Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG) Podcast

About Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG) Podcast

The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG) is an interdisciplinary discussion forum promoting debate on topical socio-legal issues and empirical research methodology. It is affiliated with several departments across the University, including the Faculty of Law, the Institute of Criminology, the Centre for Family Research and Physiology, Development & Neuroscience (PDN). The Group serves to bring together people from within Cambridge and farther afield from different disciplines, including Law, Criminology, POLIS, Sociology, Psychology, Psychiatry, PDN, Biology, Economics, History and Social Anthropology. The Socio-Legal Group provides a focus for those in the University and beyond who are engaged in socio-legal research and supports collaborative, inter-disciplinary work through its various activities, in particular its workshop and book projects. For more information see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Publisher

Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Dec 2013

Latest episode

28 Nov 2024

Latest episodes

15 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Nov 2024

   Fifty Years of the Divorce Reform Act 1969: Daniel Monk & Rebecca Probert

   Professors Daniel Monk & Rebecca Probert explore the 50-year impact of the Divorce Reform Act 1969 on family law, social attitudes, and women's lives.

2. 

   13 Feb 2024

   Radically legal: Berlin constitutes the future: Joanna Kusiak

   Speaker: Joanna Kusiak, Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King’s College Bio: Dr Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She is the winner of the 2023 Nine Dots Prize for ’thinking about the box’ about contemporary social challenges. Her winning book ‘Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future’ will appear in May 2023 in Cambridge University Press. Do we need a revolution to save our cities from the rampant housing crisis? Yes – but this revolution is powered by the law. Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizen discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240.000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. My talk describes the story of a grassroots movement that convinced one million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble a design a new institutional model for managing urban housing. For more about the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

3. 

   1 Feb 2024

   Beyond Mirrors and Windows: Exploring State-Society Relationships Through Prison and Film: Oliver Wilson-Nunn

   Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification. Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242). The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

4. 

   25 Jan 2023

   The Reasonable Person: A biographical introduction to an empathetic character: Valentin Jeutner

   Speaker: Valentin Jeutner, Lund University Bio: Valentin Jeutner is an Associate Professor of Law at Lund University, Sweden. He was educated at Oxford (BA Law), Georgetown (LLM), Cambridge (PhD Law), Lund (MTh Theology). Valentin is a member of the New York Bar and has held visiting positions at the Federal Chancellery of Germany, Münster University, KU Leuven, the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard Law School, and Malta University. Since 2013, he has been affiliated with Pembroke College, Oxford. Valentin's teaching and research activities concern foundational questions of (international) law. For more about the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

5. 

   18 Mar 2022

   Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi: Simanti Dasgupta

   Simanti Dasgupta is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the International Studies Program at the University of Dayton. Her overarching interest in the politics of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial and neoliberal nation-states link her works. She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi, India, based on her ethnographic research with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers’ collective, since 2011. She published this work in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Anti-Trafficking Review, Opendemocracy:Beyond trafficking and slavery and The Conversation. She previously authored BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), which examined the emerging neoliberal politics in urban India at the intersection of Information Technology and water privatization. She can be reached at sdasgupta1@udayton.edu. Prophylactic Rights examines the emergence of the sex work labour subjectivity at the intersection of two state surveillance regimes: HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking. It draws on ethnographic work since 2011 with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex workers' collective in Sonagachi. In 1992 the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health identified sex workers as a High-Risk Group and launched the Sexually Transmitted Diseases/HIV Intervention Project (SHIP) in Sonagachi. SHIP recruited sex workers as peer-educators to introduce others to the etiology of HIV/AIDS and promote the condom as the prophylactic device. In addressing structural barriers –poverty and stigma –SHIP achieved remarkable success in reducing new HIV infections through the sustained use of condoms. More importantly, SHIP extended the prophylactic narrative beyond public health to emphasize the threat the virus posed to the labour and livelihood of the women. The rearticulation of HIV/AIDS as a question of the labouring body that is worthy of rights, was unprecedented in Sonagachi. It motivated the peer educators to establish Durbar in 1995 as a collective to demand sex work rights and juridically delink it from trafficking. The existing literature posits both sex work and sex workers as a priori categories, when the categories themselves are relatively new in Sonagachi. This project examines how the labor narrative emerges in dissociation from ‘prostitution’ and how ‘prostitutes’ come to inhabit the worker position. I argue that for labor to emerge as a political category, the women submitted to HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking surveillances, while also subverting them with resistive connotations. In formulating what I term, the ‘medicolegal unstable’, I further show that the struggle for labor rights in such instances of historical marginalization, is characteristically uneven, that is, advances in HIV/AIDS prevention and related health rights of sex workers are often undermined by regressive anti-trafficking laws.

6. 

