Parliament is rooted in the french word “parler”, to speak. Notwithstanding the calls to “take back control”, Parliament still “speaks” through archaic forms and manners that can alienate the ordinary person. Not only is the Climate & Ecological Emergency making all our lives more precarious, the alienating forms and processes of “law-making” can itself add to this feeling of precariousness and lack of agency in our political and economic lives. Even though Parliament declared a Climate & Ecological Emergency in 2019, and a Climate & Ecological Emergency Bill is currently before our UK Parliament (as a private members bill), do we the public actually feel any safer from the massive risks to our collective future(s)?
How do we the public make sense of the Climate and Ecological Emergency: through what we say to ourselves individually in our own minds, with each other through acts of conversation, and with each other in our public lives through “acts” of Parliament? In the ALN Social we will co-create a participatory experience with you and with the law as our object of investigation and “enactment”, to explore some of these dynamics of law making and precarity. We will play with the meaning of “parliamentary motions”, breaking down the performance by which our laws are made to better understand whether our “legal home” is fit for purpose.
Mothiur is a lawyer and was part of the Extinction Rebellion protests in April that led to Parliament declaring a Climate & Ecological Emergency. Charlie Blake teaches at the Free University Brighton and the University of West London as a philosopher of speculative thought. Swastee is a PhD student at the University of Sussex working on nonhuman and affective aesthetics of law.
Fore more information on this project please contact mothiur@neweconomylaw.org.
