Centre for Law & Social Change
CLSC is a hub for connections on the topic of law and social change and a space to generate debate, between scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers.
The Centre for Law and Social Change is a place for projects encouraging interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral and intergenerational collaboration, with a focus on progressive social change and a commitment to active anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial practice.
About us & Contact
About us
In all areas of law scholars, practitioners and policy makers seek to generate positive change through law. Students with a commitment to social justice and human rights seek careers in law with the hope of defending the rights and interests of the vulnerable as against their oppressors. At the same time, both the limits of law’s emancipatory potential, as well as the role of law in structuring global inequality, have been noted and examined by critical legal scholars and practitioners alike.
The limits of, and obstacles to legal reform have been identified in various areas and, for example the potentials of accountability litigation are regularly explored, be it in areas such as universal jurisdiction or business and human rights. If law is to play a role in the transition to a fairer, more equal world it is clear that the ways, instances and methods for legal intervention require deeply engaged deliberation from all angles and contexts.
This centre seeks to be a hub for connections on the topic of law and social change and to create a space to generate precisely such debate, between scholars, practitioners, and policy makers and students alike. We will generate such debate in public events, through publications in scholarly and practitioner journals, in depth research projects, legal interventions and mainstream media.
Contact the Centre for Law & Social Change
Northampton Square
London
EC1V 0HB
United Kingdom
Media
Our members have an international reputation in their specialist fields. Please contact the Press Office if you would like to speak to one of our experts about a specialist area of legal research.
Members
Co-directors
Dr Diana Yeh (Sociology, School of Communications and Creativity)
Diana Yeh is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Culture and the Creative Industries in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at City, University of London.
Diana's research interests lie in race and racisms, migration, diaspora, youth and cultural politics, with a particular focus on constructions and contestations of British Chinese and East Asian identities. She has conducted multi-sited fieldwork on the politics of identity and belonging among Chinese migrant artists in light of their translocal histories across Britain, South Africa, Italy, China and Taiwan.
See Dr Diana Yeh's full profile
Suzana Rahde Gerchmann (Research Student)
Suzana Rahde Gerchmann (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Law and Graduate Teaching Assistant at City, University of London. Her research explores the gendered aspects of legal subjectivity, focusing on the relationship between law, gender and capital and the role of law (or the limits of law) in liberation. In this research, Suzana is supervised by Dr Grietje Baars and Dr Sabrina Germain and draws from Marxist Feminist and decolonial perspectives. She is inspired to challenge everyday injustices. Above all, she wants to do her part in social change.
See Suzana Rahde Gerchmann's full profile
Dr Mazen Masri (Law Academic Programmes)
Dr Mazen Masri joined the City Law School as a lecturer in September 2013. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and York University in Toronto, Canada.
Mazen's areas of teaching and research are constitutional law and public international law with special interest in comparative constitutionalism, constitutional theory, human rights law and equality. Mazen's scholarly work explores the interaction between law and broader social, political and economic questions. His current research explores the role of settler-colonialism in shaping law. In addition to law, Mazen has an interest in the theory and practice of academic freedom.
See Dr Mazen Masri's full profile
Santosh Anand (Research Student)
Santosh Anand is a doctoral researcher at the City Law School. His research seeks to critically study the historical formation and contemporary meaning of the concept of international crime under international law. He focuses specifically on whether the conceptual essence of international crime is obtained in how it helps institute a specific relationship of authority between international law and third world states.
Santosh's research is being supervised by Dr. Grietje Baars and Dr. Mazen Masri. He is interested in the tradition of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and is invested in understanding the role of international law in the preservation of unjust international order.
Natasha Mutch-Vidal (The Bar Standards Board)
Natasha Mutch-Vidal is the Diversity, Inclusion, and Well-being manager at the Bar Standards Board. She joined the City in 2019 as a Student Experience Officer, supporting estranged students, students with caring responsibilities, asylum-seeking students, and care-leaving students. From 2021 to 2023, she was City University's Senior EDI Officer for Race Equality, based in the Office for Institutional Equity and Inclusion.
She has worked in EDI for 6 years with her first role as a sabbatical officer for Equality and Diversity at Leeds University Union in 2017 where she won Black Student's Officer of the Year from the National Union of Students. She has most recently supported City's successful application for Race Equality Charter Award and runs a platform called Diversify your Mind for any staff member at City to develop on their anti-racist journey. Aside to this, she is a carer for her grandmother and a trustee for Carers Trust representing the needs of young carers and young adult carers.
Members
Dr Swethaa Ballakrishnen (University of California Irvine)
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law, globalization and stratification from a critical feminist perspective. Particularly, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities. Together, these motivations have resulted in three main areas of empirical inquiry.
