Menu
Foluke Adebisi
University of Bristol
Foluke Ifejola Adebisi 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 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’ at https://FolukeAfrica.com. Her monograph “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility” was published by Bristol University Press in March 2023.
Talk Information:
[Un]Making The Wretched of the Earth: Can We Aim Towards Testamentary Life Within Legal Knowledge?
October 13, 2023 | 9:00 AM
The entanglement of Euro-modern law with the design
and spirit of coloniality – focused as it is on accumulation through dispossession – is characterised and operationalised by hierarchisation, dehumanisation, as well as control and disciplining of the human body. In other words, the body/person/human is central to the workings of Euro-modern legal thought; it is ‘the bedrock on which the social order is founded’ (Oyěwùmí 1997: 2). Considering how the contours of human/body have and are being produced and governed by law, we must question if, from within colonial logics and using Euro-modern legal knowledge, it is possible to reconstitute the vision of the human/body to produce testamentary life rather than structural injustice. My talk reflects on the ways that law has been instrumental in preserving the foregoing modalities and considers the possibilities and challenges of thinking about law's relation to the human differently, especially through the adoption of Southern Epistemologies.