“What does it mean to dream of new anticolonial worlds from within the law school?” 

About the talk:

The law is heavily implicated in creating, maintaining, and reproducing racialised hierarchies which bring about and preserve acute global disparities and injustices. Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility provides an examination of the meanings of decolonisation and explores how this examination can inform teaching, researching, and practising of law. In this talk, Foluke Adebisi will explore the book's interdisciplinary dimensions and critical implications, including for thinking about decolonisation, law, legal education, racial justice, development and social change. She will also share her motivations for writing the book, run through some of its contents and conclude with what readers can expect to take away from reading it.   

About the speaker:

Dr. Folúkẹ́ Ifejola Adébísí is a Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol. Her scholarship focuses mainly on the relationship between theories of decolonisation and how they do and can interact with legal knowledge. Thus, her scholarly work is concerned with what happens at the intersection of legal education, law, society, and a history of changing ideas of what it means to be human. She has written widely in this area. She also edited a special issue for the Law Teacher journal on decolonisation in 2019. She found and runs Forever Africa Conference and Events (FACE), a Pan-African interdisciplinary conference. She blogs about her scholarship and pedagogy on her website ‘Foluke’s African Skies.' Her monograph Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility was published by Bristol University Press in March of 2023. 

About the seminar series: 

The Joint Legal Studies Seminar Series features biannual seminars showcasing a range of legal studies scholarship.  The series is hosted by the Departments of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and St. Jerome’s University.  

For more information:

Please contact Honor Brabazon, Allison Chenier, or Andrea Quinlan with any questions. 

This seminar is available online only, via Zoom (please register here).