St Mary’s Centre for Law and Culture Public Lecture: ‘Graphic Reporting’

The Centre for Law and Culture at St Mary’s University, Twickenham is holding a free lecture as part of its 2014-15 Public Lecture Series on Thursday 6th November. The lecture is entitled ‘Graphic Reporting: Human Rights Violations through the Lens of Graphic Novels’ and will be delivered by guest speakers Dr Jérémie Gilbert (University of East London) and Dr David Keane (Middlesex University). It is derived from their contribution to a collection on law and comics, edited by Centre for Law and Culture Co-Director Dr Thomas Giddens (in press at Routledge). The lecture will discuss the potential for graphic novels to influence human rights practice. At present, a handful of pioneering authors are producing graphic accounts of rights violations initially largely involving armed conflict but extending into other situations. ‘Graphic Reporting’ is the second lecture in Centre for Law and Culture’s 2014-15 Public Lecture Series. The Series will feature eight lectures, divided into two themes. As this is the first Series run by the Centre, its opening theme is very broad: ‘law and culture’. The first lecture (held in early October 2014) explored clothing and the law, and subsequent lectures will look at judicial swearing ceremonies (December 2014) and feminist science fiction (February 2015). The remaining four lectures (March-June 2015) will be under the theme ‘Feminist Legal History’. Jérémie Gilbert is a Reader in Law at the University of East London. Among a range of publications, his latest book, Nomadic Peoples and Human Rights, was published by Routledge in 2014. He is a consultant for a number of NGOs on indigenous peoples’ and nomadic peoples’ rights. David Keane is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Middlesex University. He has authored a number of books and journal articles on human rights law, including Caste-Based Discrimination in International Human Rights Law (Ashgate 2007), and was awarded the Hart Book Prize for early career scholars. The event is free and open to the public. It will be held in the N-Block lecture theatre at St Mary’s Strawberry Hill campus at 6pm. For more information and to register attendance please contact thomas.giddens@stmarys.ac.uk.