129 research outputs found
What’s missing from legal geography and materialist studies of law? Absence and the assembling of asylum appeal hearings in Europe
This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: Due to the ethical and legally sensitive nature of the research, ethnographic
notes taken in court could not be made openly available. Appellant interviewees were not asked for their
permission to share their interview transcripts in an online open archive because of concerns that they
could misunderstand what was being asked for, or feel obliged to agree but subsequently feel less able to
conduct free conversation in research interviews as a result, thereby negatively impacting on the quality of
the data generated. Additional details relating to, and data resulting from, to a survey taken during
observations of British asylum appeals between 2013 and 2016 are available from the UK Data Archive
(persistent identifier: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852032).There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non‐attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practiced. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)European Research Council (ERC
- …