Dr Matilda Arvidsson

In this lecture, entitled ‘A Jurisprudence of Gardens of Multitudes’, I deliver the Annual Lecture in Animal Rights Law & Policy, at the University of Victoria, Canada, 13 February 2026. The lecture is available online.

This talk centers on gardens, tracing the interrelations of gendered, speciesist and in-human violence and colonial legal enclosures in the Anthropocene. Drawing on posthumanist feminist, decolonial, and in-human theories, I walk through law’s gardens to analyse historical roots and contemporary legal iterations of control, domination and oppression. The talk is an invitation to reconsider the place of gardens as placeholders of both historical struggles and as sites of possibilities for a radical jurisprudence of gardens: of care, resistance, and renewal in the face of pressing current concerns.