Sabrina Gilani | University of Sussex (original) (raw)
Papers by Sabrina Gilani
domain of time appears to acquire its relational structure from human experiences of the more con... more domain of time appears to acquire its relational structure from human experiences of the more concrete domain of space.87 This idea resonates with the ideas presented in this thesis, particularly when I discuss how political and legal geographies, like the Reservation represent spaces that have been temporalised, imagined to exist ‘back in time’. 83 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, "Of Other Spaces," Diatrics 16, no. 1 (1986): p 23. This is illustrated quite vividly through his notion of heterotopia – spaces composed of both the produced spaces of ‘sites’ and their attendant social relations; a space that is both concrete (composed of the material environment) and abstract (having a meaning that could not be attributed to the physical features themselves and tended to vary across different societies). This concept appeared to draw inspiration from Chombart de Luawe’s distinction between objective and subjective social space. See, Anne Buttimer, "Social Space in Inte...
Transforming the 'perpetrator' into 'victim': the effect of gendering violence on the legal and p... more Transforming the 'perpetrator' into 'victim': the effect of gendering violence on the legal and practical responses to women's political violence Article (Published Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Gilani, Sabrina (2010) Transforming the 'perpetrator' into 'victim': the effect of gendering violence on the legal and practical responses to women's political violence. Australian Journal of Gender and Law, 1.
Social & Legal Studies, 2015
This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relat... more This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relates this back to the issue of minority protection and cultural recognition. Introducing a new method of inquiry, spatio-historical analysis, this article argues that a historical study of a legal and political geography can fundamentally enhance a sociolegal analysis of contemporary structures and processes of governance vested with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural diversity. Using the tribal areas of Pakistan as a case study, this article examines how the colonial history of the tribal areas brings into question its contemporary status in Pakistani constitutional law. It further problematizes the idea that the tribal areas’ unique legal position can be attributed to the state’s recognition and promotion of the Pakhtun community’s right of normative autonomy. This article demonstrates how a spatio-historical model of analysis can reveal previously less visible sites of power a...
Masculinity has always occupied a central position in Afghan culture and identity. Historically i... more Masculinity has always occupied a central position in Afghan culture and identity. Historically it has expressed itself through the designation of female behaviour as standards by which to judge male honour and social status. Under the Taliban, women were perceived as inferior and their status as rights-bearers was continuously challenged. The rights of women are further imperilled by the crisis in male masculinity that has resulted from the protracted episodes of male-targeted violence. At present, with the Taliban ousted and Afghanistan undergoing a period of reconstruction, it is important to consider how Afghan men will attempt to reassert their masculinity after a long period of extreme violence and oppression, and how such practices may impinge on the human rights of women within Afghanistan. This paper argues that because traditional means by which masculinity is asserted in most societies have been rendered virtually devastated or severely restricted by the long episodes of ...
Memory Studies, 2012
Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised though... more Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised thoughts and experiences can betray us long after organic memories of these episodes have faded. We are aware of these horror-stories, yet we continue to sign away our personal information to search algorithms and redundantly backed-up data-centres, leaving us vulnerable to the internet's acontextually perfect memory. Why do we do this? Because we appreciate that social networks and the broader networks that comprise the internet hinge on easy information sharing. Google's recent actions illustrate well our paradoxical relationship with online privacy. In June 2011 Google+ was launched and touted as a social network with user-determined privacy at its core. Google's latest attempt social networking sought to exploit the erosion of trust in Facebook's everchanging sharing settings. But only 9 months later, Google changed its terms of service to enable greater information-sharing between its own services. Servers in Palo Alto can now amalgamate our search histories with the sites we subscribe to, the videos we watch and even our GPS coordinates,
Social & Legal Studies
This paper re-reads American Appellate and Supreme Court rulings about the constitutionality of e... more This paper re-reads American Appellate and Supreme Court rulings about the constitutionality of execution by electrocution from the perspective of new materialism. Using the case of Provenzano v. Moore, this paper highlights how the existing jurisprudence develops a notion of cruelty that deliberately avoids the sensual and affective dimensions of punishment. Given the profoundly corporeal nature of punishment and even more so capital punishment, any consideration of the ethics of punitive practice must meaningfully engage with the body, its situatedness, and its material networks, all of which enact punishment as a social phenomenon. Employing Jane Bennett's ethics of affective enchantment, grounded in the ethico-onto-epistemology of new materialist thinkers, this paper critiques the majority opinion in Provenzano by demonstrating how it feeds into modern disenchantment. It then draws on Provenzano's landmark dissent to show how ethical practice stems from deliberately open...
Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised though... more Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised thoughts and experiences can betray us long after organic memories of these episodes have faded. We are aware of these horror-stories, yet we continue to sign away our personal information to search algorithms and redundantly backed-up data-centres, leaving us vulnerable to the internet's acontextually perfect memory. Why do we do this? Because we appreciate that social networks and the broader networks that comprise the internet hinge on easy information sharing. Google's recent actions illustrate well our paradoxical relationship with online privacy. In June 2011 Google+ was launched and touted as a social network with user-determined privacy at its core. Google's latest attempt social networking sought to exploit the erosion of trust in Facebook's everchanging sharing settings. But only 9 months later, Google changed its terms of service to enable greater information-sharing between its own services. Servers in Palo Alto can now amalgamate our search histories with the sites we subscribe to, the videos we watch and even our GPS coordinates,
Law, Culture and the Humanities
This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because h... more This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury, and death. Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury, and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materializing practices through which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgments, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think, and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is special.
Law and Critique, 2020
This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form ... more This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law's enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontrover-sial, natural, and universal conditions of being 'human' cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law's understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence.
This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that human violence is legally actionable bec... more This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that human violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury and death. These same beliefs, I believe, sustain popular resistance to the use of the criminal law to regulate nonhuman violence (e.g. violence against robots or avatars). Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materialising practices by which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgements, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is inherently different.
Social & Legal Studies Journal, Jan 8, 2015
This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relat... more This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relates this back to the issue of minority protection and cultural recognition. Introducing a new method of inquiry, spatio-historical analysis, this article argues that a historical study of a legal and political geography can fundamentally enhance a socio- legal analysis of contemporary structures and processes of governance vested with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural diversity. Using the tribal areas of Pakistan as a case study, this article examines how the colonial history of the tribal areas brings into question its contemporary status in Pakistani constitutional law. It further pro- blematizes the idea that the tribal areas’ unique legal position can be attributed to the state’s recognition and promotion of the Pakhtun community’s right of normative autonomy. This article demonstrates how a spatio-historical model of analysis can reveal previously less visible sites of power and forms of domination that bring into question the historical linking of race and space and the significance of this relationship to questions about appropriate forms and expressions of normative autonomy within liberal societies.
Australian Journal of Gender and Law, Jan 1, 2010
... Transforming the 'Perpetrator' into 'Victim': The Effect ... more ... Transforming the 'Perpetrator' into 'Victim': The Effect of Gendering Violence on the Legal and Practical Responses to Women's Political Violence. Sabrina Gilani. Full Text: PDF.
Human Rights Law Review, Jan 1, 2010
Talks by Sabrina Gilani
domain of time appears to acquire its relational structure from human experiences of the more con... more domain of time appears to acquire its relational structure from human experiences of the more concrete domain of space.87 This idea resonates with the ideas presented in this thesis, particularly when I discuss how political and legal geographies, like the Reservation represent spaces that have been temporalised, imagined to exist ‘back in time’. 83 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, "Of Other Spaces," Diatrics 16, no. 1 (1986): p 23. This is illustrated quite vividly through his notion of heterotopia – spaces composed of both the produced spaces of ‘sites’ and their attendant social relations; a space that is both concrete (composed of the material environment) and abstract (having a meaning that could not be attributed to the physical features themselves and tended to vary across different societies). This concept appeared to draw inspiration from Chombart de Luawe’s distinction between objective and subjective social space. See, Anne Buttimer, "Social Space in Inte...
Transforming the 'perpetrator' into 'victim': the effect of gendering violence on the legal and p... more Transforming the 'perpetrator' into 'victim': the effect of gendering violence on the legal and practical responses to women's political violence Article (Published Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Gilani, Sabrina (2010) Transforming the 'perpetrator' into 'victim': the effect of gendering violence on the legal and practical responses to women's political violence. Australian Journal of Gender and Law, 1.
Social & Legal Studies, 2015
This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relat... more This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relates this back to the issue of minority protection and cultural recognition. Introducing a new method of inquiry, spatio-historical analysis, this article argues that a historical study of a legal and political geography can fundamentally enhance a sociolegal analysis of contemporary structures and processes of governance vested with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural diversity. Using the tribal areas of Pakistan as a case study, this article examines how the colonial history of the tribal areas brings into question its contemporary status in Pakistani constitutional law. It further problematizes the idea that the tribal areas’ unique legal position can be attributed to the state’s recognition and promotion of the Pakhtun community’s right of normative autonomy. This article demonstrates how a spatio-historical model of analysis can reveal previously less visible sites of power a...
Masculinity has always occupied a central position in Afghan culture and identity. Historically i... more Masculinity has always occupied a central position in Afghan culture and identity. Historically it has expressed itself through the designation of female behaviour as standards by which to judge male honour and social status. Under the Taliban, women were perceived as inferior and their status as rights-bearers was continuously challenged. The rights of women are further imperilled by the crisis in male masculinity that has resulted from the protracted episodes of male-targeted violence. At present, with the Taliban ousted and Afghanistan undergoing a period of reconstruction, it is important to consider how Afghan men will attempt to reassert their masculinity after a long period of extreme violence and oppression, and how such practices may impinge on the human rights of women within Afghanistan. This paper argues that because traditional means by which masculinity is asserted in most societies have been rendered virtually devastated or severely restricted by the long episodes of ...
