Emma Patchett, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Centre for Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives at the University of Helsinki
Emma is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives at the University of Helsinki, conducting research on law, evictions and environment in film. Last year she was a Research Fellow at the Kate Hamburger Centre “Recht als Kultur” in Bonn, focusing on critical autopoesis, diaspora legal cultures and the European spatial imaginary. Prior to this she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College London (June – September 2016) during which time she explored spatial imaginaries in Australian film and literature in relation to offshore processing and international refugee legislation. She was awarded a doctorate in June 2015 from the University of Muenster, where she was employed as a Marie Curie Research Fellow on the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN. She has had work published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal; Polémos; Symbolism; and Law and Literature.
She is interested in reading law through cinematography, specifically working towards a critical method of reading the specificities of frame and composition in ‘diaspora’ film, which subverts and deconstructs broader legal spatial imaginaries of the normative. She is also an artist herself, making short films and painting scenes depicting the relationship of spatiality to justice.
She would like to collaborate with others interested in the relationship of law and the visual aesthetic as a critical methodology; subversive deconstruction of European spatial imaginaries through art; and the application of legal theory to visual spaces, architectural drawings, housing and temporary camps.
