Dr Sara Kendall part of team awarded $299k to research use of geospatial technologies in judicial investigations

Kent Law School Senior Lecturer Dr Sara Kendall is part of a team awarded $299,999 by the US National Science Foundation to critically research the use and proliferation of geospatial technologies in judicial investigations of international crimes and human rights violations.

The three-year project, entitled ‘Geospatial Technologies, Justice and Evidentiary Procedure’, will be conducted on three continents. Dr Kendall will be working with Professor Maxine Kamari Clarke (Anthropology Studies, UCLA) and Dr Jennifer Burrell (Anthropology, State University New York).

Working in Mexico, Nigeria and the Hague, the team will explore how diverse communities are using and interpreting data from technologies such as geo-satellite imaging, drones, and ground technology systems.

Dr Kendall is Co-Director of Research at Kent Law School and Co-Director of the Centre for Critical International Law. She studies the discursive forms and material practices of international law and global governance, addressing legal responses to – and complicity with – forms of violence, from international crimes to the conditions of possibility of armed conflict. One strand of this research has focused on the ways in which legal forms seek to contain or respond to mass atrocity through international criminal law and international humanitarian law. Her current research project, ‘Legal Humanitarianism: the Restorative Turn in International Criminal Justice’, focuses on the emergence of a juridical category of victimhood in International Criminal Court practices. A second strand, ‘Humanitarian Complicity’, focuses on the role of humanitarian claims in justifying (state) violence, from the colonial period to the present.

Dr Kendall’s undergraduate teaching responsibilities span across International Humanitarian Law, International Human Rights Law in Context and International Law. She also teaches Legal Aspects of Contemporary International Problems and International Criminal Law to postgraduate students.