Events

We would like to invite you to the Creative Methodologies and Law: Critical Feminist Reading Group. The reading group engages creative approaches to law, asking how they might provide space for marginalised experiences of violence, whilst centring feminist methodologies of care. The reading group will draw on contemporary feminist critical legal theory, whilst engaging a spectrum of creative, artistic and poetic modes of knowledge production, in an attempt towards breaking patriarchal power structures observed in laws founding practice.

Law is founded from racialised, gendered and capitalist thinking, meaning the conception of evidence can privilege the visible, the numerical, the databased and the immediate. This makes it much less likely to recognise marginalised, historic, and oppressed ontologies, as well as less visible violence, including internal physical pain, emotional hurt, or trauma.This is as the perpetrator/victim binary is built upon colonial civilising discourses of race, gender and sexuality whereby ‘legality’, underscored by politics and morality, becomes the signifier for state legitimacy and ‘civilisation’. Art, literature and poetry can provide spaces of resistance and disruption against laws asymmetric power structures, and are employed as such by a wide range of feminist, queer and post-colonial scholars and practitioners.

The reading group intends to bring legal and non-legal researchers, students, activists, practitioners and artists into discussion, to consider the following questions:

• How can we challenge the binary of legal/non-legal knowledge in the frame of the law?

• How far does law, as it is, allow room for alternative modes of knowledge production to enter its frame?

• Where is our energy best concentrated to evoke radical change or reform in the law?

The reading group will meet at SOAS, University of London onSaturday 2nd November, Saturday 23rd November, Saturday 14th December from 2pm – 4pm. Spring term dates to follow.

The first reading group is this Saturday 2nd November from 2pm – 4pm at SOAS, University of London. For which, we will read the introduction of ‘Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl’ by Ratna Kapur and watch an excerpt from ‘Ghost Story’ a film by artist, poet and videographer Willie Doherty: https://vimeo.com/78252145

If you’d like to join this or any of the reading group sessions, please respond to this email to confirm a place or to be added to the mailing list. Also please circulate to anyone you think may be interested in joining.

Thank you and hope to see you!

Dr Helene Kazan and Alice Finden