How is the earth written, and by whom? This interdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars from diverse backgrounds to examine how practices of earth-writing stabilize or unsettle the relationship between law, the global, and the planetary.
Cartography literally means to write the earth. If maps write rather than mirror the world, they function as world-making texts that narrate space, distribute authority, and normalize particular orders under the guise of spatial precision. Modern international law is deeply shaped by this cartographic inheritance: sovereignty, territory, and jurisdiction rest on a vision of the earth as a continuous surface partitioned into polygonal units under human control. That this image appears natural is itself a political achievement. It is a way of writing the world that has come to stand in for the planet itself.
Yet this anthropocentric world-writing is neither exclusive nor inevitable. Many other modes of composing the earth exist and have persisted across time: indigenous cosmologies, ecological and multispecies ontologies, oceanic and atmospheric imaginaries, logistical and digital infrastructures, climate and earth-system models. These do not merely represent different geographies; they articulate distinct assumptions about agency, relation, obligation, and the grounds of authority. The challenge is not simply to add the non-human or other-than-human to existing legal frameworks, but to recognize that the very scale and composition of the world shift when humans are no longer presumed to be its sole authors and agents.
As climatic destabilization intensifies, the language of the planetary has emerged as a conceptual alternative to the global , which had itself emerged as an alternative to the international . Yet these semantic shifts remains superficial if they do not grapple with the deeper conceptual question: How is the earth written, by whom, and to what ends? And how is it written through law? What, precisely, distinguishes the planetary, the global, and the international—and how might these distinctions matter for legal thought and practice? What does it mean to think of the planetary as something other than the global enlarged? How does planetary law depart or intersect with other naming projects such as global law and transnational law ? And what forms of law and authority become possible when the earth is understood as a site of multiple and contested writings?
Attending to these shifting modes of earth-writing also requires attention to legal and other expert crafts. Planetary and global projects are made and remade through the expert practices of drafting, interpreting, standard-setting, contracting, modelling, litigating, and enforcing. Asking how the earth is written therefore also means asking who writes these norms, in which institutional sites, with what materials and procedures, and how they travel, sediment, or are resisted.
This workshop invites participants to examine how diverse practices of earth-writing—cartographic, legal, literary, scientific, ecological, and infrastructural—stabilize or unsettle the relationship between law, the global, and the planetary. The workshop is substantively and methodologically interdisciplinary: no single field possesses the conceptual resources required to rethink world-making at planetary scale. It brings together scholars in law, international relations, geography, anthropology, history, political theory, STS, and critical environmental studies to collaborate experimentally.
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