Dr Jessica Hambly is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU College of Law, and Co-Director of the Law Reform and Social Justice program.
She is a socio-legal scholar with interests in: access to justice for people seeking asylum; asylum law and procedure; refugee rights; gender and migration; legal professions and radical lawyering; inclusion and participation in 'legal spaces'; court and tribunal (including online) architectures. Jess' work uses socio-legal and legal geography methodologies, particularly relating to materiality, spatiality, temporality and chrono-politics.
Jess's PhD was a socio-legal study of the role of lawyers in UK asylum appeals, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Jess has worked with a number of grassroots migrant and refugee rights organisations including Bristol Refugee Rights, Lesvos Legal Centre, and Samos Legal Centre.
Current projects include:
- Thinking transnationally about asylum appeals and design of review mechanisms and procedures. A co-authored book 'Inside Asylum Appeals: Access, Participation and Procedure’ (Gill, Hoellerer, Hambly, Fisher) is due out late 2023.
- Thinking critically about constructions of vulnerability and trauma in migration law. This strand of research considers, for example, possibilities and limits of trauma-informed lawyering, and medicalisation of vulnerability in asylum procedures.
- Casting a spatio-temporal lens on law, lawyers and social movements. Jess will teach a new course on Law and Social Movements in 2024 drawing on innovative socio-legal and legal geography methodologies.
- Funded project: 'Anglo-Indians and the ‘White Australia’ Policy: Constructions of the ‘Desirable Migrant in Australian Immigration Law’.
Past research projects include as a postdoctoral researcher on 'ASYFAIR' - a comparative study of asylum appeal procedures around Europe, where she conducted ethnography at the French National Asylum Court and research interviews in the Greek asylum system, and as a researcher on 'The Citizenship and Law Project', focusing on children's citizenship rights.
Appointments
Significant research publications
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
Link to ANU researchers profile