Rewriting Refugee Law: Centring Refugee Knowledges and Experiences is a project co-led by scholars with lived experience of forced displacement alongside refugee law scholars. Refugees are most often the objects of law and policy created, interpreted and enforced by individuals with no experience of displacement and refugee voices are rarely heard in judicial narratives. In refugee and forced migration scholarship, there is recognition that the field is developed and sustained by researchers without relevant lived experience who write “about us without us”. While there is an increasing desire to shift away from this model, the pace of change is glacial. This project develops a methodological framework for fostering refugee-led and co-authored research that encompasses legal and interdisciplinary critiques and re-imaginings of regulatory responses to displacement. Contributors draw on judgment rewriting, an innovative and disruptive methodology created by feminist and Indigenous scholars, to rethink, reframe and rewrite judicial decisions from the perspectives of scholars and lawyers with lived experience of forced displacement. The first stage of the project has been published in a 2024 special issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly. In this presentation, Saba Vasefi and Kate Ogg will launch the special issue and lead a conversation with other project contributors on the strengths and challenges of judgment rewriting methodology as a way of reshaping refugee law and the broader scholarly field by centring refugee knowledges and lived experiences.

The seminar will be followed by drinks in the Hall.