Osgoode Hall Law School will present its Law.Arts.Culture seminar on Feb. 27 with featured guest Christine Schwöbel-Patel.
The event, titled “‘Occupying’ Global Justice: Counter-Aesthetic Responses to the Marketisation of Global Justice,” runs from 12:30 to 2 p.m. and highlights the research of Schwöbel-Patel, an associate professor at Warwick Law School.
From describing the rule of law as a “personal brand” to dubbing victims of international crimes as “stakeholders,” market thinking has colonized global justice projects. This colonization, enabled through individual and institutional commitments to neoliberalism, has arguably become the common-sense approach to global justice.
The discipline of international criminal law has embraced marketized global justice like no other. It is in the stereotyped images of victims of justice as infantilized, feminized and racialized – often mobilized by international criminal justice actors – where the dominant aesthetic of marketized global justice is most acute.
The purpose of this talk is to think through some possible responses to the contemporary dominant aesthetic of marketized global justice. For notions of “occupying” global justice, Schwöbel-Patel will draw on a variety of sources, including experiences of social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, artwork in the posters of the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAL), and depictions of the “national mothers” of socialism. What these have in common is the idea of the troubling of structural inequality as struggle.
Schwöbel-Patel’s research focuses on issues of conflict and humanitarianism, mass atrocities and institutions of law, and decoloniality and pedagogy. These themes are brought together through a political economy and aesthetics critique. She is the author of Global Constitutionalism in International Legal Perspective (Brill/Martinus Nijhoff 2011) and the editor of Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law: An Introduction (Routledge 2014). She is currently completing a manuscript titled Marketing Global Justice, which will be published in 2019.
To RSVP to the event, or for more information, visit the event page.