The first is a set of interrelated projects that analyze gender inequality and representation through the lens of comparative legal institutions. The second concentrates on inclusivity in global legal education and the resultant implications for organizational diversity within the legal profession. A third emerging field of interest focuses on transnational migration and its implications for intergenerational mobility, international human rights, and transnational family law.
Scholarship from these projects has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Fordham Law Review, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Their first book, Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press: 2021), unpacks the case of unintentional gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals; a second book Invisible Institutions (Hart Publishing: 2021, ed. with Sara Dezalay) brings together cross-subjective perspectives on legal globalization; and a third forthcoming book Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (Zubaan Books, with Kalpana Kannabiran) investigates the gendered legacies of India’s privacy jurisprudence.
See Dr Swethaa Ballakrishnen's full profile
Dr Hannah Franzki (Free University Berlin)
Hannah Franzki is a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Studies (INTERACT) at Free University Berlin, where she oversees a project that is concerned with the legal construction of corporate responsibility and the way it shapes our understanding of violence in a global capitalist economy.
Before joining the Free University, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Law at Bremen University, Germany. Hannah studied politics and international law in Marburg (Germany), Montevideo (Uruguay) and Warwick (UK). She holds a PhD from Birkbeck College/University of London. Her wider research interests include critical legal theory, Walter Benjamin, philosophy of history, international political economy, and postcolonial theory.
See Dr Hannah Franzki's full profile on the INTERACT website
Amelia Spooner (Columbia University)
Amelia Spooner is a PhD candidate in History at Columbia University specialising in the social and political history of law in the French empire. Methodologically, her work is informed by historical sociology and critical geography, comparative and transimperial histories, and theorisations of racial capitalism and social reproduction.
Amelia's dissertation looks at the legal and extralegal project to define and manage work and workers in French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion Island after the second abolition of slavery (1830s–1870s). It seeks to uncover how the regulation of "free labour" produced both marketable commodities and particular relations of domination: racialised, gendered, and classed divisions among workers across French colonial space.
See Amelia Spooner's full profile
Dr Alejandra Azuero-Quijano (Swarthmore College)
Alejandra Azuero-Quijano is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. Her work focuses on the anthropology of legal knowledge(s), particularly those produced through criminal detection, investigation, and prosecution.
Azuero-Quijano has written on the rise of new forensic practices at the Nuremberg Trials and is currently working on a project on the financialization of forensics in Colombia's political transition. She holds an SJD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
See Dr Alejandra Azuero-Quijano's full profile
Dr Sophie Chamas (SOAS, University of London)
Sophie Chamas is a lecturer in gender studies at SOAS, University of London. Their research sits at the intersection of feminist and queer political theory, Middle East Studies, political economy, and cultural studies.
Their work is focused on the study of the life, death, and afterlife of the radical political imagination in the Middle East and its diaspora. Their research overall focuses on the consequences for activism and the political imagination of neoliberalism’s temporal effects.
See Dr Sophie Chamas' full profile
Dr Tanzil Chowdhury (Queen Mary University of London)
Tanzil Chowdhury is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Public Law at Queen Mary University of London and the Co-Director for the Centre of Law and Society in a Global Context. His research focusses on Public law and accumulation by dispossession. He has previously written on war powers, constitutionalism in the British Overseas Territories, and published a monograph titled ‘Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment’. Tanzil has also contributed to public discussion and written several pieces on a range of social movements primarily around issues of race and policing (with a chapter in an edited collection titled ‘Abolishing the Police’)
Tanzil was a co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project and helped set up the Greater Manchester Law Centre. He currently sits on the Board of Advisors for the Legal Department at the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust’s Rights and Justice Committee. He was previously a member of the National Executive Committee of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Tanzil previously worked in the Pro Bono Offices of Singapore’s Subordinate courts, and has spent much time on twinning and teaching projects in the Occupied Palestine Territories. He maintains a commitment to labour organising and community-oriented projects.
Tanzil was previously a Research Fellow at Birmingham Law School, where he assisted on a report examining key provisions of Gibraltar’s 2006 Constitution for the Territory’s Parliamentary Select Committee on Constitutional Reform, and was the President’s Doctoral Scholar at the University of Manchester. He was also a Research Associate at the University of Essex and has held visiting positions at the New School, (New York), New York Law School (New York), Hong Kong University (Hong Kong), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris), Yeshiva University (New York City), and the Université Catholique de Lille (Paris).
See Dr Tanzil Chowdhury's full profileDr Vidya Kumar (SOAS, University of London)
Vidya is an Associate Professor of Law at SOAS, where she teaches Public Law, Public International Law and Critical Space Law.
