The MOTH Festival of Ideas is an annual space dedicated to the interdisciplinary exploration of ideas and practices for earthly flourishing.

For more information on the 2026 Festival, please see the Festival website.

The MOTH Festival of Ideas is dedicated to exploring the rich and rapidly evolving field of inquiry and action pursuing efforts to bring the more-than-human world into the ambit of moral, legal, and social concern.

The Festival has two components.

The morning sessions comprise a closed-door, interactive conference. Debates and initiatives on the rights of the more-than-human world are here to stay. Recent developments in the natural sciences, moral philosophy, and politics have fundamentally challenged the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman forms of life that is at the core of modern law and human rights thought and practice. However, legal thought and practice, including human rights, remain largely anthropocentric. 

The premise of this Festival is that a fruitful discussion of the rights of nature—or, as we propose to call them, more-than-human (MOTH) rights—needs to consider a broad range of knowledges and practices. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars and practitioners from diverse fields and disciplinary backgrounds, including the social sciences, law, natural sciences, philosophy and the arts, to explore the concept of more-than-human rights and well-being from various angles.

The conference will be organized around five main thematic areas:

1. Storytelling in the more-than-human rights field: literary journalism, fiction, and other narratives that engage with the well-being and rights of the more-than-human world.
2. More-than-human rights in theory: conceptual approaches to the more-than-human world, including philosophical frameworks, Indigenous thought, and spiritual approaches that emphasize ecological and holistic thinking.
3. More-than-human rights in practice: cases, campaigns, and sociolegal mobilizations for the recognition of the rights and interests of the more-than-human world.
4. MOTH rights innovations: social, legal, political, and technological innovations for engagement with the more-than-human world.
5. MOTH in the natural sciences: advances in botany, mycology, ethology, physics, and other fields that drive home the entanglement of the human and the more-than-human worlds.

The afternoon sessions, meanwhile, are open to the public and serve as a platform to engage a broader audience in conversations and actions aimed at advancing the rights and well-being of humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all. With creativity and interdisciplinarity at its heart, the Festival will include keynote talks, interviews, film screenings, book launches, poetry readings, concerts, and performances of various kinds by prominent scientists, lawyers, Indigenous leaders, artists, journalists, advocates, and scholars from around the world.

The 2026 MOTH Festival of Ideas will run from May 14th through May 16th, 2026 in London, United Kingdom. We have released the call for papers for the academic conference which is part of the Festival. To apply to the conference, please submit your paper abstract and other information here. Applications are due by November 15th, 2025.

Please note: A registration fee of $200 will apply for participants whose papers are accepted. Public afternoon events will carry a separate fee; however, registered conference participants will receive a discounted rate. A limited number of need-based scholarships and discounts will be available to support participants who may require assistance.

MOTH 2025 Festival of Ideas

The video recordings of the various sessions–from keynote speeches to book launches to conversations to poetry readings–of the 2025 MOTH Festival of Ideas are now available.