Prof. Irus Braverman receives SUNY's highest faculty distinction
Professor Irus Braverman has made the world—its geography, its living creatures, and humanity’s role in shaping and conserving it—her field of study. Now the State University of New York has recognized the scope and impact of her scholarship with its highest faculty rank.
Braverman, the William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar at the School of Law, has been named a SUNY Distinguished Professor. The distinction has stringent criteria: It’s awarded only to those whose scholarship has achieved international prominence, whose contributions have shaped their fields, and whose presence “elevates the standard of academic excellence.”
Braverman has taught at the law school since 2007 and has been prolific, having completed seven monographs, six edited books and more than 100 articles and chapters in that time. “Irus is a trailblazer in the areas of legal geography and non-human legalities, recognized globally for her groundbreaking interdisciplinary research,” says law school Dean S. Todd Brown. “We could not be more proud of her remarkable achievements.”
Born in Jerusalem, Braverman practiced criminal and environmental law in Israel before entering academia. At the law school, she has taught courses on property law, criminal procedure, climate change, legal geography, wildlife and biodiversity law, animals and the law, and environmental justice in Palestine-Israel. She is known for approaching her work through a highly interdisciplinary lens and serves as an adjunct professor at UB’s Department of Geography and as a research professor at UB’s Department of Environment & Sustainability.
A brief conversation with Prof. Braverman reflects the depth and breadth of her scholarly interests and her hopes for justice and healing.
The scope of your academic research is wide and brings together disciplines varying from environmental humanities to science and technology, and beyond. Tell us about the range of your scholarly interests.
My research draws on critical theory and deploys legal ethnographic methods. I have studied trees in urban and national contexts, checkpoints and national parks in Palestine-Israel, public toilet surveillance in North American cities, animal management in American zoos and aquariums, as well as nature conservation, hunting, and the endangered species regime. I’ve also examined gene editing and environmental governance, the plight of coral reef scientists at the age of climate change, marine genetic resources and the negotiations over the high seas treaty, the One Health approach from a more-than-human perspective, and settler ecologies in Palestine-Israel.
Exploring the core assumptions of nature conservation, I have engaged with multiple disciplines, mainly law, geography, anthropology, political ecology, animal studies, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and the natural sciences. I am particularly fascinated by questions of governance in the context of the life sciences and have examined such questions in conversation with experts and bureaucrats—including with conservation and restoration scientists, veterinarians, and geneticists.
Your scholarship seems to defy silos. How has this contributed to scholarly explorations and collaborations?
My work pulls together a wide array of disciplines, attending to the interstitial spaces between them while establishing platforms for conversation among academics across the traditional divides. My coedited volume, The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, has marked an important intervention into the emerging field of legal geography. Drawing on animal geographies, I have insisted on moving beyond the human and coined the term “more-than-human legalities” to that effect. My study of zoos and aquariums and my contemplations about conservation without nature have provided additional insights into the field of legal geography and political ecology.
Drawing on ethnographic methodologies, my research at the nexus of law and the life sciences has examined how lively bodies are governed across time and materialities and how, in turn, such lively bodies also shape legal regimes. In the last decade or so, I also moved beyond terrestrial legal geographies to incorporate amphibious ocean materialities into my critical studies of law. My two collections on blue legalities and ocean laws brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines to contemplate the state of the ocean and to consider its futures. Finally, my legal ethnographies on Palestine-Israel, and my development of the concept “settler ecologies” in particular, have contributed to critical explorations in legal geography, nature conservation, animal studies, and settler colonialism.
You’ve thought a lot about conservation management—how decisions are made about conservation strategies. What questions concern you?
For much of my academic career, I have been reflecting on the normative decision-making processes led by scientific experts in conservation management. Where should the state invest its limited resources: in saving the last three northern white rhinos or in protecting less charismatic species such as insects who are fundamental to ecosystem health? Should mosquitoes be genetically engineered to prevent diseases? And how do we save coral reefs in increasingly warm and polluted environments?
My work utilizes ethnographic fieldwork to document structures of power as those relate to nature generally and to biodiversity in particular. Conservation managers have been making and executing many of these decisions, often without including the local and Indigenous communities who would eventually live with the consequences in the decision-making process. The question that increasingly concerns me is: how might conservation management become a more inclusive, participatory, and democratic process?
In the classroom, do you encourage your students to bring the insights of other social science disciplines into the study of law?
My courses on climate change are good examples of how I teach law as fundamentally and inherently social, spatial, and political. A major part of the courses involves reading critical literature on capitalism and colonialism and understanding how law figures in and configures existing institutions and structures. Reading literature on science and technology studies, we also discuss the limitations of science and the problems of scientific modes of thinking for how climate change has been documented, explained, and addressed. By the time we reach the topic of international climate change law, the students already have a nice set of tools for recognizing why it has miserably failed to address the global issues of climate change—and how, in fact, this is happening by design.