Dr Mai Taha (LSE)
Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor of Human Rights, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
See Dr Mai Taha's full profile
Dr Dominic Davies (English, School of Culture and Creativity - City, University of London)
Dom Davies is a Senior Lecturer in English in the Department of Media, Culture, and Creative Industries at City, University of London. Dom's research focuses on the broad themes of colonial, postcolonial, and world literature; the cultural politics of nation, race, capitalism, and the climate; and the imagination and representation of infrastructure.
He is the author of two academic monographs and several book chapters and articles on these topics. His first trade book, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, is published by Lawrence & Wishart.
See Dr Dominic Davies' full profile
Reed Puc (Research Student - English, School of Culture and Creativity - City, University of London)
Reed Puc is a PhD student at City University of London. Their research focuses on superheroes, policing, and urban life. He is passionate about abolitionist pedagogy and tabletop games as discursive learning technologies. His scholarship on Marvel's The Punisher and queer masculinity has appeared in the Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture.
Dr Sabrina Germain (Law Academic Programmes)
Dr Sabrina Germain is a Senior Lecturer at the City Law School, a member of City University’s Centre for Healthcare Innovation Research (CHIR), and a research associate at the Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Culture in Health Law and the Policy and the Health Hub: Politics, Organisations and Law (University of Montreal, Canada). She is also the Society of Legal Scholar (SLS) co-convenor of the Health Law section.
Dr Germain’s research interests are in the field of healthcare law and policy and bioethics. She focuses on questions of distributive justice (resource allocation and access to healthcare services) and the role of medical professionals in the healthcare law making process.
Her current research projects include a study on 1) the role of medical professionals in shaping healthcare law during COVID-19 in England, 2) a comparative project on the role of the medical profession in Canadian and British healthcare reforms, and 3) an analysis of inequalities in access to healthcare for ethnic minorities and migrant women during the COVID-19 pandemic with Dr Adrienne Yong (City).
See Dr Sabrina Germain's full profile
Purity Ajoko (LLB graduate)
Purity Ajoko is an LLB graduate from City, where she was also the Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Student’s Officer. Her focus is to address and tackle issues affecting BAME groups, all forms of racism, promote inclusivity and individual engagement.
During Black History Month, she attended the Student Union’s ‘Decolonizing City’ panel talk event where she and other panelists discussed what decolonization means and how City University should be decolonized.
As a woman of color and a law student herself, she knows first-hand what it feels like. She is a committed member that wants to drive social, academic, and structural change in the law school, and is hoping to do so with the help of BAME LLB students.
Dr Shuli Branson (author)
Shuli Branson is a Jewish transfemme anarchist writer, teacher, organiser, musician and artist. Shuli's book, Practical Anarchism: A Daily Guide, was just published by Pluto Press. Scott translated The Abolition of Prison by Jacques Lesage de la Haye (AK Press) and Gay Liberation After May '68 by Guy Hocquenghem (Duke University Press). Their co-edited volume, Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, is forthcoming from PM Press. Shuli is also a co-host on the anarchist radio show/podcast The Final Straw Radio.
Dr Shreeta Lakhani (SOAS)
Shreeta Lakhani is a researcher and educator whose work is located in the nexuses between, gender, sexuality, migration, culture, political economy, empire and race. She is the current convenor of the MA Gender, Sexuality in Global Politics at the Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS. Her research interests and pedagogy are informed by her work and activism on abolition. In particular, she is interested in feminist and queer imaginations of practising day to day utopia through both organising and creating networks of care and joy.
Dr Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia)
Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. She is also Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, QMUL. She is the author of Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020).
Dr Mikki Stelder (University of Amsterdam)
Mikki Stelder (they/them) is an antidisciplinary researcher and writer whose work traverses oceans, anticolonial struggles, and queer transfeminist thought and praxis. Their work examines the relationship between Dutch maritime imagination and imperialist expansion, and how water holds potential for crafting radical and liberatory futures.
It is situated at the intersection of critical ocean studies, Black and Indigenous studies, and anticolonial critique. They are an Assistant Professor of Global Arts and Politics at the University of Amsterdam.
Dr Foluke Adebisi (University of Bristol)
Dr Foluke Ifejola Adebisi is an Associate Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol. Her scholarship focuses mainly on the relationship between theories of decolonisation and how they do and can interact with legal knowledge. Thus, her scholarly work is concerned with what happens at the intersection of legal education, law, society, and a history of changing ideas of what it means to be human. She has written widely in this area, for example: "Should We Rethink the Purposes of the Law School? A Case for Decolonial Thought in Legal Pedagogy." published in Amicus Curiae in 2020. She also edited a special issue for the Law Teacher journal on decolonisation in 2019. She found and runs Forever Africa Conference and Events (FACE), a Pan-African interdisciplinary conference. She blogs about her scholarship and pedagogy on her website ‘Foluke’s African Skies’ at https://FolukeAfrica.com. Her monograph “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility” will be published by Bristol University Press in of March 2023.
