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In this episode, Dr Ben Golder (UNSW Law School), Dr Kathleen Birrell (La Trobe Law and Humanities Network) and Professor Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne Law School) are joined by Dr Shane Chalmers (Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide) to discuss how to successfully edit a collection. Shane's research examines law from disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. It shares a critical concern with the legacies of European colonialism for laws and societies today, investigated through a combination of cultural analysis and historical enquiry. Shane's work has contributed to the sub-fields of law and colonialism, law and development, law and art, and jurisprudence, through publications in journals including Law and Critique, Social & Legal Studies, Law & Social Inquiry, Humanity, Griffith Law Review, Law & Literature, and Law, Culture and the Humanities.

In this episode join Sundhya Pahuja and Shaun McVeigh in conversation with Cait Storr to launch her book titled ‘International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law’. Book Description: Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru’s imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru’s status – from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state – as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru’s status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic’s post-independence ‘failures’. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.

In this episode Dianne Otto was joined by Oishik Sircar to discuss his recent publication. 'Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India' (OUP 2021)uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the postcolony share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law's promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions.

In this Festival of Conversations episode Professor Hilary Charlesworth was joined in conversation with Professor Anne Orford to discuss the founding of IILAH in 2005 and the shifting relations between international law and the humanities.

Panelists engaged in a live online conversation about art-based methods in legal scholarship, teaching and practice, inviting the audience to participate in an interactive discussion about 'art', 'law' and the 'and' between. With Alice Palmer , Ruth Buchanan, Sara Ramshaw and Sean Mulcahy. At 43:13 the audience watched Ruth Buchanan's video essay 'Local Hero' this is accessible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wl2YeSVcmU.

McVeigh and Gaita discuss the relations between morality, law and politics. Gaita has argued in, amongst other places, his contributions to 'Who’s Afraid of International Law', (which he edited with Gerry Simpson) that morality, law and politics are distinctive forms of the ethical and that, as seen from a particular ethical perspective in the Western tradition, each is sui generis. He does not equate the ethical with morality. He believes that law and politics are answerable to morality, but not reducible to it in their ethical dimensions. To see morality, law and politics as different forms of the ethical, he has argued, enables one to see why the different conceptions of responsibility distinctive to each sometimes bring (especially parts of international) law and politics into irreconcilable conflict with morality and politics sometimes with law.

In this episode Dr Kathleen Birrell and Tim Lindgren were joined by Dr Daniel Matthews (University of Warwick) to discuss his new book Earthbound: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty . The conversation traversed the aesthetic force of sovereignty as a framing device of modern legal and political forms and the possibility of an alternative political aesthetics for the Anthropocene.

In this episode join James Parker, Jake Goldenfein, Fleur Johns, Andrea Leiter and Andre Dao in conversation on the questions of international law and technopolitics in the humanities.

Critique in the Tropics: The Crisis of Indian Legal Education and Scholarship, convened by Adil Hasan Khan. This panel featured contributions from academics trained in the law in India, and who are currently teaching at Indian universities, and reflected on the inheritances, futures and failures of a critical legal project for Indian legal education and scholarship. Featuring Dr. Anuj Bhuwania (Jindal Global Law School), Dr. Oishik Sircar (Jindal Global Law School), Dr. Debolina Dutta (Jindal Global Law School), and Professor Rukmini Sen (Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi).

Join Hilary Charlesworth (MLS) in conversation with Roland Bleiker (Director of a cross disciplinary project on Visual Politics at UQ) to discuss the role of images and emotions in global politics, and in particular the politics and ethics of visualising humanitarian crises which is the subject of Professor Bleiker's new ARC Linkage project.

In this event, we talked about doing fieldwork, and were joined by special guests, Dr Debolina Dutta and Dr Amanda Gilbertson. The session was convened jointly with Dr Ben Golder and the UNSW Critique Network.

Join Johanna Commins, Ann Genovese for this conversation with Professor Margaret Thornton which reflects on the 2000 conference, Romancing the Tomes, which brought together feminist scholars working across law and the humanities under the auspices of the ANU Humanities Research Centre to address the fictions of law, the legal academy and judges through the lens of popular culture.

The Amsterdam Center for International Law and IILAH present Unpacking Transitional Justice: International Law, Memory, and Power, convened by Dr Eliana Cusato (ACIL) and Valeria Vázquez Guevara (MLS). The aim of the Series is to bring together scholars from around the world employing interdisciplinary and critical approaches to the study of transitional justice and international law, broadly understood. This episode is the final seminar of a four-part series on Unpacking Transitional Justice. Our speakers include Associate Professor Oishik Sircar (Jindal), Associate Professor Sara Kendall (Kent) and Christopher Gevers (University of KwaZulu-Natal). Join us as we discuss 'Dealing with...the past? Reconciliation, reparations, and beyond'.

