How must we re-imagine justice for the more-than-human world in the face of planetary catastrophe? We begin with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s principle for abolitionist praxis, “where life is precious, life is precious,” which commits to remaking worlds by reducing harm and investing in care. The ongoing climate crisis pushes this further, reinforcing a horizon of extinction that reorients the relationships between other-than-human and human lives and demands more radical conceptions of our collective world(s). A. Naomi Paik, for instance, develops the idea of “abolitionist sanctuary” out of the movement for immigrant rights. This concept would “make the whole world a sanctuary for all, everywhere,” especially the lives “we don't ordinarily see our connections to” like those of other species and the environment itself (Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary). 

Yet, in broadening how we understand multiple and intersecting “chronic catastrophes” of the present, we also confront whose life counts as precious. As scholars in gender studies, critical race studies, decolonial feminism, multispecies studies, environmental justice, etc. have long argued, racialized and gendered conceptions of the “human” undermine projects for justice and forming solidarities across species. Alternatively, Juno Salazar Parreñas asks in Decolonizing Extinction, “What if we experienced this present era of extinction without violent domination and colonization over others, particularly nonhuman beings?” She goes on to argue that confronting the shared horizon of extinction means embracing risk and unequal vulnerability across species and recalibrating care against the reality of hospice. Along these lines, this seminar broadens how we imagine precious species in order to confront chronic catastrophes across the more-than-human world. 

We ask: What does it mean to live justly at the end of the world(s)? What conventions of theory and representation must be revisited within the horizon of extinction? How must justice be reconceived for the more-than-human world? How do we build worlds that take seriously “where life is precious, life is precious”? 

Multiple and diverse avenues of inquiry are desired. Possible directions may include but are not limited to: anticarceral activism, environmental justice, critical refugee studies, liberation pedagogy, black radical thought, feminist and queer carework, multispecies relatedness, ecocriticism, black ecologies, indigenous resistance movements, climate grief or solastalgia, protest rhetoric, and coalitional politics.