More-Than-Human Rights: Towards a Flourishing Earth

Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a NYT and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of Vrije University Amsterdam and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. He is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms.

Robert is author of books including Underland, The Old Ways, Landmarks and The Wild Places, as well as, with Jackie Morris, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He has written films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both starring Willem Dafoe, and collaborated with musicians Johnny Flynn, Cosmo Sheldrake and Julie Fowlis. He is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities in Cambridge, and his current book-in-progress is called Is A River Alive?, and concerns the global Rights of Nature movement.

César is the founding director of the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program and the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Program at NYU School of Law. He is a Professor of Law and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. César is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose work and publications focus on climate change, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and the human rights movement.

Rebecca is Head of Curatorial Programme at Future Observatory, the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition. Previously, she was Senior Curator at the Design Museum and Curator of Exhibitions and Design at Serpentine Galleries. She has produced independent exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Metz, Kestle Barton and Cell Project Space and has taught on courses at the Royal College of Art, Design Academy Eindhoven and Iceland University of Arts.

Elena is a Latin American interdisciplinary artist and art fellow with the NYU MOTH Project. Her practice explores the relationship between the human and more than human world. Marked and inspired by the movement of water and dreams, Elena relies on her own style of magical realism to portray diverse artworks, through collections, drawings, writings, photography, and paintings. She is also an Art Fellow with the NYU MOTH Project.

A major exhibition bringing together art, science and radical thinking to ask how design can help our planet thrive by shifting its focus beyond human needs.

Future Observatory is the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition.

UKRI’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funds internationally outstanding independent researchers across the whole range of the arts and humanities: history, archaeology, digital content, philosophy, languages and literature, design, heritage, area studies, the creative and performing arts, and much more. The quality and range of research supported by AHRC works for the good of UK society and culture and contributes both to UK economic success and to the culture and welfare of societies across the globe.