ReVisions Seminar: ‘Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice’, Dr Maria Elander

You are warmly invited to attend a research seminar in the ReVisions series with the Centre for International Law, Conflict and Security at the Glasgow School of Law this coming Monday 29 April at 1pm. The seminar will be of particular interest to those working in international criminal law, legal theory, and criminal law more generally:

‘Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice: The Case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’

Dr Maria Elander, La Trobe Law School, La Trobe University

Event details: 1-2pm Monday 29 April 2019 in the Cosgrove Room (TBC), Glasgow School of Law

Abstract: Most discourses on victims in international criminal justice take the subject of victims for granted, as an identity and category existing exogenously to the judicial process. In this seminar, Dr Maria Elander will take a different approach. On the basis of her newly published book (Routledge 2018) that provides a close reading of the institutional practices of one particular court, she will discuss how court practices produce thesubjectivity of the victim, a subjectivity that is profoundly of law and endogenous to the enterprise of international criminal justice. By situating these figurations within the larger aspirations of the court, the book shows how victims have come to constitute and represent the link between international criminal law and the enterprise of transitional justice. The book takes as its primary example the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as it is also called, and theseminar will focus on the court’s relations with photographic images.

Dr Maria Elander is a Lecturer in Criminology and Law at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Her research is in the broader field of international criminal justice, and engages with theories in cultural and feminist legal studies. Her work examines questions of representation, victimhood and encounters between the local, national and international in crime and criminal justice. She is currently working on two projects: on international criminal justice and the visual, and a collaborative project on the spatialities of transitional justice.