Associate Professor Serena Natile (University of Warwick School of Law) has been a Visiting Fellow at the ANU College of Law. As she nears the end of her fellowship, she discusses her experience at the College, her current research and what is next for her.

What are your research interests?

My research lies at the intersection of international law, feminist political economy, and digital technologies. My work is mainly concerned with how international law enables the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and responsibilities and the impact that this maldistribution has on people at the margins of the global economy. To address this concern I bring together socio-legal enquiry and feminist and decolonial approaches to examine issues of coloniality, social reproduction, and maldistribution. My previous research project, undertaken throughout my PhD and postdoc, interrogated the narratives, institutions, and governance of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality. This research has been published in my first book The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, Routledge 2020), which provides a decolonial feminist critique of digital financial inclusion arguing for a radical politics of redistribution in international law and development. My current research projects include: ‘Feminist Recovery Plans for Covid-19 and Beyond: Learning from Grassroots Activism’; ‘Rosa Luxemburg & International Law (with Christine Schwöbel-Patel); and ‘Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution’ on which I’m working on during my ANU Fellowship.

What motivated you to come to the ANU College of Law as a Visiting Fellow?

I was informed about this fellowship by two wonderful colleagues at ANU College of Law, Ntina Tzouvala and Wanshu Cong. I consider it a real privilege to be able to spend time with them and the rest of the faculty to discuss our research interests and learn from each other’s work. The College of Law has a cluster of incredible scholars working on international law, political economy, socio-legal studies, and digital technologies and I have been able to discuss my research with Ntina, Wanshu, Kate Ogg, Jessica Hambly, Will Bateman, Faith Gordon, Alvin Hoi-Chun Hung, Clement Chen, among others. Beyond law, I was very thrilled to have the opportunity to meet in person two ANU scholars who I met online: Elise Klein, from The Crawford School of Public Policy, and Kate Henne, Director of the School of Regulation and Governance (RegNet). Elise’s work on universal basic income, coloniality and reparations and Kate’s work on the digital welfare state are very relevant for my new project. Besides scholarly interests, I was also very keen to explore Australia’s beautiful landscapes and learn more about its complex colonial history and First Nations peoples’ struggles for justice.

How have you found your time so far at the College?

I received a very warm welcome from ANU colleagues. Brenna and Mel have been extremely supportive in helping me to settle in quickly and academic colleagues have been very generous in making time for lunches, dinners, coffee breaks and lovely walks. I have also met PhD students to discuss their book proposals, publications and job applications. Outside the College of Law, I have arranged meetings with Elize Klein, Kate Henne, and Matt Whiters to discuss our common research interests and plan collaborations. Canberra gave me an equally warm welcome: I arrived on a bright sunny morning and the sunlight reflecting on Lake Griffin was just beautiful. I love Canberra’s extraordinary nature, I took walks through the Botanic Gardens, the Black Mountain, Mount Ainslie, and wondered in the surrounding nature reserves, I have been admiring flowers at Floriade, and appreciating Canberra’s eclectic food scene and hidden bars. I have also explored a personal favourite: Canberra’s local markets, from the Capital Region Farmers Market to the Old Bus Deport Market to Haig Park Village and Fyshwick markets. I have also visited art galleries and museums and learned more about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside the Museum of Australian Democracy at the Old Parliament House and the First Australians’ stories at the National Museum. Last weekend I visited Melbourne and besides catching up with friends and colleagues, I was able to visit the city and do some research at my favourite building: Trades Hall, to learn more about the workers’ movement in Australia. This past weekend, I took the train to Sydney where I met friends and colleagues, explored the city, the beautiful coastline, and the Blue Mountains.

Your visitor's seminar is entitled Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Can the law enable a grassroots politics of redistribution? Why have you chosen to speak on this topic? 

The talk is based on my new research project ‘Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution’ for which I have been awarded the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) EC Fellowship for 2024-2025. The project questions the assumption that digital technologies can improve the design and delivery of social security and be a quick fix for global inequality. It does so by contextualising the rise of digital social security and social protection programmes within the historic and contemporary power relations of international law and development. The purpose is to illustrate that although social security is considered a regulatory responsibility of the state, resources for social security depend on global economic dynamics enabled by the law, and international economic law in particular. My talk focused on the role of international law in enabling, and possibly challenging, the global maldistribution of resources for social security and discussed how technology is implicated in these dynamics. The project also aims to go beyond this critique and adopts a prefigurative law-making methodology to centre the voices of people at the margins of the global economy and give them the power to act as if they can reimagine and remake international law. Via consultations with groups representing these voices, the project will develop a grassroots-inspired framework for transnational social security law and will apply it to four case studies of digital social security programmes to understand whether and how the adoption of such framework can have a different distributive potential towards social justice. The project brings together insights and lessons from TWAIL, feminist political economy, international labour law, digital capitalism, archival research conducted at the International Labour Organisation and empirical case studies. I was very grateful to ANU colleagues’ for their engagement with the presentation and thoughtful questions, they really helped me to think through some key aspects of the project.

What is next for you beyond your ANU fellowship?

After the end of my ANU fellowship, in mid-November, I’m going back to the UK. I look forward to catching up with my lovely colleagues at Warwick Law School, resume my role as research seminars coordinator and see my PhD students. In the next months I will focus on completing some papers which are part of the project’s conceptual framework and next year I will start working on the empirical part of the project. I have planned consultations with grassroots groups and international organisations and fieldwork in Brazil, India, and Kenya. I will also be working on a new podcast which is part of the project titled ‘Women at the Margins of the Global Economy’. I will miss my daily interactions with colleagues at ANU, Canberra’s sunshine, birds and flowers, but I will go back enriched by the wonderful people I have met, the places I have visited and the many things I have learned. I am already planning collaborations with ANU colleagues and I will look forward to welcoming them at Warwick and be back in beautiful Australia.