1. 'Prossy Has Been Saved!' : a sense of unease, a lack of connection, a spatial turn -- 2. Law/space/belonging? : legal geography and its discontents -- 3. From positionality to spatiality : theorising legal geography and finding life in space -- 4. Subversive property : reshaping malleable spaces of belonging -- 5. Homelands : property and belonging in Australia's northern territory intervention -- 6. Your lesbian property please : refugee law and the production of homonormative landscapes -- 7. Taking space with you : inheritance, appropriation and belonging across time and space.
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This book explores the relationship between space, subjectivity and property in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property. Sarah Keenan demonstrates that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about property in terms of space and belonging, rather than exclusion.Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, this book shifts focus away from the propertied subject and on to the broader spaces in and through which the propertied subject is located. Using case studies, such as analyses of compulsory leases under Australia's Northern Territory
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For decades, the British Museum has been displaying an object in its collection as the shield which was used by Gweagal men defending against Cook's landing at Kamay in 1770. Following a loan of the shield to the National Museum of Australia in 2015/2016, Gweagal man Rodney Kelly lodged a claim with the British Museum asking for the shield to be repatriated. Soon after, the British Museum facilitated and partly funded research which aimed 'to test the argument – or widely held belief – that the shield was collected at Botany Bay in 1770' ( Nugent and Sculthorpe 2018 , 37). The research all but concluded that the shield was not collected at Cook's landing, and that that shield, if it exists, is now lost ( Thomas 2018 , 25). Despite this questioning of the shield's identity, it remains on prominent display in the British Museum's Enlightenment room. In this article, I critically examine the new research on the shield, making two related arguments. I argue first that the research is conceptually limited because it assumes that the Gweagal shield is an empirically definable object of property, and second that the research is practically limited because it has been produced in a material context through which the British Museum has reasserted its control and possession of the shield. Engaging with a range of scholarship that uses different methodologies from those used in the research in question, I argue that the 'truth' about the shield cannot be found while it continues to be kept as the British Museum's property.
This comment piece in the Feminist Perspectives on Brexit series argues that the Trump and Brexit campaigns need to be understood by reference to the interconnections between identity - specifically white identity - and property in the national spaces of the US and the UK. It was originally given as a paper to the Feminists @ Law: Revisiting Identity Symposium, UTS, Sydney, 2-3 November 2017.
Abstract This article traces some of the ways in which Australian law in the post-Mabo era has functioned to discursively historicize Indigenous Australia, that is, to construct Indigenous Australia as a historical relic. I argue that despite law's continual historicization of Indigenous Australia, there have nonetheless been "moments of decolonization," as there have been since the colonization of Australia began, in which Indigenous Australia asserts its contemporary presence in opposition to and outside of colonial Australia. Drawing on Doreen Massey's conceptualization of place and space and three examples, I argue that in these moments, Indigenous activists do not only resist the ongoing project that is settler Australia, they also create an elsewhere to it.
Despite a wide field of scholarship critiquing the idea and workings of property, most understandings still centre on the propertied subject. This article spatializes property in order to shift the focus away from the propertied subject and onto the broader networks of relations that interact to form property. It draws on critical geography, phenomenology and empirical socio-legal work to argue that property can be understood as a relationship of belonging that is held up by the surrounding space — a relationship that is not fixed or essential but temporally and spatially contingent. Building on Davina Cooper's analysis of 'property practices', I argue that when analysed spatially, the two types of belonging she discusses — belonging between a subject and an object and between a part and a whole — become indistinguishable. As such, characteristics generally associated with identity politics can be understood as property in the same way that owning an object can — in terms of belonging in space. This spatialized understanding shows the breadth of property's political potential. Although property tends to be (re)productive of the status quo, it can also be subversive. Property can unsettle spaces too.