Michaelmas Term 2024 Update

This term, we organized two incredible events. On October 22, Dr Holly Porter, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies and Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, hosted the event ‘Rebel Sex: Male Combatants and Desire in Coercive Circumstances’. She discussed male desire in coercive circumstances, focusing on her ethnographic work done with young men in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Later, on November 12, our guest speaker, Dr Daanika Kamal, Lecturer in Law at Royal Holloway, presented on Gendering practices, domestic violence and law in Pakistan. Daanika explained how domestic violence claims are dismissed through character allegations labelling women as ‘bad’ or ‘mad’ and explored how the subjectivities of Pakistani women are constructed, captured and negotiated.

We also hosted a Global Criminal Justice Hub visitor, Dr Valeria Vegh Weis (University of Buenos Aires) who presented her research on ‘Southering Lawfare: Indicators of the judicialisation and criminalisation of progressive politics in Latin America.’ Dr Valeria Vegh Weis and Dr Leila Ullrich also started to work on a grant proposal for a project on ‘Ecologies of Justice: Unearthing legal and non-legal paths to save the planet from below’. The project asks the following questions: How can environmental harm be addressed in international criminal justice and beyond and what role do victims play in such efforts? Are retributive or restorative measures better suited to achieve environmental justice from a victim’s perspective? And what can be learnt from already existing bottom-up initiatives, most of which are emanating from the Global South?