19 November 2025: Being and Doing Law and Humanities Roundtable

In the context of ecological degradation, brutal warfare, colonial logics, and technological transformation, humanism is increasingly challenged. At the same time, the historical home of the humanities, the university – or, more precisely, the universitas, the corporate body of scholars – is itself at a crossroads, maligned, among other things, for having become corporatised.  There is a renewed disruption of the binaries of modernity that organise humanist disciplines, including law, and a questioning of the limits of the humanities as a form of knowledge.  What does it mean to be a law and humanities scholar and to meaningfully respond to its epistemological challenges in times of disruption? How does law and humanities research shift when we work in explicitly creative registers? What does law and humanities scholarship have to offer in a time of cascading poly-crisis? In this series of roundtables, we bring together scholars from different disciplinary points of departure to explore ways of being and doing law and humanities – as scholars, creators and activists.

Hosted by the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia, in collaboration with the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law (Melbourne Law School) and the International and Comparative Law Cluster (La Trobe Law School).

19 November 2025, 9:30am to 4:00pm. Register here.

Schedule

9:30am Roundtable 1: Bridging the Critical and the Creative in Law and Humanities (Chaired by Danish Sheikh)

11:30am Roundtable 2: Being and Doing Law and Humanities Scholarship (Chaired by Kathleen Birrell)

Lunch

2:30pm Roundtable 3: Law and Humanities and Political Struggle (Chaired by André Dao)