The first JurisTalk of the Fall 2014 term takes place today!

Wednesday, October 1st
3pm | Room D492, Loeb Building

Special guest, Sarah Keenan, will present her work, “Subversive Properties: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging“.This seminar explores the relationship between space, subjectivity and property, arguing that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about property in terms of belonging rather than exclusion. While most socio-legal theories of property focus on the propertied subject and that subject’s right to exclude, Keenan shifts focus away from the propertied subject and on to the broader spaces in and through which the propertied subject is located. This presentation will discuss the main themes of her new book of the same title, to suggest ways in which subversive property might offer a conceptually useful way of analysing a wide range of socio-legal issues.

Sarah Keenan is Lecturer in Law at SOAS, University of London.  She teaches Property, Feminist Legal Theory and Indigenous Land Rights and is also engaged in community-based struggles around these issues.  Her research draws on legal geography, feminist and critical race theory to think through the relationship between law, space and belonging.  In particular, Sarah has written on the role of long term leases of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention, of the impact of identity testing in sexuality-based asylum claims, and of the conceptual and political links between property and governance, and between ownership and membership.

This lecture is part of the JurisTalk seminar series, organized by the Jurisprudence Centre and the Department of Law and Legal Studies.