The Law, Art, Politics Podcast comprises a series of interviews with academics and artists exploring issues on the entanglements of law, art and politics.
2020 was an emblematic year in which forces that have been bubbling under the surface across all aspects of society intensified dramatically into identifiable events. The dramatic imagery of Australia’s bushfire crystallised for many that the ravages of climate change have already arrived. The novel coronavirus – a long predicted and perhaps inevitable threat stemming from the expansion of human industry and urban density – changed the way we work, travel and be amongst one another. Long withheld reckonings with racial justice in colonial states could no longer be contained.
Great art has often emerged at times when opposing social and ideological forces intensify into conflict. Picasso’s Guernica is a moving portrait of a world being broken apart by fascism. Its stark tableau of figures and animals in great distress continues to move audiences and to draw attention to what is missing in the official propaganda of war – a consideration of the dignity of the ‘ordinary’ masses swept into its maw. Art emerges from specific contexts but their experimentation with forms can also prefigure new ways of representing, seeing, writing and speaking that builds possible bridges between one era and the next. In this way, art is both a commentary on its time and place and the beings that occupy it, and a vision of some other world and ways of being yet-to-come. Because of the potential for novel forms and relations, art contains politics.
What then of law? Will the existing categories of law be adequate to the task of governing the future? How have aesthetics, law and politics interacted at various moments in order to build new worlds and ways of being? Has their ability to do so been disrupted by contemporary forces siloing the public sphere, neoliberalism’s impact on institutions including universities and the means of dissemination of art, and the sense of helplessness in the face of corporate power and climate change?
The first series of the Law, Art, Politics Podcast was conceived and made possible with the support of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies - lucernaiuris at the University of Lucerne.
The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies is a hub for leading-edge teaching and research that crosses traditional boundaries between law, the humanities and the social sciences.
Their priorities are to critique and unsettle accepted categories and concepts, norms and discourses, practices and methods, with the aim of engaging with the urgency of the present moment and to imagining alternative futures.
Acknowledgement of Country
This podcast was recorded and produced in different locations including the lands and waters of the Ngunnawal, Yuin, Cammeraygal, Noongar, Yuggera and Turrbal peoples.
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians on whose lands we meet and pay our respects to the Elders past and present.
Law, Art, Politics is produced and hosted by Justine Poon, Lecturer in Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Her doctoral work at the Australian National University is on the power of images and language in shaping the legal category of the refugee. She is interested in developing interdisciplinary and creative methodologies to ask critical questions about law and society.