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Law Otherwise: Troubling the ‘Legal’ with Alternative Modes of Inquiry (LAW-RT-LAWOTH-25)

LAW-RT-LAWOTH-25

Purpose

 

Description

Law Otherwise is a seminar for those who feel constrained by the inherited ways we are taught to do research – those for whom existing legal frameworks, methods, and epistemologies no longer suffice. In a world where research objects shift and problems are continually reconfigured, we ask: Do the methods and conceptual tools we’ve inherited still make sense? And if not, what kinds of approaches emerge when we begin from elsewhere – other grounds, other struggles, other ontologies?

This course begins from the proposition that law has historically functioned as an extractive and ordering technology of knowledge, power, and violence, encoded through state sovereignty, capitalist legality, and Eurocentric rationalities. Against this backdrop, we explore how different collectives, movements, and forms of life enact legalities otherwise – through cosmopraxis, refusal, situated care, storytelling, artivism, and embodied insurgency.

Rather than expanding the legal canon to include “alternatives”, we dislocate the foundational assumptions of law itself: what it is, what it does, and how it positions us as researchers and legal subjects. We treat law not as a discipline or tool, but as a contested site of world-making – always shaped by where we speak from, what relations we hold, and which futures we are accountable to.

Participants will be introduced to conceptual and methodological resources drawn from Indigenous and decolonial ontologies, feminist and environmental epistemologies, and transdisciplinary tools such as STS, CRT, among others – rethought and implemented through grounded research practices. The seminar supports those looking for methodological grounding while recognizing that method cannot be universal: it must emerge from the project, the problem, and the site of enunciation. The rationale is to assist researchers in finding their own ‘way’ of doing legal research with awareness, which traditional concepts and methods do not really offer.

Participants will also be invited to perform Law Otherwise: to explore non-traditional mediums through which to elaborate and communicate their research. This might include visual, performative, or sonic forms – ways of thinking and speaking law beyond academic writing. The seminar draws on the convenors' experience with such experimental practices and includes contributions from invited guests across disciplines. Through an established partnership with Villa Romana in Florence – a residency that hosts research-based artists, some of whom have already engaged with the EUI – as well as collaborations with Black History Month Florence and the Recovery Plan, the seminar opens space for encounters with artivists (artistactivists who mobilize creative practices for political transformation). These engagements will not be peripheral, but integral to how we imagine and do legal research otherwise.

Law Otherwise is a space to unlearn, reimagine, and enact legal thinking otherwise—across shifting landscapes. It offers not a single method, but an invitation to inquire from multiple grounds, with care, critique, and creative rigor.

Course reading list: https://readinglist.eui.eu/leganto/public/39EUI_INST/lists/2942314510008406?auth=SAML&idpCode=SAML_LEGANTO


First, Second & Third Term: registration from 22 to 26 September 2025

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