Reimaging Tools of Justice for Decolonized Futures: Visible-Invisible Voices and the World in Between
Overview
Join this panel to reimagining legal knowledge, challenging colonial legacies, and centering Global South voices
Taking up the Go South conference theme of the politics of knowledge production this panel focuses on how we might reimagine tools of justice to strive for decolonized futures.
In the Global South, the study of law, human rights, and justice are deeply influenced by British, French, and American jurisprudence due to colonial histories, histories of settler colonialism, as well as international human rights norms shaped by the Cold War that continue to maintain socioeconomic disparities and stifle particular approaches to justice. The seminar aims to decolonize knowledge about human rights law by critically examining legal knowledge production, methodologies, and knowledge transmission. It proposes that we re-imagine artifacts of justice as opportunities for innovation and reclamation, challenging structural violence and colonial legacies that marginalize other understandings of what justice is and could be.
Panelists will address three key challenges: the persistence of colonial legal frameworks for teaching human rights by locating the Global South as a place of archives and not canons (Grovogui, 2025), the dismissal of Southern knowledge as incompatible with existing legal histories and paradigms, and the deployment of methods that undermine other ways of understanding human rights law and justice. By shifting the focus away from traditional legal frameworks to de-colonial legal knowledge and methods, the seminar seeks to redefine how we can illuminate new justice paths through the mapping of anti-colonial visions of self-determination, what is necessary for detailing alternate visions of teaching law and human rights, and the importance of making visible that which has been invisibilized in the study of human rights and justice traditions. It proposes itself as an alternative pedagogical forum devoted to creating new innovative tools of knowledge for turning structural violence and hidden historical injustices into opportunities for envisioning in turn decolonized futures. From new epistemic approaches to emergent methodological trends, shifts in taxonomies of knowledge, the panel will consider some of the most law, justice and human rights challenges of our time.