Memory Studies, 2012
Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised though... more Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised thoughts and experiences can betray us long after organic memories of these episodes have faded. We are aware of these horror-stories, yet we continue to sign away our personal information to search algorithms and redundantly backed-up data-centres, leaving us vulnerable to the internet's acontextually perfect memory. Why do we do this? Because we appreciate that social networks and the broader networks that comprise the internet hinge on easy information sharing. Google's recent actions illustrate well our paradoxical relationship with online privacy. In June 2011 Google+ was launched and touted as a social network with user-determined privacy at its core. Google's latest attempt social networking sought to exploit the erosion of trust in Facebook's everchanging sharing settings. But only 9 months later, Google changed its terms of service to enable greater information-sharing between its own services. Servers in Palo Alto can now amalgamate our search histories with the sites we subscribe to, the videos we watch and even our GPS coordinates,
Social & Legal Studies
This paper re-reads American Appellate and Supreme Court rulings about the constitutionality of e... more This paper re-reads American Appellate and Supreme Court rulings about the constitutionality of execution by electrocution from the perspective of new materialism. Using the case of Provenzano v. Moore, this paper highlights how the existing jurisprudence develops a notion of cruelty that deliberately avoids the sensual and affective dimensions of punishment. Given the profoundly corporeal nature of punishment and even more so capital punishment, any consideration of the ethics of punitive practice must meaningfully engage with the body, its situatedness, and its material networks, all of which enact punishment as a social phenomenon. Employing Jane Bennett's ethics of affective enchantment, grounded in the ethico-onto-epistemology of new materialist thinkers, this paper critiques the majority opinion in Provenzano by demonstrating how it feeds into modern disenchantment. It then draws on Provenzano's landmark dissent to show how ethical practice stems from deliberately open...
Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised though... more Throughout Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger provides us with examples of how our digitised thoughts and experiences can betray us long after organic memories of these episodes have faded. We are aware of these horror-stories, yet we continue to sign away our personal information to search algorithms and redundantly backed-up data-centres, leaving us vulnerable to the internet's acontextually perfect memory. Why do we do this? Because we appreciate that social networks and the broader networks that comprise the internet hinge on easy information sharing. Google's recent actions illustrate well our paradoxical relationship with online privacy. In June 2011 Google+ was launched and touted as a social network with user-determined privacy at its core. Google's latest attempt social networking sought to exploit the erosion of trust in Facebook's everchanging sharing settings. But only 9 months later, Google changed its terms of service to enable greater information-sharing between its own services. Servers in Palo Alto can now amalgamate our search histories with the sites we subscribe to, the videos we watch and even our GPS coordinates,
Law, Culture and the Humanities
This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because h... more This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury, and death. Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury, and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materializing practices through which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgments, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think, and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is special.
Law and Critique, 2020
This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form ... more This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law's enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontrover-sial, natural, and universal conditions of being 'human' cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law's understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence.
This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that human violence is legally actionable bec... more This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that human violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury and death. These same beliefs, I believe, sustain popular resistance to the use of the criminal law to regulate nonhuman violence (e.g. violence against robots or avatars). Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materialising practices by which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgements, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is inherently different.
Social & Legal Studies Journal, Jan 8, 2015
This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relat... more This article considers the mutually constitutive relationship between law and geography and relates this back to the issue of minority protection and cultural recognition. Introducing a new method of inquiry, spatio-historical analysis, this article argues that a historical study of a legal and political geography can fundamentally enhance a socio- legal analysis of contemporary structures and processes of governance vested with the aim of protecting and promoting cultural diversity. Using the tribal areas of Pakistan as a case study, this article examines how the colonial history of the tribal areas brings into question its contemporary status in Pakistani constitutional law. It further pro- blematizes the idea that the tribal areas’ unique legal position can be attributed to the state’s recognition and promotion of the Pakhtun community’s right of normative autonomy. This article demonstrates how a spatio-historical model of analysis can reveal previously less visible sites of power and forms of domination that bring into question the historical linking of race and space and the significance of this relationship to questions about appropriate forms and expressions of normative autonomy within liberal societies.
Australian Journal of Gender and Law, Jan 1, 2010
... Transforming the 'Perpetrator' into 'Victim': The Effect ... more ... Transforming the 'Perpetrator' into 'Victim': The Effect of Gendering Violence on the Legal and Practical Responses to Women's Political Violence. Sabrina Gilani. Full Text: PDF.
Human Rights Law Review, Jan 1, 2010