A launch event for books authored by Kent Law School Senior Lecturer Dr Emily Haslam and PhD alumna Dr Serena Natile will be hosted online on Wednesday 18 November.
The Slave Trade Abolition and the Long History of International Criminal Law, by Dr Haslam, and The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion, by Dr Natile, are both published by Routledge.
The event, from 4pm – 6pm, will be hosted jointly by the Law School’s Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice (SeRGJ), the Centre for Critical International Law (CeCIL), and research group Social Critiques of Law (SoCriL).
Dr Haslam’s book will be introduced by Professor Michael Lobban (LSE) and Dr Christine Schwobel-Patel (University of Warwick), and Dr Natile’s book will be introduced by Dr Luis Eslava (Kent Law School) and Professor Kate Maclean (University of Northumbria).
Dr Haslam’s book offers a close and critical examination of litigation that arose from British efforts to capture slave ships in the nineteenth century. It shows how the slave trade and abolition has influenced (and continues to influence) international criminal law in multiple ways.
Employing archival-based research, Dr Haslam explores the legal construction of so-called ‘recaptives’ (slaves found on board captured slave ships). She argues that, notwithstanding its promise of freedom, the law actually constructed recaptives restrictively. In particular, it focused on questions of intervention rather than recaptives’ rights. At the same time it shows how a critical reading of the archive reveals that recaptives contributed to litigation in important, but hitherto largely unrecognized, ways.
Dr Haslam also addresses this topic in a recent post on our Countercurrents blog, ‘Whose redemption? The slave trade, abolition and British interventions on the high seas’. In it, she addresses British public memory of slave trade abolition and offers a timely reminder of Britain’s brutal involvement in the trafficking of 2.6m Africans.
Dr Haslam has research interests in international criminal law, international legal history and civil society. She has authored numerous book chapters and articles in this field and has extensive experience teaching international law, international criminal law and transnational criminal law.
Dr Natile’s book focuses on Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project M-Pesa to examine and critique the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality. It argues for a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects.
As a digital financial inclusion project, M-Pesa facilitates the transfer of money and access to formal financial services via the mobile phone infrastructure and has grown at a phenomenal rate since its launch in 2007 to reach about 80 per cent of the Kenyan population. Through a socio-legal enquiry drawing on feminist political economy, law and development scholarship and postcolonial feminist debate, Dr Natile unravels the narratives and institutional arrangements that frame M-Pesa’s success while interrogating the relationship between digital financial inclusion and gender equality in development discourse. She argues that M-Pesa is premised on and regulated according to a logic of opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution, favouring the expansion of the mobile money market in preference to contributing to substantive gender equality via a redistribution of the revenue and funding deriving from its development.
Dr Natile is Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick’s School of Law. Whilst at Kent, she served for three years on SeRGJ’s steering committee and completed her PhD in December 2016 (passing her viva with no corrections). Her PhD thesis ‘Mobile Money and the Limits of Financial Inclusion: A Gender Analysis of M-Pesa in Kenya’ was supervised by Professor Toni Williams and Professor Donatella Alessandrini and examined by Professor Judy Fudge and Professor Ambreena Manji.
In a post on our Countercurrents blog, Dr Natile reflects on her experience of turning her PhD thesis into a book. She also discussed the process with current Kent PhD scholar Elean Caruso in a conversation which you can watch again on YouTube.
Dr Natile’s research interests lie in the areas of gender studies, law & development, global political economy, finance and digital technologies. She maintains connections with Kent colleagues through collaborative research projects that include: The IEL Collective (with Dr Eslava and Professor Alessandrini) and (formerly) the Inclusionary Practices Project (with Professor Williams).
Please register for the book launch on Eventbrite – a Zoom link will then be emailed to you in advance of the date.