Dr Vanja Hamzić (SOAS)
Dr Vanja Hamzić is Reader in Law, History and Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Vanja’s work principally considers colonial, postcolonial and decolonial subjectivity making—with a particular focus on gender nonconformity— in South and Southeast Asia, West Africa and Louisiana. Vanja’s books include Control and Sexuality: The Revival of Zinā Laws in Muslim Contexts (with Ziba Mir Hosseini, 2010) and Sexual and Gender Diversity in the Muslim World: History, Law and Vernacular Knowledge (2016, 2019). Vanja’s current book project addresses gender diversity and cosmological pluralism in eighteenth-century Senegambia as well as the ways enslaved gender nonconforming West Africans have survived the Middle Passage and the gender regime of colonial Louisiana. Vanja was a 2016/17 Member at the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Partner institutions
Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context / Queen Mary University of London
Founded in 2013, the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context (CLSGC) is a home for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research into the global dimensions of law and society.
Find more about the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context
Centre for Gender Studies / SOAS
The Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS is an interdisciplinary space promoting research and teaching on gender and sexuality with particular reference to Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas. Since its inception in 2005, CGS has become a hub of research and training working to support anti-racist feminisms and social movements challenging normative constructions of gender and sexuality.
Find more about the Centre for Gender Studies
Centre for Research on Race and Law / Birkbeck
Launched in 2017, the Centre for Research on Race and Law brings together work in Birkbeck's School of Law and further afield on the conceptual and practical connections between race and law. Many other disciplines consider various issues through the lens of race, but it is much rarer for race to be used as an explicit analytical framework within the discipline of law.
Find more about the Centre for Research on Race and Law
Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice (SeRGJ) / Kent
The Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice (SeRGJ) advances critical and interdisciplinary research that is theoretically informed and policy-relevant. We are based in Kent Law School and membership is made up of interested academics and doctoral students based at the University of Kent.
Find more about the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice
Centre for Law, Gender, Race and Sexuality / Westminster
The Centre for Law, Race, Gender and Sexuality adopts a critical, interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to legal scholarship which is theoretical as well as practical and grounded.
The Centre is committed to creating connections with and between researchers whose work is concerned with the interface between law and the body, and particularly in exploring the complex relationship between law, race, gender and sexuality.
Find more about the Centre for Law, Gender, Race and Sexuality
Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law / SOAS
Building on SOAS’s unique remit to develop research on the global south, the Centre for the study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law (CCEIL) is a hub for inter-disciplinary collaboration and research on public international law and its historical and contemporary relationship to colonialism and empire.
Find more about the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law
Events & Recordings
Events
Pashukanis and the Turbulence of the Present
Thursday, 18 July, 5 pm (BST) - 1 pm (ET), on Zoom.
The Centre for Law & Social Change is honoured to host a roundtable with our Co-Director, Dr Grietje Baars (City Law School, City, University of London), Tapji Garba (York University) and author Cordelia Belton.
It's been 100 years since the publication of Pashukanis Law and Marxism, where he argues that capitalist social forms are inseparable from legal subjectivity and the transition to communism means overcoming both law and the state. We live in a period of transition characterized by the rise of right-wing nationalism, international conflict, genocide, and climate instability. Pashukanis and the turbulence of the present is a roundtable on law, transition, and crisis, followed by a conversation where we try to link theory to praxis. What would or does the transition to a world beyond law look like? what would be needed in terms of alternative practices, spaces, social forms? What do we need to destroy (including structures and ideas), and what needs to be built? What/who can we draw inspiration from and are we/people already doing? Please register here.
Speakers:
Tapji Garba (they/them) is an MA student in Social and Political Thought at York University. They work on political theology, political economy, and Black studies.
Cordelia Belton works at the corner of communist political theory and the sort of philosophical question of how it is that we act.
