Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Law
Degree type
Higher Degree Research
Research project topic
Legal Metaphors and Political Discourse
Research project
Border, Body, Sea: Legal Metaphors and Political Discourse in Australian Refugee Law.
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.
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