   26 Nov 2020

   'Gone with the wind' - Organised crime and the geography of wind farms in Italy: Davide Luca

   Speaker: Davide Luca, Department of Land Economy, Cambridge University The adoption of low-carbon energy sources is considered as one of the key policies to tackle climate change and, to this aim, many European governments have been supporting the transition to renewable energy through subsidies. Growing anecdotal evidence suggests that the generosity of incentives has attracted the interests of corrupt politicians and criminal organisations, as the sector offer attractive opportunities for mafias to benefit from generous public grants and tax subsidies and to launder illegal money via legal business structures. Yet, no academic research has systematically explored the link between organised crime and the renewable energy sector at the local level. In ‘Gone with the wind’, Dr Davide Luca and Alessio Romarri aim to fill this gap. The analysis features innovative GIS data on the geo-location of wind farms across Italy and on the local presence of mafia groups. Preliminary findings confirm how, in mafia-ridden regions, local criminal presence is strongly associated with a higher likelihood of hosting at least a plant. The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group is an interdisciplinary discussion forum promoting debate on topical socio-legal issues and empirical research methodology. It is affiliated with several departments across the University, including the Faculty of Law, the Institute of Criminology, the Centre for Family Research and Physiology, Development & Neuroscience (PDN). The Group serves to bring together people from within Cambridge and farther afield from different disciplines, including Law, Criminology, POLIS, Sociology, Psychology, Psychiatry, PDN, Biology, Economics, History and Social Anthropology. For more information see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

7. 

   20 May 2020

   The repatriation of offshore finance to onshore: transnational legal orders and the Cayman Islands experience: May Hen-Smith

   A webinar hosted by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group. May Hen-Smith is a PhD student in Sociology at Cambridge. She is a former tax collector from Canada Revenue Agency and studies offshore financial centres. She is also co-founder of the Cambridge Tax Discussion Group, a student-led discussion group which began in 2015 and continues to meet weekly during term to talk about all things tax. Their website is taxtaxtax.tax More information can be found at: https://research.sociology.cam.ac.uk/profile/may-hen-smith This presentation will discuss my PhD work which takes an ethnographic approach to the study of Cayman Islands professionals to understand how an offshore financial centre operates from the perspective of the professionals who live and work in them. It offers a close-examination of a single jurisdiction, one that is heavily referred to by critics of offshore, and brings new empirical data based on 13-months of fieldwork from a jurisdiction heavily used by some of the largest financial transactions in the world. Supported by the Centre for Tax Law.

8. 

   14 May 2020

   The 'Chimera' of Parenthood: Brian Sloan

   Cambridge Socio-Legal Group's Brian Sloan, a College Lecturer & Fellow in Law, explores how human chimeras challenge traditional notions of parenthood and advocate for a redefined understanding of fatherhood as a process.

9. 

   15 Nov 2019

   Reimagining Children's Equality: Nancy Dowd

   Cambridge Socio-Legal Group co-hosts Professor Nancy Dowd on reimagining children's equality, arguing for developmental equality and proposing a New Deal for Children to address systemic inequalities.

10. 

    12 Feb 2019

    Polos de Cidadania Research and Outreach Program: the challenges of science and social change: Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês

    Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês, a leading expert in social sciences, shares insights from Polos de Cidadania's research on harnessing the power of dialogue and knowledge co-construction to drive social change and human rights effectiveness.

11. 

    16 Nov 2018

    Egg Freezing in the UK: The data we have is the tip of the iceberg: Zeynep Gurtin

    Dr. Zeynep Gurtin of University College London's Institute for Women's Health reveals the hidden truths behind UK egg freezing data, shedding light on the unreported aspects of this rapidly growing phenomenon.

12. 

    2 Feb 2017

    Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers: Jennifer Ann Drobac

    Professor Jennifer Ann Drobac explores the shocking prevalence of teenage girls being harassed and exploited by adults in power positions, revealing flaws in the U.S. system and advocating for legal reforms to protect vulnerable youth.

13. 

    27 Jan 2015

    A Precariat Charter: from Denizens to Citizens: Guy Standing

    Professor Guy Standing discusses his Precariat Charter and proposes a new framework for redefining citizenship and social protection for the precariat, offering a path to a more inclusive and equitable society.

14. 

    9 May 2014

    Begging laws, morality and exclusion – Forgetting 'the beggar' through immaterial sharing in East London: Johannes Lenhard

    Johannes Lenhard, a University of Cambridge anthropology graduate student, examines the moral underpinning of laws governing begging in East London, revealing how immaterial sharing strategies can reduce stigma and exclusion.

15. 

    5 Dec 2013

    What's the Harm? Who's to Blame? Reflections on the Criminalization of HIV Transmission, Exposure and Non-Disclosure: Matthew Weait

    Professor Matthew Weait discusses how the criminalization of HIV transmission and exposure reveals insights into the construction of harm, responsibility, and consent, offering a critique of the law in this area.

Who has been a guest on Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG) Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Daniel Monk
• Rebecca Probert
• Dr Brian Sloan
• Nancy Dowd
• Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês

Contact Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG) Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.