School of Social and Political Science

Description

Overview

The title of this year's lecture is Border Fictions, presented by Professor E. Tendayi Achiume, Standford Law School.

The Macqueen Annual Lecture is named in honour of Julie-Ann Macqueen who played a leading role in bringing the struggles of single-parent families to the attention of the public, policymakers, and lawmakers. Her legacy continues through initiatives like the Macqueen Scholarship, which supports PhD research in Social Work focusing on one-parent families.

This is our third lecture and, for the first time, this will take place online, which will enable us to invite further afield audiences.

Title: Border Fictions

Abstract: Legal imagination is central to worldmaking—it supplies frames for how we make sense of ourselves, our relationships to each other and to place and time. This lecture will consider the legal and political imagination at work in dominant conceptions of national borders and those who cross them, with particular attention to how legal fictions concerning borders entrench global injustice.

Event format

This is an online event and will be followed by a Q&A session. Online attendees will receive a link to join the session on the day, in advance of the lecture start time. Please check your emails!

Keynote Speaker

E. Tendayi Achiume is a professor of law at Stanford Law School. She is an Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria; a Research Associate with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand; and a Research Associate with the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford. Her academic research explores the global governance of racism and xenophobia, and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism and other forms of empire for the governance of international borders and migration. In recognition of the “exceptional creativity” and “promise for important future advance” of Achiume’s research in these areas, she was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship. Professor Achiume is a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and was the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1993. For the 2024-2025 academic year she was a member in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.