HDR and ECR Workshop

Facilitated by Dr Honni van Rijswijk, Senior Lecturer UTS

Sponsored by the ANU Gender Institute and the Association of Law, Literature and the Humanities, this workshop examines strategies for writing at the intersection of feminist theory, law, literature and the humanities across all levels of postgraduate study. The workshop will be of interest to scholars working on inter-disciplinary projects that touch upon feminism, law, literature and other humanities disciplines.

The workshop is free for all ANU students and staff. However, space is limited and reservations are essential. Please email Anne Macduff before Friday 30 November 2013.

The workshop:

The workshop will begin with a presentation by Dr Honni van Rijswijk. The presentation will consider questions such as—What is ‘good writing’, and how do the aesthetics of your writing come to matter? What do journal editors, dissertation examiners and book publishers look for, when evaluating manuscripts? How do you balance professional goals with ethical and political goals, and how is this important when developing a writing practice? How do you position yourself within wider academic and political conversations? How does your passion for social justice and critique relate to your professional goals? The presentation will discuss recent work located across legal theory, feminist legal jurisprudence and indigenous jurisprudence. These pieces are exemplary for their critical engagements, clear writing and creative outlook; they combine elegant argument with an ethic of social justice. They will become a provocation for participants to think about their own writing practice, and the ways in which researchers unite professional, creative, and political goals.

Dr Sarah Marusek, University of Hawaii and co-ordinator of the Law and Semiotics Network of the U.S. Law and Society Association, and Dr Olivia Barr, UTS and member of the HDR committee of the LLHSA will then respond, reflecting on their own writing as well as their own theoretical and political practice.

A series of small roundtable discussions will then follow. Each group will be led by a specially invited recent graduate, including (in addition to the above) Dr Karen Crawley (Griffith) and Dr James Parker (Melbourne). The discussion will encourage workshop participants to reflect on the writing strategies used in their own work. 

To assist the organizers, participants should email a short extract (no more than 10 pages single spaced or approximately 2,000 -3,000 words) from a piece of their academic writing (for eg a conference paper, article, or chapter from your dissertation) to the HDR workshop organizers on or before 1 December 2013.

Dr Honni van Rijswijk is a graduate of Sydney Law School and received her PhD from the University of Washington, where she was a Fellow in the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney. She researches at the intersections of law, literature and legal theory, and has written on subjects ranging from the feminist aesthetics of harm, narratives of consent in Stolen Generations cases, and the significance of Virginia Woolf to tort law. Her work has been published in Law, Culture and the Humanities, Melbourne University Law Review, Feminist Legal Studies, UNSW Law Journal, and Australian Feminist Law Journal. She is currently working on a book called The Figure of the Child in the Law’s Imaginary, which argues that in modern and contemporary periods, the child figure has become increasingly significant to the juridico-political imagination. The book examines the significance of the child figure in constituting the authority and legitimacy of the law, in legal formulations of responsibility for past and present harms, and to the contemporary rule of law.