The Amsterdam Center for International Law and IILAH present Unpacking Transitional Justice: International Law, Memory, and Power, convened by Dr Eliana Cusato (ACIL) and Valeria Vázquez Guevara (MLS). The aim of the Series is to bring together scholars from around the world employing interdisciplinary and critical approaches to the study of transitional justice and international law, broadly understood. This episode is the third seminar of a four-part series on Unpacking Transitional Justice. Our speakers include Associate Professor Christine Schwöbel-Patel (Warwick) and Dr Hannah Franzki (Bremen). This episode discusses 'Justice: The political economy of international law'. Dr Christine Schwöbel-Patel is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick School of Law. Her research spans areas of international law, global constitutionalism, governance, and critical pedagogy. Dr Hannah Franzki is a Research Fellow in the Transnational Force of Law Project since 2015. Her research interests include legal theory and philosophy, international political economy with a particular focus on transnational investment law and international criminal law.

The Amsterdam Center for International Law and IILAH present Unpacking Transitional Justice: International Law, Memory, and Power, convened by Dr Eliana Cusato (ACIL) and Valeria Vázquez Guevara (MLS). The aim of the Series is to bring together scholars from around the world employing interdisciplinary and critical approaches to the study of transitional justice and international law, broadly understood. This episode is the second seminar of a four-part series on Unpacking Transitional Justice. Our speakers include Professor Lucas Lixinski (UNSW) and Dr Maria Elander (La Trobe). This seminar focuses on how transitional justice institutions and international law shape post-conflict societies by giving meaning, or organising in particular ways the meanings, to culture, cultural heritage, victimhood and victims, broadly speaking. Lucas Lixinski is a Professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice at UNSW Sydney. He researches and teaches across a range of fields in international law, primarily international cultural heritage law and international human rights law. Maria Elander is a senior lecturer at La Trobe Law School. Her research is primarily in the broader field of international criminal justice, and engages with theories in cultural and feminist legal studies.

The Amsterdam Center for International Law and IILAH present Unpacking Transitional Justice: International Law, Memory, and Power, convened by Dr Eliana Cusato (ACIL) and Valeria Vázquez Guevara (MLS). The aim of the Series is to bring together scholars from around the world employing interdisciplinary and critical approaches to the study of transitional justice and international law, broadly understood. For the first seminar of the series, our convenors, Valeria Vazquez Guevara and Dr Eliana Cusato, provide a series introduction with a discussion on the role of international in truth commissions and post-conflict state-building, in the aftermath of the 1980s-1990s civil wars of El Salvador (1980-1992), Liberia (1989-1996) and Sierra Leone (1991-2002). Professor Sundhya Pahuja provides the series opening. A selection of the presentation slides displayed at the seminar are available for context here: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/powerpoint_doc/0004/3644140/UTJ-seminar-one-slides.pptx Valeria Vazquez Guevara is a doctoral candidate at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. Dr Eliana Cusato is Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, University of Amsterdam.

This instalment of the IILAH/Critique Network Skills Circle featured Stewart Motha (Birkbeck, University of London) on his experience at running a podcast. Stewart’s research is on sovereignty, violence, human and post-human archives. He has recently published articles on international law and the humanities, and on the autonomy and heteronomy of law. His current major project explores the multiple forms and sources of legal norms (heteronomy) as a counter-narrative to liberal positivist accounts of the autonomy of law. This includes challenging the opposition between life/non-life.

This instalment of the IILAH/CN Skills Circle features Illan Wall (University of Warwick) who discusses his experience with academic Blogging. Illan works on questions of protest, public order and critical legal theory. He has published on critical legal theory, affective dynamics of policing, theories of constituent power, the Arab Spring, protest and transitional justice in Colombia, theories of human rights and revolt, and new Andean constitutional apparatuses.

Across the world today, more than one billion people live in substandard housing and informal settlements. Every year, several million people lose their homes as a consequence of development projects, conflicts, natural disasters or the climate crisis. Many of them are subjected to forced evictions. To understand and address these issues, in 2000, the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights established the role of Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing In this Interview, Professor Sundhya Pahuja (University of Melbourne) and Dr Luis Eslava (Kent Law School) talk with Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on his recent appointment to that role. Topics they cover include, what is the role of Special Rapporteur, and how are its functions carried out? What is understood to be a ‘right to housing’, and what are the main challenges that communities face in accessing such rights? This interview addresses these questions and explores the various challenges and approaches to international law and development over the last 20 years. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (USA) is Professor of Law and Development at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A lawyer by training, he is an expert on many areas of human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights, the UN system, and the human rights challenges posed by development activities. He has conducted over 20 years of research on social movements and human rights advocacy around the world focusing in particular, on land and property rights, evictions and displacement. A more extensive profile of Balakrishnan is available on the United Nations website.

Join Dr. Ntina Tzouvala (ANU) and Danish Sheikh (MLS) in conversation with Dr. Rahul Rao (SOAS), the author of 'Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality'. In this book, Rahul explores the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, the book argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rahul offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. Rahul Rao is Senior Lecturer in Politics at SOAS University of London and a member of the Radical Philosophy collective; Ntina Tzouvala is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU College of Law; Danish Sheikh is a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School and a Member of IILAH.