Welcome to the online book launch seminar of Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics (EUP 2020), co-edited by Matilda Arvidsson (Gothenburg), Leila Brännström (Lund) and Panu Minkkinen (Helsinki). Recent social and political developments, including the presidential elections in the United States, antidemocratic state policies in Hungary and Poland, and the political climate in the rest of Europe have brought…
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (A Stubbs. ed) (Heinemann 1978) Although she was writing about the black existentialist novelist Ralph Ellison, Hortense Spillers could easily have also been referring to Stephen Bantu Biko when she invokes the figure of a Black thinker who revises “’blackness’ into a critical posture” – “a strategy [and] process of culture critique” – and harnesses…
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (The New Press 2010) When I was a wandering recent law graduate, I found myself washed up in the murky bayous of New Orleans, working at an under-resourced, over-stressed Capital defence law firm. After a few weeks of preparing case work at my desk, I make my first trip to speak…
Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘The Coming of el Mundo Surdo’ in AnaLouise Keating (ed), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Duke 2009) How can we make sense of a global order that is founded upon the act of making “most of the world”[1] out of place, through the motions of the global economy and those divisions from which it has always fed…
Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge 2007) I’ve been called ‘Paki’, ‘flaco n*****’, ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘too Latin American’ more times than I care to count. Including during and about my teaching. But CRT is not about who I am or what names I’ve been called. It isn’t about self-victimhood or identity-politics. It’s about agency,…
Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.’ University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989) 139; Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. (Harvard 1991). Sometimes our language fails us. We observe things in daily life—about our social interactions, our institutions, or the ways that laws…
Donna Awatere, Māori Sovereignty (Broadsheet 1984) My mother’s people are from Ōpōtiki on the East Cape of Aotearoa and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I came to have some understanding of my Māoritanga, or our people’s history. Our iwi (tribe) Whakatōhea are widely acknowledged to have been among those ravaged the worst by successive…
James Baldwin, Speech at Berkeley (1979) I call myself a child of this world of empire. The colony I was born in bore recent witness to British district officers who met with one of my grandfathers. My other grandfather was schooled by Scottish missionaries. Colonial anthropologists and sociologists took intrusive photographs of the women of my family.…
Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (Chatto and Windus 1961) A few years ago, I was offered the opportunity to participate in a workshop in India to support early career academics with their writing. The workshop was geared towards addressing the countless issues with academic publishing and the ways knowledge production in the “Global South” is…
As if this annus horribilis wasn’t horribilis enough in the last few weeks the Conservative government, the depth of whose depravity is impossible to fathom from one day to the next, have commenced a McCarthy-esque censorship initiative that would be comical if it wasn’t a widely recognised harbinger of fascism. These brow-beating heroes of ‘free speech’ dissatisfied only with…
This call for papers is for an interdisciplinary virtual seminar exploring interpretations, intersections, and tensions between the law of equity and new technologies. Drawing on work by the likes of Franco Berardi, Ian Bogost, Adam Greenfield, and Bernard Stiegler, we welcome speculative theories, critical fields of thought, and futurological perspectives. We also welcome contributions from…
Today Petr Kupka and Vaclaw Walach continue the interview with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale, discussing their critical analyses of policing. VW&PK: On the other hand, there are cases that appear to show that policing is not just about working-class people and ethnic minorities. Bernie Madoff was punished for his financial machinations for example. Did…
On 14 July Petr Kupka and I sat down (virtually) with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale to discuss their critical analyses of policing. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and has been frequently interviewed on the issue of policing in connection with the Black Lives Matter protest movement. His latest book The End…
We are thrilled to announce the establishment of the ANZSIL History and Theory of International Law (HTIL) Interest Group. The new HTIL Interest Group has been established in response to the sustained growth of diverse and vibrant scholarship in the history and theory of international law. Scholars inspired by the Third World Approaches to International…
Towards Decolonising the University: A Kaleidoscope for Empowered Action launches online at 2pm on Thursday 1 October Register Here A book by DecoloniseUoK, a collective of Kent students and academics campaigning for cultural democracy, will be launched online on Thursday. Decolonising the University: A Kaleidoscope for Empowered Action (Counterpress, 2020) is a book featuring diverse voices…
Brazil is at an existential crossroads, the magnitude of which we can only begin to imagine. This is a country where the pandemic has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. With only about 2.8 percent of the world population, Brazil accounts for 13.9 percent of deaths from COVID-19. This is a…
Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to reach a conclusion. We, Frei Betto,…
In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores how wine functions not only as France’s national emblem, but also as a myth that helps grasp the ambiguity within French capitalist society. Wine, he argues, is a defining part of France’s experience because it structures the “environment”, serving as the core piece in almost all ceremonies…
The Open University Law School PhD studentships are based on full-time study for three years at the Milton Keynes campus. Students are normally expected to live within commuting distance of Milton Keynes. Studentships cover tuition fees, a generous research training support grant and a stipend (circa £15,285 per annum) for 36 months. The Law School…
Sat 01–Sun, 30. Aug 2020 Subscribe Here where are you today is a new work by Manus Recording Project Collective, continuing the collective’s practice of documenting, sharing and circulating audio recordings from inside Australia’s on- and off-shore detention centres for refugees and asylum seekers. where are you today will comprise a new set of ten-minute…