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Dr Sarah Keenan

Associate Research Fellow

BA/LLB(Hons 1)(ANU), Grad Dip (Legal Practice), PhD(Kent), PGCert (Teaching Higher Education)

s.keenan@bbk.ac.uk

Research Interests

My work sits at the intersection of legal and political thought, geography, feminist theory and postcolonial studies. I am particularly interested in the malleability of the concept of property and how it might reshaped for a better world.

Additional Professional Information

Raised on Giabal and Jarowair land in Toowoomba, ‘Australia’, Sarah Keenan has taught at Kent, Oxford Brookes, SOAS and Birkbeck Law School, where she co-founded the Centre for Research on Race and Law. She has held visiting positions at LSE, Osgoode (York), Allard (UBC), Melbourne and Wollongong Law Schools and at CUNY Centre for Place, Culture and Politics. She has served on the editorial boards of Feminist Legal Studies, feminists@law, the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law and the International Journal of Human Rights.

Publications

Monograph

2015). Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging. Routledge Social Justice Series.

Edited Collections and Special Issues

Keenan, S. & Smith, J. (Eds.) (2023). Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy and the Socio-Legal. Special Section of Social and Legal Studies.

Keenan, S. & Patchett, E. (Eds.). (2017). Spatial Justice and Diaspora. Counterpress.
 

Peer-reviewed Journal articles

(forthcoming 2023) Things Naturally on the Land: Nuisance and non-human agency in common law. Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas (Special Issue: Property and Nature). (10,000 words).

(2023) Keeping the Gweagal Shield: Property and Truth in Matters of Post-colonial Redistribution. Legalities (10,000 words).

(2023) The Transfer of What? Electronic Conveyancing and the Destabilisation of Property. Law, Technology and Humans 5(1):11-23. 

(2021) Fumaça, cortinas e espelhos: a produção de raça por meio do tempo e do registro de títulos / Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration, translated by Ferreira, B.M.B. Revista Direito e Praxis 12(3): 2258 -2296.

(2020) Expanding Terra Nullius. The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs (Special Issue: Refugees and New Inequalities in the Pacific) 32(2): 449-460.

(2019) Keenan, S. & El-Enany, N. From Pacific to Traffic Islands: Challenging Australia's colonial use of the ocean through creative protest. Acta Academica (Special Issue: Space, Place and the Power of Ideas) 51(1): 28-52.

(2019) From Historical Chains to Derivative Futures: Title Registries as Time Machines. Social and Cultural Geography 20(3): 282-303.

(2017) The Gweagal Shield. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly (Special Issue: ‘The Pop-Up Museum of Legal Objects’. 68(3): 283-290. 

(2016) Smoke, Mirrors and Curtains: Time, Race and Title Registration. Law and Critique 28(1): 87-108.

(2014) Swimming against the tide of history: Undoing Australian law’s historicization of Indigenous Australia in the post–Mabo era. Canadian Journal of Law and Society (Special Issue: Law and Decolonization) 29(2): 163-180.

(2013) Bringing the Outside(r) In: Law’s Appropriation of Subversive Identities. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 64(3): 299-316.

(2013) Property as Governance: Time, Space and Belonging in Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention. Modern Law Review 76(3): 464-493.

(2010) Subversive Property: Reshaping Malleable Spaces of Belonging. Social and Legal Studies 19(4): 423-439. Sage Publications.

(2009) Australian Legal Geography and the Search for Postcolonial Space in Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island. Australian Feminist Law Journal 30: 173-199.

(2009) A blue wristband view of history? The death of Mulrunji Doomadgee and the illusion of postcolonial Australia. Alternative Law Journal 34(4): 248-252.