Dr Grietje Baars (they/them) works on the relationship between law & capital, using queer and Marxist theory to understand (and ultimately subvert) the constitutive, ordering and ideological functions of law. Their current project, ‘Queer Subjects of Capital’ is an historical-materialist analysis of how sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered and sexualised subjectivity have been and are configured (tied up with race and racialised subjectivity) to support the needs of capital, foregrounding the role of law in this process. Grietje put legal subjectivity at the centre of their analysis and this connects their earlier work on the corporate legal subject with the current work on the Queer/Trans legal subject, and liberation. Their first monograph (The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Brill, 2019/Haymarket 2020) offers a Radical Perspective on the Role of Law in the Global Political Economy. Grietje co-edited The Corporation, a Critical, Multidisciplinary Handbook (CUP 2017) and has a background in corporate legal practice and human rights in the Middle East. They are currently a Reader at the City Law School and a founder and co-director of the Centre for Law & Social Change.
'Concerning Genocide' - Workshop with Prof Vasuki Nesiah (Hybrid)
Wednesday, 13 March, 3-5 pm, City, University of London - Moot Court Room (TG14) - City Law School - Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
We are honoured to welcome Prof. Vasuki Nesiah of NYU to the Centre for Law & Social Change. Prof Nesiah's lecture is entitled "A Genocide by Any Other Name Would Smell as Foul". She will touch on the Herrero Genocide in German South-West Africa as well as the recent Namibian intervention in the ICJ Genocide case brought by South Africa regarding Gaza.
You may wish to listen to the Countersign podcast interview with Prof. Nesiah in advance of the lecture.
Please register here: Prof. Vasuki Nesiah - 'Concerning genocide' at Centre for Law & Social Change event tickets from TicketSource
'Colonialism and EU Law' - Lecture with Dr Hanna Eklund
Please note that this event has been postponed. A new date will be released soon.
The Institute for the Study of European Law (ISEL) and the Centre for Law & Social Change are delighted to invite you to a talk with Dr Hanna Eklund.
Dr Eklund’s talk will focus on her research on Colonialism and EU Law, most recently published as ‘Peoples, Inhabitants and Workers: Colonialism in the Treaty of Rome’ in the latest issue of the European Journal of International Law.
She will also discuss a forthcoming edited volume to be published by OUP in 2024/25. The edited book will offer an in-depth examination of the ways in which the economic, legal, ideological and political structures of colonialism have shaped the EU legal order.
'Decolonising Minority Rights Discourse' - Workshop with Prof. Mohammad Shahabuddin (Hybrid)
Wednesday, 21 February, 1-3 pm, City, University of London - Moot Court Room (TG14) - City Law School - Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
The Centre for Law & Social Change is excited to announce the public lecture by Prof. Mohammad Shahabuddin (Birmingham Law School), on the topic of ‘Decolonisation and Minority Rights’. The lecture will build on the introduction to his book Minorities and the Making of Postcolonial States in International Law (CUP 2021) and the new article on ‘Decolonising Minority Rights Discourse’ (open access).
Professor Mohammad Shahabuddin teaches and researches international law and human rights with a special focus on the history and theory of international law, ethnicity and nationalism, and human rights. His teaching and research are informed by critical, postcolonial, and TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship.
LGBTQI+ History Month: Queer Solidarities with Palestine
Thursday, 15 February, 6-8 pm, City, University of London - Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
The Centre for Law & Social Change presents the following panel to discuss race, religion and sexuality in today's global context with a particular focus on Queer Solidarities with Palestine, for our LGBTQI+ History Month event: Dr Abeera Khan (SOAS), Elias Jahshan (editor of This Arab is Queer), Dr Samer Anabtawi (UCL), Dr Howie Rechavia-Taylor (LSE) and Dr Grietje Baars (City). The discussion will be chaired by Dr Karis Campion (City).
ICJ Gaza Genocide Case - Special Session
Monday, 12 February, 3:30-5 pm, City, University of London - in BG02 Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
The Centre for Law & Social Change's Co-Directors, Dr Grietje Baars and Dr Mazen Masri, will provide a special session on the ICJ case brought by South Africa last December, claiming Israel is violating the Genocide Convention in its current military operation in Gaza. They will explain the application, the Court's interim ruling and open space for Q&A and discussion.
This event is open to City students from all degree programmes.
Approaching the Field - Seminar
Monday, April 24, 1-2 pm, City Law School Room TG13 - Sebastian Building - Sebastian Street, Northampton Square - London EC1V 0HB.
Field research methods used by the Visual Storyboards project. Centre for New Economics Studies, OP Jindal Global University, India.
Public exhibition from midday.
Public talk and discussion 1 - 2 pm.
Speakers: Professor Deepanshu Mohan and Jignesh Mistry
Introduced by: Sandhya Drew, Centre for Law & Social Change
Visual Storyboards, a methodological and pedagogical experiment, develops audio-visual models of documentation in social science studies and ethnographic research, documenting the lives-livelihoods of marginalised, vulnerable populations across rural and urban India.
