Asha (Ramakumar) Amdur
Law and Literature Scholar @ University of Michigan
I am a former public interest environmental litigator (JD '23, Harvard Law School) and incoming fellow in the Sentient Futures AIxAnimals program whose work focuses on entangled empathy, embodiment, and interspecies justice. As a litigator, I specialized in pesticide regulation, endangered species protection, and NEPA compliance — experience that grounds my current scholarship in the material realities of how legal systems mediate human-nonhuman relationships.
My article, "Toward Interspecies Reproductive Justice" (Vol. 32.1 of the Animal Law Review), argues that any true sense of reproductive justice must necessarily include nonhuman animals, using embodiment theory as the basis for moral consideration. I am now a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's joint PhD in English and Women's and Gender Studies, working to develop more imaginative, humanistic understandings of law and power — and to challenge the institutional narratives that legal mechanisms sustain. My research examines how literary texts, particularly Victorian Gothic literature, preserve embodied and somatic ways of knowing that legal discourse systematically excludes.
I believe that the project of moral circle expansion requires not only philosophical argument but richer vocabularies for recognizing nonhuman experience — vocabularies that literature and the humanities are uniquely positioned to offer. I write about these intersections on my Substack, Alive Together.
100% Disagree➔ 0% AgreeI actually would agree with the inverse of this statement:
"If AI goes well for animals, it'll go well for humans"
We are interdependent beings. And yet survival--particularly the contemporary late-capitalist understanding of survival--is treated as zero-sum. This is common amongst social movements: To view success and justice for one group as coming at the expense of another. And while the reality may be that in one snapshot of time, it looks that one is benefitting more than another, if we zoom out and understand how things undulate, it becomes clear that on the whole, when we lift up others, it is mutually beneficial.
I think that when we care and construct a world that honors the most vulnerable, we create a better world for ourselves. However, I disagree with the causality of this statement because "human" ends, as they are currently interpreted by systems of power, are exclusionary of animal interests.