Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Nov. 6 | JurisTalk with Dr. Trish Luker
November 6, 2015 at 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM
| Location: | D492 Loeb Building |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | Anyone |
| Contact Email: | Prof. Diana Majury |
| Contact Phone: | x. 8863 |
‘Animating the Archive: Artefacts of Law’
In this paper, Dr. Luker investigates the notion of law’s counter-archive through a reflection on the materiality of archival sources and the significance of this objective status when such sources are presented as evidence in legal proceedings. She argues that thinking of archival sources not as legal documents, but as artefacts with specific agentic powers, draws attention to the material conditions of their creation and demonstrates the way they are productive of colonial relations.
The investigation of the legal historical archive is supplemented by reflections on counter-archival artistic practice that redeploys archival documents in contemporary creative work, to produce historical documents in the present. Dr. Luker uses the work of well-known Australian artist Judy Watson to illustrate her argument.
Dr. Trish Luker is Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. Her postdoctoral research project is called ‘Reading the Archive: Use of Historical Documents as Evidence in Law’. In addition, she is a chief investigator on the Australian Feminist Judgments Project, which resulted in the publication The Australian Feminist Judgments Project: Righting and Re-writing Law (Hart Publishing 2014), as well as another research project entitled ‘The Court as Archive: Re-thinking the Institutional Role of Federal Courts’. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Allard School of Law (University of British Columbia). While in Canada, she will be conducting transnational research on two of her projects concerned with law and archives.