersection of climate, biodiversity, food, health, and justice, it combines creative re-imagination with practical pathways for structural change. Bridging arts and sciences, policy and practice, Living Imaginaries collaborates with communities, governments, and international organisations to reshape the political and economic imaginaries that underpin institutions, supporting more relational, just, and ecologically grounded forms of governance across Europe and the Asia-Pacific.

Centre for Deliberative Democracy, University of Canberra, is a world-leading research centre dedicated to advancing scholarly and applied research in deliberative governance and democratic innovations. Our research focuses on how deliberation, inclusive, reasoned, and reflective communication, can tackle some of the most pressing challenges democracies face today, including political polarisation, declining trust in institutions, far-right extremism, and climate change.