Research work so far has been in India, studying intersecting thematic areas of interdisciplinary research scholarship encompassing fields of: development studies; migration and mobility studies; social psychology; political sociology of work; development economics; public law and development.
The model has the potential for use elsewhere.
More details on the stories completed by Visual Storyboards can be accessed from its website and video essays.
The exhibition will be a display of photographic prints and commentary from the team’s selection.
About the speakers
Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics and Director at the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India. He is a Visiting Professor of Economics at the School of International Development and Global Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa, and a Visiting Professor to the Department of Economics, Carleton University, Ottawa. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at the School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa. His most recent book: Strongmen Saviours: A Political Economy of Populism in India, Turkey, Russia and Brazil was published by Routledge London and New York in September 2022.
Jignesh Mistry is a Photographer and a Field Researcher and currently leads the Visual Storyboard Team at the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P Jindal Global University, India. Jignesh also conducts photography workshops for students enrolled in academic institutions. He has conducted workshops for the Department of Communication and Journalism, Ranade Institute, Pune, Jindal Global Business School, Jindal School of Banking and Finance, and Centre for Civil Society (CCS), Delhi.
Oceans as Archives: A conversation between Renisa Mawani and Mikki Stelder (hybrid event)
Monday, March 27, 6-8 pm, Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Senate House North Block - SOAS 10 Thornhaugh Street London WC1H 0XG
Hosted by The Centre for Law & Social Change (City) and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media).
As part of the Fertile Ground – Interdisciplinary Conversations series and the Law & Race Roundtable, we offer you a conversation between socio-legal historian Prof. Renisa Mawani (UBC, Canada) and cultural studies scholar Dr. Mikki Stelder (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands). Our conversants will discuss the roots, currents and capillaries of the relationships between law, race, colonialism, and environmental destruction by turning to oceans. Drawing on oceans as archive as their orientation, Renisa and Mikki will navigate an original course through the choppy waters of law’s oceanic empire and imaginaries.
Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. She is the author of Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020).
Mikki Stelder is a lecturer in gender and postcolonial studies at Utrecht University and recently completed a three-year Marie Sklodowska Curie Global Fellowship for their project Maritime Imagination: A Cultural Oceanography of Dutch Imperialism and its Aftermaths. They received the 2022 ASCA Academic Article of the Year Award for the “The Colonial Difference in Hugo Grotius: Rational man, Slavery and Indigenous Dispossession” published in Postcolonial Studies.
Chaired by Grietje Baars, co-director of the Centre for Law & Social Change at City.
Abolition for Liberation Roundtable (hybrid)
With Scott Branson, Lola Olufemi and Reed Puc. Chaired by Natasha Mutch-Vidal.
The Centre for Law & Social Change is excited to host this roundtable on Abolition for Liberation with speakers Lola Olufemi (organiser, researcher and author of Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise), Scott Branson (artist, podcast host and author of Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily life and Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies) and Reed Puc (currently writing their PhD thesis at City on Spiderman, policing and abolition). The conversation will be chaired by Natasha Mutch-Vidal of the Centre for Institutional Equity and the Network for Racial Justice. This event forms part of the Centre for Law & Social Change event series and City’s LGBTQI History Month events.
Watch the Abolition for Liberation event recording 23 January 2023:
Brown-bag Lunch with Dr Nurfadzilah Yahaya
November 22nd, 12-2 pm, in the Boardroom, on the 6th Floor of City Law School (Sebastian St, London EC1V 7HD).
Nurfadzilah Yahaya is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Yale University. Her book Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia, published by Cornell University Press in 2020, touches upon the Indian Ocean, Islamic law, and mobilities. She is currently writing a book on the history of land reclamation in the British Empire. She has published in Law and History Review and other journals. She is also a co-editor of the Asia section of History Compass and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Global History and Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.
You can find more about Nurfadzilah Yahaya' s work and follow her on twitter @nfyahaya
Please join us in this great opportunity to discuss topics such as capitalism, colonialism, International Law and the Indian Ocean.
Fertile Ground: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Intersections Between Capital and Conflict in Latin America (or beyond)
This fall! Date to be confirmed.
Speakers:
- Dr Alejandra Azuero, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropologie of Swarthmore
- Dr Hannah Franzki, from the Center for Interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Research at the Freie Universität Berlin
Chair: Dr Grietje Baars, Reader in Law & Social Change, City Law School
Fertile Ground: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Student-worker Collaborative Organising in the Neoliberal University
This fall! Date to be confirmed.
