Foluke Adebisi, University of Bristol Law School, UK
Over the years several colleagues and I have been thinking of how to consolidate and build on the work that we have been doing in translating our anti-colonial, anti-racist research into our teaching. There have been a number of false starts; starts; however, as you can see below, we have collectively managed to fashion a vision that we believe we can run with to establish a global research network focused on engaging with how race and colonialism are taught in law and allied social science and humanities disciplines. At the moment the main organisers are myself (Foluke Adebisi, University of Bristol Law School, UK), Chaumtoli Huq (City University of New York School of Law, US), Sahar Shah, (University of Bristol Law School, UK), River Baars (SOAS, University of London, UK), Michael Yarbrough (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York), Diego Alcalá Laboy, Albany Law School, New York), and Christine Schwöbel-Patel (Warwick Law School, UK). We expect this team to be expanded over the next couple of months and years.
The proposed research network aims to bring together a wide range of scholars engaged in the praxis of embedding critical understandings of race, colonialism and empire into their pedagogical practice and research. The purpose is to consolidate and innovate practices and insights across geographies and expertise, inside and outside of ‘traditional’ legal education institutions and contexts. Recognising the limited advancement of knowledge in this field, we aim to synthesise a range of scholarly efforts to enhance understanding of how race and colonialism shape the nature and substance of law and its teaching.
Our [fairly simple] premise is that both law and society have been shaped by colonial histories. Thus, one could argue quite confidently that the last 500 years of human history have been fundamentally influenced by the manufacture and use of race to create human hierarchies and to produce material difference across human populations on a global scale. The main structures through which this has happened are the interwoven processes of racialised enslavement and extractive colonisation. The effects of these are carried on into the present, exemplified by racial violence, extreme inequality and environmental devastation. International and domestic forms of law have played complex, often paradoxical, roles in the foregoing processes – institutionalising imperialism/racism as well as serving as a recourse for colonised and racialised populations resisting imperialism/racism. One could then strongly suggest that the very ontology of law is fundamentally shaped by its entanglement with racism and imperialism on a global scale as well as movements to dismantle them. Despite this, the core curriculum of legal education (particularly but not limited to Global North/Global North-influenced contexts) does often not include an examination of the questions that arise from this.
In response to this absence, recent years have seen a surge in legal academics and law students making concerted efforts to draw attention to the ways in which racism and imperialism have shaped the character of law – for example, as part of ‘Decolonising the Curriculum’ initiatives or ‘critical legal’ teaching more broadly. As part of this move, our newly created network intends to provide a forum for sharing this praxis across vastly different regions and different areas of law. As such, we particularly want to facilitate conversations with and within the Global South as well as with non-Anglophone countries. The network will be a space to showcase anti-colonial and anti-racist approaches to the teaching of so-called ‘foundational’/‘core’/‘traditional’ law subjects as well as the development of completely new law subjects that directly engage with the intertwinement of race, empire, and law. We are interested in sharing knowledge on pedagogical strategies that are non-traditional (e.g., interdisciplinary or art-based) as well as those that rely on traditional pedagogies. Knowledge-sharing across jurisdictions and jurisprudences beyond the common law, as well as different disciplines beyond the law, aids in the development of new strands of pedagogy. As such, the network intends to also be an avenue for establishing and collaborating on research projects and writing projects as well as non-traditional academic projects. We aim to work closely with other research projects and networks where areas of interest overlap. We want to offer a home for the ‘pedagogical’ element that might attend the critical strands of research emerging from other groups/networks/projects.
At present many of the pedagogical innovations that are happening in ‘critical’ or ‘anti-colonial’ intellectual spaces around the world are sporadic and often fuelled by the enthusiasm of individual academics or small groups of people. Many of these innovative individuals are young and precarious academics, often from racialised or indigenous backgrounds. Students at various institutions have also provided impetus for these pedagogical innovations. Consequently, we believe that the work that is being done would benefit from a supporting network of individuals able to exchange ideas about the relevance of this work to legal education and to develop knowledge in this area.
