Practical engagements in legal geography: Collaborative feminist approaches to immigration advocacy in Denmark

Abstract

In this article, I examine how collaboration can yield new insights into inquires of legal geography and transform the ways that legal work is carried out. Drawing on feminist methodologies, I put forward feminist legal collaboration -a method and praxis -through which legal geographers can address the everyday manifestations and contestations of power in relation to law and space, while at the same time build alliances with people whose (legal) rights are currently contested. I reflect on my experiences of doing everyday collaborative work with legal practitioners, activists, and forced migrants at community centers in Denmark. Through two empirical examples of legal collaboration, I show how collaboration offers insights into migration law and legal procedures that are impossible to gain from just reading the law. The process of collaborating can teach us about the politics in law and reveal political possibilities within these socio-legal spaces. We might think of feminist legal collaboration as a method and praxis that takes place through direct engagement with the law and legal practices in order to co-produce knowledge and radically reconfigure existing approaches to legal counseling. The feminist legal collaborative approach, which I put forward here, is not limited to research on the legal geographies of (forced) migration. Rather, I imagine that feminist legal collaboration can

Refusing the Gift of Welfare: Syrians’ Encounters with the Danish State

“…With their lived experiences and intimate knowledges of fleeing war and seeking refuge in a foreign country, Syrians need to be understood as a site of social and political critique, rather than as an object of rescue and investigation (Espiritu 2014). As a researcher, I approached my long-term engagement with Syrians as one of feminist collaboration (Jacobsen 2021) and solidarity in the face of state oppression. Thus, I approach the question of my own positionality not merely in terms of my own identity as some fixed category but rather a matter of relationality (Rose 1997).…”

Insights from Antipodean legal geography: Building an environmental legal geography scholarship

“…Bartel, 2020; Charpleix, 2018; Carter and Paterson, 2021; Jessup, 2015; O’Gorman, 2016). Further, and by way of example, Lange and Gillespie (2022) use legal geography as both a method and praxis (following O’Donnell et al, 2020; and akin to Jacobsen, 2021) as they analyse prescribed burning legislation and policy to assess to what extent more-than-human concerns are given priority in wild or bushfire management practices. They find that the anthropocentric grounding of current state-based laws prioritises human interests at the expense of more-than-human interests.…”

Practising legal geography

“…Reflecting critical scholarship on the state (see McConnell, 2016), Brickell’s discussions conclude with the call for legal geographers to look beyond court spaces to the wider set of places and spaces within which law is rehearsed. The range of actors involved in the deliberation of law is also a feature of Jacobsen’s (2021) paper examining the collaborative work between legal practitioners, activists, and forced migrants at community centres in Denmark. This work illuminates the political potential of scrutinising embodied and everyday encounters, to trace how power operates in socio‐legal situations.…”