Searching for Legal Futures at The Horniman Museum. Image: Amanda Perry-Kessaris adapting images © The Horniman Museum and Gardens.
Amanda Perry-Kessaris (University of Kent) and Elen Stokes (University of Bristol) have been awarded a Research Grant for ‘Legal Futures at The Horniman Museum and Gardens’ by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA).
The Horniman Museum and Gardens in Forest Hill, London, consists of a World Gallery, Music Gallery, Aquarium, Library, Animal Walk, Butterfly House, formal and informal Gardens. It is a unique site where living, non-living, and no-longer-living plants, animals, humans, building, and artefacts are explicitly entangled; and where relations with local and transnational social and professional communities are strong.
Amanda and Elen, in collaboration with a diverse team of legal scholars, are asking how we might use The Horniman Museum and Gardens to develop legal futures capacity among academic researchers; and with what benefits and risks?
Amanda explains that
‘by ‘legal futures’ we mean the roles that law plays in constituting possible futures, whether by accident or by design (Stokes 2021). By ‘legal futures capacity’ we mean our ability to work on, with, and through legal futures. To work on legal futures is to focus on legal futures as an object of inquiry. To work with and through legal futures is to activate the possibility of alternative futures, through traditional lawyerly activities such as legislation; and creative practices, such as prefiguration. We anticipate that exploring legal futures at The Horniman will generate risks and rewards around the quality of research; and of research relations—among researchers, and between researchers and those who use, or are otherwise affected by, research (Perry-Kessaris 2021). The main project outcome will be a Field Guide to Investigating Legal Futures at The Horniman. We envisage this as an accessible, infinitely expandable, resource. It will be designed to ‘help the novice’ (researcher, educator, student, layperson) ‘to rethink and freshly perceive formerly unremarkable objects and actions’ by prompting and facilitating a ‘change in habits of valuing, observing, and in modes of involvement and connection’ (Schlünder 2020).’
You can read more about the project here.
References
Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2021) Doing sociolegal research in design mode. Routledge.
Martina Schlünder (2020) ‘The generative possibilities of the wrong box’ in Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi eds. Boxes: A Field Guide Mattering Press.
Elen Stokes (2021) ‘Beyond evidence: Anticipatory regimes in law’ 43:1 Law and Policy 73-91.