Practising feminist politics in legal geographic research

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on my experiences conducting legal geographic research within a Central Pennsylvania courtroom. This research builds on my former professional experience as a legal advocate where I worked for five years providing advocacy services to over 800 survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. I discuss how I incorporated two common advocacy practices – accompaniment and institutional advocacy – into my research praxis as a means to fulfil my commitment to conduct activist research as a feminist legal geographer. I argue that the advocacy skills I learned outside of academia helped me navigate the tensions of studying power with legal actors in the privileged space of the courtroom. This paper contributes to recent interest in the methodological practices that legal geographers utilise within courtroom spaces, while also encouraging legal geographers to consider what knowledge and skills – beyond academic methodologies and methods – might serve to support activist research within spaces of power.

Practising legal geography

“…The first three papers in the special section explore court spaces. The section opens with Dana Cuomo’s (2021) paper, which navigates issues of power in a Central Pennsylvania courtroom and in doing so reflects on the kinds of methodological tools and skills required to understand the differential subjective experiences of legal spaces. In widening the methodological toolkit of legal geographers, and in particular drawing on the significance of advocacy practices such as accompaniment and institutional advocacy, Cuomo illustrates how activist strategy and methodological practice can interplay to reveal – while also seeking to confront – law’s spatial qualities.…”

Event(ful) spaces of organised legal encounter: Reflections from a client consultation competition on domestic violence law in Cambodia

“…Over the past five years, geographers’ engagement in legal observation and/or intervention has begun to gain momentum, with a particular emphasis on the courtroom. It is here where a growing number of geographers have variously witnessed, and sometimes even taken part in, war crimes trials (Jeffrey, 2019), asylum claims (Faria et al., 2020; Gill & Hynes, 2020, this issue), and other cases (Cuomo, 2020, this issue; Walenta, 2020). Yet according to Caroline Faria et al., this emerging cohort of scholars is counterpoised against the majority of legal researchers, and indeed legal geographers, who rarely step into a courtroom, despite the fact the courtroom is a highly significant legal space, one densely concentrated with legal meaning and through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed (2019, p. 2).…”