Image: Pixabay

Rewriting Jurisprudence: Centring Refugee and Migrant Lived Experience is a critical judgments project. The aim is to rethink, reframe and rewrite jurisprudence from the perspectives of scholars and lawyers with lived experience of forced displacement (refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs)), statelessness and migration. Some refugee and migration law judgments have been rewritten from queer and feminist perspectives but this will be the first project in which judgments are critiqued and rewritten by scholars and lawyers with lived experience of forced displacement, migration and statelessness.

The conceptualisation of this project is broad in reach. We invite proposals for rewriting any judgment concerning refugees, IDPs, stateless persons and migrants from any country or region. Authors can nominate a case they would like to rewrite or ask the editors for suggestions. We encourage authors to explore what was outside the judicial lens in the initial decision, whose narratives and voices were given priority and whose were (mis)represented, silenced or ignored. 

Taking our lead from Nicole Watson and Heather Douglas’s Indigenous Judgments Project, we envisage that many of the contributions will be co-authored. We are looking to pair, in the first instance, scholars (from any discipline) or lawyers with lived experience of forced displacement, statelessness and migration and, in the second, scholars of refugee, statelessness and migration law without such lived experience. As the editorial team, we are similarly a group of scholars from these backgrounds. We invite proposals from authors who would like to write together but we also welcome expressions of interest from those who would like to be paired with a co-author. We will endeavour to match contributors with similar interests.

Rewriting Jurisprudence: Centring Refugee and Migration Lived Experience is an ongoing project. In its first phase, we will be publishing a selection of rewritten judgments as articles in a special issue of a journal. We will then work towards producing a broader range of rewritten judgments for publication as an edited collection. During the project we will also publish shortened or draft versions as blog posts as a way of ensuring both accessibility and timeliness of contributions. 

Rewriting Jurisprudence: Centring Refugee and Migration Lived Experience is a joint project between the ANU College of Law and Sir Zelman Cowen Centre at Victoria University. The editors are: Tina Dixson (ANU), Assistant Professor Veronica Fynn-Bruey (Athabasca University), Dr Jessica Hambly (ANU), Dr Eve Lester (ANU), Nyadol Nyuon (Victoria University), Associate Professor Kate Ogg (ANU), Associate Professor Olivera Simic (Griffith University) and Associate Professor Matthew Zagor (ANU).

See here for more information.