Speakers:
- Dr Sophie Chamas, Lecturer in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London
- Dr Amelia Spooner, from the History Department of Columbia University
Chair: Dr Grietje Baars, Reader in Law & Social Change, City Law School
Fertile Ground: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Capitalism, Colonialism, International Law and the Indian Ocean
This fall! Date to be confirmed.
Speakers:
- Dr Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Assistant Professor in the History Department at the National University of Singapore
- Dr Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies at the University of Virginia
Chair: Dr Grietje Baars, Reader in Law & Social Change, City Law School
The Present & Future of LGBTQ+ Liberation: International Trans Day of Visibility Event
5.30pm - 7.30pm Thursday 7 April 2022
Speakers:
- Shon Faye, bestselling author of The Transgender Issue
- Hafsa Qureshi, Queer Muslim activist
- Oscar Davies, The Non-Binary Barrister.
Chair: Dr Grietje Baars, Reader in Law & Social Change, City Law School
Decolonising the LLB
5.30pm - 7.30pm Tuesday 5 April 2022
This conversation was facilitated by the City's Student Union BAME Officer Purity Ajoko, a 3rd year LLB student. Purity introduced the decolonisation topic and lead our session. Students presented their experiences and perspectives to understand how we can contribute to decolonising the institution.
Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India’s Professional Elite
5.00pm – 7.00pm Tuesday, 30th March 2021
- Speaker: Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, University of California Irvine School of Law
- Discussant: Dr Sabrina Germain, Senior Lecturer in Law, City Law School
Webinar: Human Rights, Poverty, and Capitalism: Exploring the Value of an Institutionalist Approach
5.00pm - 6.15pm Wednesday 17th March 2021
- Speaker: Dr Anna Chadwick, University of Glasgow
- Discussant: Dr Grietje Baars, Reader in Law & Social Change, City Law School
The history of resistance to British racism
12 - 1pm Thursday 25 February, 12-1pm (via zoom)
- Speaker: Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, research associate in applied sociology at the University of Greenwich. His research focuses on anti-racism and policing, both on Britain and in its colonies.
- Discussant: Dr Grietje Baars, Reader in Law & Social Change, City Law School
Projects
Feminist Fightback Reading Group: Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment
Description:
The Centre for Law & Social Change is co-hosting the Feminist Fightback reading group. We are reading ‘Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment’(2023) by Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk. This book is much more aligned with our politics, particularly around trans liberation and sex work decriminalisation.
‘Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment’ charts the new phase of global struggles around gender equality and sexual democracy: the ultraconservative mobilization against “gender ideology” and feminist efforts to counteract it, as well as how opposition to “gender” has become a key element of the rise of right-wing populism. The authors map the anti-gender campaigns as a global movement and argue that the anti-gender rhetoric is best understood as a reactionary critique of neoliberalism as a socio-cultural formation.
Next meeting: Tuesday, 24th October at 7:30 pm at Golden Lake Centre
More information here.
Critical Theory Reading Group (CTRG)
Description:
The Critical Theory Reading Group (CTRG) is a monthly gathering of scholars across disciplines interested in furthering our study in areas captured under the umbrella of ‘critical theory,’ such as gender and sexuality; Black studies; capitalism and its alternatives; disability studies; colonialism and empire. This term will meet at 6 PM on the second Monday of February (13/2) and March (13/3) in AG01.
Our second term’s readings will be thematically centred on Madness and Crip theory.
CTRG is open to postgraduates and faculty. To register interest please email reed.puc@city.ac.uk.
Law & Race Roundtable
Description:
The Centre for Law & Social Change at City, University of London, and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context, at the Queen Mary University of Law, co-hosted the first Law & Race Roundtable meeting on November 2 at City. We met with London-based scholars, friends and colleagues who work on race and law and also its intersections with gender, class and sexuality. We had a wide-ranging discussion about the types of activities and the projects we could develop together.
Next meeting: October 19, at City, University of London.
Get in touch if you want to be involved in a radical, actively anti-racist collaboration among and beyond legal scholars! You can find us on Twitter or via email: CentreLawSocialChange@city.ac.uk
Fertile Ground: Interdisciplinary conversation event series
Description:
The Fertile Ground: Cross-disciplinary conversations event series brings together scholars working on the same or closely related questions, but from different disciplinary perspectives. Through these curated encounters we hope to generate synergies inspiring new insights, discoveries, convergences, even break-throughs.
We pair scholars with anthropologists, historians, sociologists, literary scholars and more, and see what magic occurs! We strive to make these conversations cross-generational as well, including students, PhD researchers, professors and everyone in between, and welcome conversationalists from around the world. Would you like to be engaged in a cross-disciplinary conversation? Get in touch! CentreLawSocialChange@city.ac.uk
Decolonising the Law School
Description
On October 29th 2021, the Student Union organized a successful panel discussion about what decolonisation means and how city university should be decolonised.
