Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
March 25 | JurisTalk – Global Justice and the Cinematic Slum: Ethics and Aesthetics
March 25, 2015 at 3:00 PM
| Location: | D492 Loeb Building |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | Anyone |
| Key Contact: | Prof. Stacy Douglas |
| Contact Email: | stacy.douglas@carleton.ca |
In the face of mounting evidence of intensifying inequalities in most parts of the world, it is difficult to debate the urgency of global justice as an ethical demand. At the same time, the persistence of extreme poverty in many parts of the globe presents a challenge to the claim that the world will make good on this promise. This paper seeks to contribute to a critical literature on global justice through considering it in terms of an aesthetic rather than an ethic. Prof. Buchanan will do so through a close examination of cinematic depictions of poverty such as those found in the films City of God and Slumdog Millionaire. What is the relation between the aesthetic and the ethical in these portrayals? What aesthetic pleasures and affective engagements do they incite? How might they speak both to the promise and the failure of global justice?
About the Speaker:
Prof. Ruth Buchanan is an interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work has spanned a wide range of debates, methods and concerns in both law and humanities and socio-legal studies. Her scholarship has frequently engaged with issues of globalization, legal pluralism, resistance and affect. She is a co-editor of two recent books: Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (2014) and Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (2012) and has authored numerous articles and book chapters. Her doctorate is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she taught at UNB and UBC before taking up her current position at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2006. Her current project is a study of the affective and emotional engagements that frame the project of law and development.