Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Folúké Adébísí

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Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility

Professor Folúké Adébísí's book Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility examines conceptual issues that legal academics (and anyone with ancillary interests) should take into account when considering the origins of colonialism (and its logics) and how legal knowledge is implicated in this process. This examination connects itself to recent debates around decolonisation of knowledge in higher education. ‘Decolonising the curriculum/law school’ has become a term of art, whose activity, especially within higher education in the Global North, often does not involve decolonisation at all and whose proposed area of influence should extend well beyond the curriculum. Therefore, this book responds to this misuse by exploring what decolonisation actually means, broadly, but also specifically in relation to legal knowledge. Thus, the book unsettles some specific premises upon which legal knowledge is engaged in law schools, especially the ways in which uses of body-politics have facilitated the granting of unequal transactional lawful value and power to the human and to space–time. Recognising the tensions that exist between abiding with the standards of the discipline and producing future worlds that break from colonial logics that are often predicated on those standards, this book strives for a way to engage with those tensions within legal knowledge, while still remaining true to the radical vision of decolonisation.

Folúké Adébísí is a Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol whose scholarship focuses on decolonial thought in legal education and its intersection with a history of changing ideas of the 'human.'