Our initial guiding questions
We aim to begin our work with the following [shared] questions in mind:
What?
What is being taught within the general ambit of race and empire within legal education? This may include legal histories, theories, examinations of legislation on antidiscrimination and equality, etc.
How?
How is race and empire taught in legal education? What teaching materials are used? Is teaching in these arenas connected to research? How is learning assessed? What is the impact of institutional, sector or professional arrangements on what can be done in the classroom? Where does the teaching take place? How are class conversations run?
When?
When does this teaching happen within the law school programme – at the start of the degree or the end? Is it included in the “mainstream” or in stand-alone units? Who gets to participate due to the timing of the teaching?
Why?
Why is the work happening? Who drives it? What are the responses to it?
So what?
So what? What happens next? What are the observations and reflections that come out of the work that has already been done? What do we think would be useful to do that has not been tried yet? What support to we need? What impact does it or can it have?
How will we answer these questions?
The first step of in building this network is to propose it as a new Collaborative Research Network of the Law and Society Association. We believe that this helps us to tap into pre-existing networks that many of us have already built. We envision this as a branch of our activities and not the root. Additionally, as with any such endeavour we do have concerns about how far the institutional structure will allow us to innovate in the way we need. Yet, we recognise that we must build on work that has already been done and be in conversation with people who have done some of this work. We are acutely aware of the balance that must be struck (or at least attempted) here.
As stated above, we want to emphasise the non-traditional ways of sharing knowledge while we continue to work within traditional mediums as well. Traditional mediums have their strengths but are also hampered by, among other things, a North-South imbalance. As such we would also like to explore the following:
- Pedagogical materials and methods-sharing projects
- Podcasts
- Seminars held in various geographies and languages
- Non-traditional research projects such as film making, writing projects and trips.
If any of this sounds important and appealing to you, please sign up here to be looped into communications about the development of the network and its first steps: https://forms.office.com/e/uAa8mPSuJP
A Bibliography of What Has Been Done —Some of the existing scholarship
Petrov, Ivan, and Amina Yusuf. “Reforming Legal Education in the Global South: Colonial Legacies and Critical Pedagogy.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Society, Law, and Politics 4, no. 1 (2025): 220-230.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Toward a race-conscious pedagogy in legal education.” Nat’l Black LJ 11 (1988): 1.
Devlin, Richard F. “Towards an/other legal education: Some critical and tentative proposals to confront the racism of modern legal education.” UNBLJ 38 (1989): 89.
Ansley, Frances Lee. “Race and the core curriculum in legal education.” Calif. L. Rev. 79 (1991): 1511.
Barkaskas, Patricia, and Sarah Buhler. “Beyond reconciliation: Decolonizing clinical legal education.” Journal of Law and Social Policy 26 (2017): 1.
Jivraj, Suhraiya. “Towards Anti-racist Legal pedagogy: A resource.” (2020).
Karibi-Whyte, Asikia. “An agenda for decolonising law in Africa: Conceptualising the curriculum.” Journal of Decolonising Disciplines 2, no. 1 (2020).
Burgis-Kasthala, Michelle, and Christine Schwobel-Patel. “Against coloniality in the international law curriculum: examining decoloniality.” The Law Teacher 56, no. 4 (2022): 485-506.
Fischer, Alison. “Colonialism, Context and Critical Thinking: First steps toward decolonizing the Dutch legal curriculum.” Utrecht Law Review 18, no. 1 (2022).
Adébísí, Folúké. Decolonisation and legal knowledge: Reflections on power and possibility. Policy Press, 2023.
Adebisi, Foluke, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Ntina Tzouvala. Decolonisation, Anti-Racism, and Legal Pedagogy. Routledge, 2024.
Adebisi, Foluke I., ed. Decolonisation and the Law School: Dreaming Beyond Aesthetic Changes to the Curriculum. Taylor & Francis, 2024.
