ANU Law PhD candidate Justine Poon has written a “Letter to the Land” for an artwork currently featuring in an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne.
Justine Poon
Manager - LRSJ, PhD Candidate
BA LLB (1st Hons)
ANU College of Law, Bld 5, Fellows Rd, Acton ACT 2600
ANU College of Law, 5 Fellows Rd, Acton ACT 2600
Research Themes
Research Centre
Biography
Justine graduated in 2012 from the University of Technology, Sydney with a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours and a Bachelor of Arts in Commmunication (Media Arts and Production). She is a published writer and a filmmaker. Her PhD thesis examines the legal consequences that are activated at the moment asylum seeker boats cross the Australian sea border and the work that language and metaphors in political discourse do in shaping our understanding of the limits of law and sovereignty.
Appointments
- Manager, Law Reform and Social Justice
Recent news
13
Sep
2016
PhD candidate Justine Poon will represent the ANU College of Law on Wednesday at the University's Three Minute Thesis finalwith her presentation on refugee law.
If you're confused about the referendum for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, you need to watch this video.
In the Media
24
May
2017
Justine Poon writes in Demos Journal
Past events
08
Jul
-
17
Sep
2017
10.00AM to 5.00PM Exhibition
PhD Student and LRSJ Manager Justine Poon has a 'Letter to the Land' included in the Greater Together art exhibition at ACCA in Melbourne.
07
Mar
2017
1.00PM to 2.00PM Information session
Want to find out more about who ANU Law Reform and Social Justice are, or what we do? Are you interested in joining a project? Do you have ideas you are burning to share with like-minded students? Come along to our Info Session in Week 3!
Research projects & collaborations
- 2015 Visiting PhD scholar at the Human Rights Consortium (Refugee Law Initiative), School of Advanced Study, University of London
Conference papers & presentations
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'Border, Body, Sea: How does the asylum seeker appear in law and political images?', Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference: Complicities (University of Technology Sydney, 2015)
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'How a Body Becomes a Boat: Metaphors and the legal recognition of asylum seekers in Australia', Critical Legal Conference: Law Space and the Political (University of Wrocław, Poland, 2015)
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'Encounters at the Border: The disembodiment of asylum seekers and the embodiment of sovereignty in Australian law and discourse', Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory: Borderlines (University of Melbourne, 2014)
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'Border, Body, Sea: The tidal flow of bodies and three stories about sovereignty', Migrants Outside the Frame of Community Symposium (The Australian National University, 2014)
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'The Persistent Demand of the “Queue” in Australian Refugee Law and Discourse or Five Ways of Looking at a Queue', Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference: Interpellations (The Australian National University, 2013)
Philosophy & approach
Teaching is a collaborative exercise between me and my students. As well as making sure they understand the content, I aim to help students understand the processes of legal reasoning and critical thinking.
Past courses
- Torts
- Lawyers, Justice and Ethics
Topic
Border, Body, Sea: Legal Metaphors and Political Discourse in Australian Refugee Law.
Program
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Further information
This thesis is a critical theory examination of legal change in Australian refugee law. Australian refugee law has been in recent times one of the most active areas of law. Its legislation and its jurisprudence have been both influenced by and produced ideas about sovereignty, legal personality and subject-hood, and the creative imagination of space and jurisdiction. The border, the body and the sea are the major metaphors that set the stage for, and form the focus of, the particular legal changes examined. Within the conceptual system of law, legal change takes place in no small part due to the cognitive and epistemological shifts that the use of metaphors enables. Close examination of the deployment of these metaphors in the law, and in the political discourses that shape our understanding of the law, can reveal to us the relationship between language, concepts and law.
