Eco-social new-materialist reflections for the Anthropocene

Towards the end of 2019 Jane Bennett and William E Connolly visited Cardiff University as keynote speakers for the speaker series, ‘Imagining the Eco-Social: New Materialist Reflections for the Anthropocene’. Organized by Anna Grear, the series sought to push the boundaries of the social into more complex material engagements and brought law and justice-based questions haunting the so-called Anthropocene into conversation with new materialist and posthuman thinking. The speaker series was hosted by the Centre of Law and Society and by what was then known as the Environmental Justice Research Unit (later renamed the Centre for Environmental Law and Policy). The keynote events were co-organized by Anna Grear and Dot Kwek. Before these two full and intense days, Bennett and Connolly joined Grear and Kwek for an interview. (The interview was filled with laughter and has been lightly edited for clarity.)