Spatial Justice in the Postcolony: Legacies of the Nomos of Apartheid

'Spatial Justice in the Postcolony: Legacies of the Nomos of Apartheid' is a research project, funded by the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship (UK) (2017-2020) and the National Research Foundation (SA) (2014-2016).

Origins

Spatial Justice in the Postcolony started as a small collaborative research project between Julia Chryssostalis (Co-Director: Westminster Law and Theory Lab) and Jaco Barnard-Naudé (Co-Director: Centre for Rhetoric Studies, University of Cape Town) when Julia visited Cape Town in 2012 and, in conversations with Jaco, problematised the ab-normality of South Africa’s ‘post’-apartheid spatiality. Julia was working on Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt’s divergent understanding of nomos at the time and Jaco had published an article on walls and remains after apartheid.

The project soon grew into an international collaborative effort and its first public academic event consisted of two panels at the 2015 Critical Legal Conference on space and law in Wrocław, Poland. In 2016 the project convened the Cape Town Spatial Justice Colloquium over two days in April, with speakers from universities across South Africa. In 2017, the project was awarded the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship with Jaco Barnard-Naudé as the Newton Advanced Fellow and Julia Chryssostalis as co-investigator. The fellowship is hosted in the Westminster Law & Theory Lab at the Westminster Law School, Westminster University. Over the last three years, the project has hosted seminars, workshops, discussion panels and lectures in London and Cape Town, including the Cape Town Spatial Justice Laboratory: Writing / Righting the City Otherwise in July 2019. Look out for our soon to be published edited collection, Spatial Justice After Apartheid: Nomos in the Postcolony which will appear in Routledge’s Law and the Postcolonial series.