This methodological masterclass will discuss the practice of studying, interpreting, and re-inscribing interfaces as sites of international legal work, effect, and relation: interfaces being mediating, bounding, connective conjunctions of software and hardware that elicit, frame, and invite entry or re-entry into social, economic, and political life in particular configurations (from cables to websites, contractual regimes to application forms, and beyond). To draw out the potential of such an approach – and discuss its limits – compared with other modes of legal and non-legal scholarly reading and writing, participants will be invited to pre-read the following texts and identify, in advance, an interface in which they have particular research interest, and reflect on how the work of that interface could potentially be ‘re-read’ and ‘re-written’, and what could be at stake in that work, or to whom and for what it might matter, with a view to discussing this during the masterclass.
Pre-reading:
Fleur Johns, ‘Interfaces: New Media of Humanitarian Relation’ in #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (2023) pp. 1-28.
Fleur Johns, ‘Uses: Using, Disusing, and Misusing Digital Humanitarian Interfaces’ in #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (2023) pp. 205-224.
Fleur Johns, ‘Reading and writing at the interface’, London Review of International Law (DOI: 10.1093/lril/lrae001 forthcoming) (11 pages).
Additional reading (optional):
Alexander R. Galloway, ‘Postscript: We Are the Gold Farmers’ in The Interface Effect (2012) pp. 120-143.
About the speaker:
Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney. Fleur works in international law, legal theory, law and development, and law and technology. Her latest research has focused on the implications of digital technology for international law and politics, and on the international law of diplomacy. Fleur is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2021-2025) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (2021-2024). She has published five books, the most recent of which is #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2023). Fleur has held visiting appointments in Canada, Europe, the UK, and the US and currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and the journals Technology and Regulation, the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law, and Science, Technology & Human Values, as well as being an Advisory Editor for the London Review of International Law, the Australian Feminist Law Journal and several scholarly book series. Fleur is a graduate of Melbourne University (BA, LLB(Hons)) and Harvard University (LLM, SJD; Menzies Scholar; Laylin Prize). Prior to entering academia, Fleur practised law in New York.