S.4.5-More-than-human rights: the music of nature and the nature of music

This episode of Sounds of Justice, the fourth series in the Global Campus “To the Righthouse” podcast programme, explores how listening to the sounds of the more-than-human world – from forests to fungi, from whales to waterways – can help us reimagine our relationship to the earth we inhabit. It looks at the role of music in Indigenous and Afro-descendant understandings of ecology and struggles for environmental justice, including in Latin America and Haiti.

* Rebecca Dirksen

is Laura Boulton Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and co-founder and current director of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT). Working in and around Haiti, Dirksen’s research priorities encompass sacred ecologies, environmental justice, and politically engaged music. She is the author of After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (2020) and co-editor of Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change (2021). 

* César Rodríguez-Garavito

is Professor of Law and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is the founding director of the Earth Rights Research & Action (TERRA) Clinic, the More-Than-Human Rights (MOTH) Program and the Climate Law Accelerator. An Earth rights and human rights scholar and a field lawyer, he focuses on climate change, international environmental law, Indigenous peoples’ rights and more-than-human rights.