LAW & HUMANITIES WORKSHOP
presents
Irus Braverman
SUNY Buffalo
More-than-Human Legalities:
Advocating an “Animal Turn” in Law and Society
12:30-2:00 pm
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Solarium (FA2) – Falconer Hall - 84 Queen’s Park
Irus Braverman is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography at SUNY Buffalo, where she teaches Criminal Procedure, Law and Nature, and topics related to legal geography. She is currently a fellow of Cornell’s Center for the Humanities and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. In 2014, she is also a Ryskamp fellow of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS).
Her main interests lie in the interdisciplinary study of law, geography, and anthropology. Writing within this nexus, Braverman has conducted ethnographic research of illegal houses, trees, checkpoints, public toilets, police dogs, and zoos. Born in Jerusalem, Braverman acquired a law degree (LL.B.) and a Master’s in Criminology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She served as a public state prosecutor and as an environmental lawyer, both in Israel, and was also trained as a mediator and worked as a community organizer for environmental justice issues and as a political activist. Braverman acquired her doctoral degree in law (SJD) from the University of Toronto. During this time, she was an Associate with the Humanities Center at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow with the Human Rights Program at Harvard University Law School, a Junior Fellow with the Center of Criminology at the University of Toronto, and a Visiting Fellow with the Geography Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Braverman’s first monograph, House Demolitions in East Jerusalem: ‘Illegality’ and Resistance (Hebrew), focuses on how planning laws and regulations applied in East Jerusalem create a discriminatory urban landscape and produce illegal spaces. In her second monograph, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Braverman describes how acts of planting and uprooting trees have facilitated the struggle over land and identity in Israel/Palestine. Finally, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press, 2012) draws on more than seventy interviews with zoo managers and administrators as well as animal activists to offer a glimpse into the otherwise unknown complexities of modern zoos, thereby making surprising interconnections between our understandings of the human and the nonhuman. This book received the Independent Publisher Book Award in Current Events. Her co-edited collection of legal geography essays, The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (forthcoming, Stanford University Press), illuminates the dynamic relationship between law and space.
Braverman has also published essays in several collections and journals such as Antipode, Law and Society Review, Environment and Planning, Cultural Studies, Law and Social Inquiry, Cultural Critique, Buffalo Law Review, and PoLAR, and is currently co-editing a volume of critical essays on legal geography, The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (forthcoming, Stanford University Press). Her new book project, “Wild Life: The Nature of In Situ and Ex Situ Conservation,” explores the intensified management of nature as a form of biopower.
This event is sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) Working Group on Animals in the Law and Humanities, with funding provided by the JHI and the law school Scotiabank Fund.
A light lunch will be served.
For a copy of the paper, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
