Law and Methods Seminar

Guest Speakers:

• Professor Rachel Sieder, Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS)
• Professor Karen Engle, University of Texas at Austin, Shcool of Law

This session, Rachel Sieder and Karen Engle will discuss their research.

Rachel Sieder will start by exploring ideas about how colonial, extractivist forms of political economy have dispossessed Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples of their territories and labor, denying their specific ways of life and turning their territories into sacrifice zones of enormous environmental and epistemic violence. In recent decades courts have become an important and generative site of Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples’ political struggles over territory. What debates, approaches and methods can help us to analyze the nature and effects of such phenomena? When can sociolegal mobilization be judged “transformative”? This presentation draws on various literatures, including sociolegal mobilization, political economy and land regimes, and colonial capitalism, and proposes process-tracing, database and ethnographic methods to analyze litigation and its outcomes.

Professor Karen Engle’s presentation will be based on: Quilombo Land Rights, Brazilian Constitutionalism and Racial Capitalism, by Karen Engle and Lucas Lixinski.

It will discuss how only in very recent years have legal scholars begun to deploy critiques of "racial capitalism," a term that was first used and developed in the 1970s and early 1980s in South Africa and the US and that experienced a resurgence in the 2010s. Racial capitalist critiques challenge not only capitalism itself but what they see as the  race-blind Marxist critique of capitalism. Professor Engle's presentation will apply a racial capitalist approach to a 2018 decision of the Brazilian Constitutional Court, drawing not only from academics but from the thought and activism of Afro-Brazilians who have long fought for communal land rights. Exploring concepts that circulate through the court's decision—resistance, expropriation, and heritage— in the hope of sparking thought about the applicability of the critique to other sites of legal production.