The panellists, Bobby Banerjee (Associate Dean of Research and Enterprise of Bayes Business School), Diana Yeh (Associate Dean EDI at SASS), Purity Ajoko (Student’s Union BAME Officer), Shaima Dallali (Student’s Union President) gave their own account on what decolonization means to them and how City should be decolonised to better represent BAME students. This was a stepping stone for the institution as a whole, which started the fight for change across the university.
The Centre for Law and Social Change held an event on decolonising the Law School on 9 December 2021. This project is just a small fraction of this huge project. Our task is to ensure that BAME LLB students’ opinions for change are heard and for them to be put into action.
Decolonising the institution takes hard work and time, but with the knowledge and support from our students, we are confident that we will reach our goal. Get in touch if you would like to be involved!
Resources to start decolonising the law school now
- Kent Law School/Suhraiya Jivraj’s 'Decolonising the Curriculum' resources and 'Towards Anti-racist Legal Pedagogy: A Resource'
- Upcoming book 'Decolonising Legal Pedagogies'
- ‘Towards Decolonising the University: A Kaleidoscope for Empowered Action’ by Decolonise University of Kent Collective, Eds: Dave S.P. Thomas and Suhraiya Jivraj (2020) is available to download on a pay-what-you-can basis.
- City Law School colleagues have worked with the North American ‘Guerrilla Guides to Law teaching’: to produce a similar guide for the UK – we had a legal education panel with the North American colleagues at the Law & Society Association Annual Conference in Toronto in 2018.
- The Law Teacher - Volume 54, Issue 4 (2020) 'Decolonising the Law School'
- "Revisiting (inclusive) education in the postcolony." Journal of the British Academy 9, no. 1 (2021): 47-75. [by Foluke Adebisi with Abdulrahman, Hadiza Kere, Zibah Nwako, and Elizabeth Walton.
- UCL's Decolonising Law Public Lectures (several videos).
- UCL's Liberating the Curriculum resources (text, links, various).
Resources on specific law topics
- Constitutional law in decolonial context (special issue set of articles)
- Racial Capitalism and International Economic Law: Introduction (intro to special issue articles)
- Journal of International Economic Law (Special issue: set of articles)
- Decolonising criminal justice (article and reading list)
- Teaching international law (symposium, articles)
- Decolonising Human Rights (article: HR, Health Law, Intellectual Property)
- Decolonising land (video)
- Decolonising law as a standalone module (syllabus)
- Corporate law (book)
City Library Guide
Some work by Foluke Adebisi
- Forthcoming June 22 2021: Should We Rethink the Purposes of the Law School? A Case for Decolonial Thought in Legal Pedagogy, Amicus Curiae, Series 2, Vol 2, No 3,
- "Revisiting (inclusive) education in the postcolony." Journal of the British Academy 9, no. 1 (2021): 47-75. [with Abdulrahman, Hadiza Kere, Zibah Nwako, and Elizabeth Walton.]
- Special Issue: The Law Teacher - Volume 54, Issue 4 (2020) ‘Decolonising the Law School’
Law & Marxist Methods Spring School
Law & Marxist Methods
Watch the workshop recording:
9-10 May 2024
City, University of London, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB
A two-day focused workshop for participants to discuss their research within the specific framework of Marxist approaches to legal scholarship.
The Spring School focusses specifically on Third World Marxism and Marxist feminism on Day 1, and Queer and Trans Marxism on Day 2.
In each session, a faculty member will provide a 30-minute introductory talk about their own research method, and this will be followed by an open discussion in which participants will have the chance to discuss their own research questions.
We discuss the basics of what Marxist legal scholarship looks like, what the core research questions and themes are (or could be) and how to overcome challenges and avoid pitfalls. Finally, we also set aside time to discuss how we connect our theoretical research to praxis and encourage an open flow of ideas. We hope the sessions will be useful as well as supportive and fun, and aid in building a network of Marxist legal scholars.
Programme
9 May 2024 – Afternoon session
- Marxist Feminism – chaired by Mai Taha (LSE)
- Third World Marxism – chaired by Rob Knox (University of Liverpool)
10 May 2024 – Morning session
- Queer Marxism – chaired by Shreeta Lakhani (SOAS)
- Trans Marxism – chaired by Grietje Baars (City, University of London, and Co-Director of the Centre for Law & Social Change).
10 May 2024 – Afternoon session
- Writing Workshop
If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at centrelawsocialchange@city.ac.uk.
Purity Ajoko (City SU BAME Officer and LLB student)