Kent Law School Lecturer Dr Rose Parfitt has secured grants totalling £7k for an international workshop on ‘Interdisciplinarity as Resistance‘ to be held in Sweden.
The four-day workshop for activist lawyers and artists will be held at the Valand Academy of Art from 5-8 June. It will explore how to make sense of, and respond to, a global political, economic and legal system whose central epistemological frameworks offer violence, inequality and unbridled accumulationism as the solution to violence, inequality and unbridled accumulationism.
Dr Parfitt was awarded £5,000 from Kent’s Faculty Research Fund and £2,000 from the Socio-Legal Studies Association’s annual seminar competition for the workshop which she is organising in collaboration with Dr Matilda Arvidsson and Dr Hjalmar Falk from the University of Gothenburg. Dr Arvidsson secured a further grant of 187 658,40 SKR (£15,370) from Gothenburg’s School of Business, Economics and Law Partnership Programme Internationalisation Support fund.
It is the third workshop in a series that Dr Parfitt has organised for a broader legal research project on ‘Fascism and the International’, established with a Discover Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council. It is also a pilot workshop for a new project. The first of these workshops took place in June 2017 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. The second, organised in collaboration with the sound art collective Liquid Architecture, was held in May 2018 at West Space in Melbourne.
This year’s workshop is co-sponsored by the Valand Academy, the University of Gotheburg, Kent Law School, the Australian Research Council and Melbourne Law School. Dr Parfitt said: ‘The idea of this workshop is that it really should be a workshop – a space not just for telling but also, and more importantly, for cross-training, a form of simultaneous learning and teaching. We have a number of special guests who are going to be conducting exercises and masterclasses, not just on what they do, as radical scholars and artists, but more importantly on how they do it – on the tools and their techniques they employ and develop to make those interventions, from machine-learning simulations and LARP (live action role play) to the ‘how to’ of strategic human rights litigation, agitprop, critical curation and the art of the satirical cartoon.’
Workshop contributors include:
- Andeel – Egyptian cartoonist, scriptwriter, performer and cult satirist. Co-founder of the comics quarterly Tok Tok, whose work gained popularity after the 2011 revolution
- Helena Chávez Mac Gregor – Curator and critical theorist of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas and former academic curator at UNAM’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
- Luciano Chessa – a New York-based composer, conductor, audio-visual and performance artist and pianist. Author of Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (University of California Press, 2012), who recently conducted the New School’s Mannes Orchestra at the Lincoln Centre in the world premiere performance of Julius Eastman’s ‘Symphony No. 2’
- Paul Clark – Barrister at Garden Court Chambers) and member of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN)
- Jenifer Evans – artist, editor, writer and co-curator, with Taha Belal, of Nile Sunset Annex, an art production and distribution outfit in downtown Cairo which opened soon after the revolution in 2011. She is also a former Culture Editor for the online newspaper Madr Masr, Egypt’s only remaining left-leaning news source, access to which has recently been banned in Egypt
- Jake Goldenfein – scholar of law and technology, cyber-physical systems, AI and surveillance, from the Swinburne University of Technology. Currently a research fellow at Cornell Tech, whose book Monitoring Laws: Surveillance, Automation and Information Law, will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year
- Mónica A Jiménez (TBC) is an historian and an assistant professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, whose work explores the intersections of law, race and nationalism in U.S. empire building in Latin America and the Caribbean and whose forthcoming book, American State of Exception, offers a legal history of race and exception in United States empire building centering, in relation to Puerto Rico in particular
- Roger Reeves (TBC), poet and Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, whose first book, King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), won the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Zacharis Prize from “Ploughshares,” and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award
- Alicja Rogalska – a London-based visual artist, fresh from a Paradise AIR residency in Tokyo, whose many exhibitions, performances and projects include ‘Morning Boat’, a public art commission in Jersey; ‘How to Talk to Fascists’, at Metal in Liverpool; ‘So-Called Law’ at Artsadmin in London; ‘Karaoke Capitalism’ at the Galeria Metropolitana, Santiago; and ‘Gotong Royong. Things We Do Together’ at CCA Ujazdowski, Warsaw.
Dr Parfitt’s research is focused on the development of a new set of techniques aimed at uncovering, making sense of and challenging international law’s role in the creation and preservation of a world in which wealth, power and pleasure are distributed more and more unequally.
She is the director of the Constellations seminar series on methodology and interdisciplinarity; the co-director (with Dr Luis Eslava) of a collaborative research network on International Law and Politics at the (US) Law and Society Association; and an active member of the HAAIL (History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law) and After Self-Determination projects. Her book, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Subjectivity, Historiography, Law, Violence, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.