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Dr. phil. (pending) Emma Patchett

King's College, London

Curriculum Vitae

Emma Patchett received her PhD from the University of Muenster in 2015, where she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN. Her doctoral research explored legal spatiality in the context of the contemporary literature of the Roma diaspora. Prior to this, she read English Language and Literature at King’s College London (2004-2007) and gained an LLM in International and European Human Rights Law from the University of Leeds (2007-2008).
From June until September 2016 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London , where she focused on the narrative construction of legal spatial imaginaries in literature and film in the context of contemporary immigration law.

Emma Patchett has been a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Studies “Law as Culture" from October to December 2016 and April to June 2017.

Research project

Autopoesis, diaspora legal cultures and the European spatial imaginary

At a time when the European spatial imaginary is under threat, it is important to develop innovative critical legal research which explores the pluralist network evoked through minority jurisprudence, and to consider how this plays into the concept of autopoetic culture and the force of law. This research therefore aims to ask questions about the binding force of law beyond pluralism, as a critique of differentiation and a turn towards a new reading of Niklas Luhmann’s autopoetic theory. This interdisciplinary research regards critical legal analysis as the most effective means of encountering and translating interaction between minority legal orders and the spatial imaginary within an autopoetic context , contributing to the conceptual and comparative debates about legal cultures of differentiation within the wider social space of the European project, focusing specifically on three courts : Kris (Roma diaspora), shar’ia (muslim diaspora) and Beth Din (Jewish diaspora) in the context of Western European member states. Whilst a functional spatial imaginary requires a recognition of interrelations within a broader topography, even to begin to acknowledge the presence of minority and diaspora legal orders demands a progressive rethinking of space.

Publications (selected)

  • 2017 Spatial Justice and Diaspora. Co-edited with Sarah Keenan. Oxford: Counter Press.
  • 2016 – ‘Overlapping Sovereignties: Legal Diaspora Studies and the Literary Text’ In Diaspora, Law and Literature. 135 - 153. Edited by Klaus Stierstorfer and Daniela Carpi. Berlin, De Gruyter
  • 2016 - ‘The Unbearable Weight of Staying’ , Critical Legal Thinking, 4th July http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/07/04/unbearable-weight-staying/
  • 2015 – ‘The Right to Respect for Home: Roma, Material Spaces, and the Interpretative Potential of Article 8’, Today's Children are Tomorrow's Parents 40/41, 81-95.
  • 2015 - La Zone: In/habitation in the itinerant city’ Global Jurist 13.2, 175 – 194.
  • 2014- ‘Roma, rhizomes and roots in rough soil: cultivating trans-territoriality in law and film’ Australian Feminist Law Journal 39.1, 57-78.
  • 2014 - ‘The right to free movement as temporal deterritorialization in the landscaped garden’ Pólemos 8.2, 253–273.
  • 2014 – ‘Two stone lions: Law, home, and diasporic sovereignty’ Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 14, 131-148.
  • 2014 - 'The Big Gap Beyond? Property, Planning and Space’ Feminists @Law 4/2. http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/127/305
  • 2013 - ‘Corpus cartography’: diasporic identity as flesh and blood’ Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 4.3, 51 -67.