How do we dance law?

This seminar brings together two bodies of research – socio-legal studies and dance or movement studies – to explore what insights these different fields can offer one another, in terms of both research and practice. In doing so, it suggests new ways of doing socio-legal work with attention to law’s relation to movement.

Law regulates movement in diverse ways. This plays out in laws regulating bodes moving across international and sometimes sub-national borders; laws restricting the ways that bodies can move in diverse areas such as driving, sports, and sex; and laws controlling the movement of carceralised bodies through things such as interlock devices, ankle bracelets, and custody cells.

Law often seeks to regulate the movement of bodies that are deemed unruly or disordered and this can manifest in the prohibition of dance forms, such as jazz, reggae, and raves. In contrast to movement, fixation is a common thematic in the legal regulation of dance, copyright, and choreography, suggesting confluences between fixation and legitimation as compared to unfixity and deviance.

This seminar will explore current socio-legal debates about the regulation of movement, as well as arts-based methods of conducting legal research and teaching such as movement and dance. These arts-based methods of socio-legal research offer new ways of exploring the intersections of law and the moving body through lifting law from the page to the stage.

Speaker: Sean Mulcahy is a Research Officer at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society with a research focus on human rights law and experiences of stigma and discrimination against marginalised populations, including people with (a history of) hepatitis C, people who use drugs, and LGBTIQA+ people. Sean completed a joint PhD in the School of Law at the University of Warwick and the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, where he served as a teaching associate in performance studies. His doctoral research examined courts and law from the perspective of contemporary theatre and performance practice. His work has been published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Law and Humanities, and Law Text Culture. He also produces the Performing Law podcast and has also worked as a freelance actor, director and theatre producer.

Speaker: Maria Federica (‘Marica’) Moscati is a Reader in Law and Society at the University of Sussex. Her main research interests lie in issues relating to dispute resolution, comparative legal studies, children's rights, queer people and the law, dance and the law, and hormones and the law. While incorporating arts and in particular, dance into her research and teaching, she is currently working on the research project The power of battement jete: conversation between dance and law that aims at exploring how different genres of dance, dance pedagogy and choreography can be transferred into legal research and legal teaching. In January 2024, she designed and launched a dance-practice interdisciplinary learning initiative on Dance in Law, Politics and Sociology. She is co-director of the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health; co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press book series ‘Comparative Legal Studies, Society and Justice’; co-editor of the journal Amicus Curiae; Associate Research Fellow at IALS. 

Speaker: Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher at SOAS where she studies the impact of authoritarianism on the land claims of nomadic communities in India. She was previously a doctoral researcher in international law at the European University Institute in Florence. Her project proposed a multimedia ethnographic re-articulation of the grammar and politics of cultural rights in international human rights law using counterhegemonic epistemologies. Her doctoral thesis was anchored on collaborative fieldwork with the Irulars, a semi-nomadic community based in southern India. Raghavi is actively engaged as a policy interlocutor through her work with ICOMOS and her consulting work with cultural rights collectives in India, Kenya, and Italy. She is interested in international human rights law, international criminal justice, cultural heritage law, epistemic injustice, the ethics of ethnographic research, and sensory approaches to legal meaning-making. 

Chair: Jess Connolly-Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with research interests in the areas of legal geography, law and everyday life, and law and the senses. Her research explores how law engages in abstract and material practices of meaning-making to produce identities which construct, shape, and permeate our experience of everyday life. Jess is the author of Law, Registration, and the State: Making Identities through Space, Place, and Movement (Routledge, 2023), which was awarded the Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics 2024. She is co-editor of ‘Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal’, a special section of Social & Legal Studies. Her research has been also published in Feminist Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, and the Sociological Review.