lukebennett13

The view from the river: a legal psychogeography of the posthuman

July 28, 2026 Leave a comment

“Whether legal geography will ever embrace an object-oriented post-humanism to any significant extent (and thus dwell upon the relationship between Latour’s chairs and tables rather than upon their co-option– alongside the texts and officials he glimpsed at work there– in essentially human projects) remains to be seen. Yet there are challenging and interesting projects if we expand legal geography scenes, working with affective geographies of matter and understanding legal practices as embedded (and embedding).”

Luke Bennett & Antonia Layard (2015) ‘Legal geography: becoming spatial detectives’, Geography Compass 9(7): 406-422, p419

The point of these ‘view from’ mini-essays is to look for the specific roots and features of my take upon legal geography, and in particular to capture the role of biography, contingency, journeying and being-in-the-world (that being – essentially – the ‘psychogeographic’ bit) in the development of my legal psychogeographic orientation.

In her review of recent developments in legal geography Päivi Kymäläinen (2026) has helpfully teased out the significance for legal geography of my ruminations on posthumanism. This synthesis is timely because my three papers that she has woven together were situated quite far apart in time and original intent, but they do deserve be seen as stage-reports in a rather tortuous journey undertaken by me. The subject I wrestled with across these papers was how the posthuman turn might be best integrated into disciplines like law and in the built environment. I was keen to think through how the writers urging a greater attentiveness to the agency of “nature” (and matter in general) could influence an essentially abstract, discursive realm like law and/or a prosaic/managerial world-view of the built environment professions.

At the time ruminating on this seemed playful, rather abstract and unlikely to have much purchase in these disciplines. Whilst collaboratively writing the 2015 Geography Compass piece I was also working on a contribution to a collection of essays in an education studies edited collection, entitled Posthuman Research Practices in Education (eds. Carol A. Taylor & Cristina Hughes, 2016). That essay (Bennett, 2016) sought to explore how posthumanism might enlighten consideration of the perception of and interaction with building materials (but ended up concluding that any such consideration would always remain essentially anthropocentric). That resulting essay attracted some interest over the years from education scholars (but not lawyers or geographers) and I was asked to give a talk on it in 2024. This then led to an invitation to write a reflective essay about how my original essay, and its ideas, had come about. In writing up that reflection (Bennett, 2025) I found myself drawing out the links to my lawyer origins and my legal geography writings. So, in effect, writing that reflective essay closed the loop and it was great to see that Päivi had spotted it and could see the links between my 2016 essay and my 2015 legal geography article.

I left 2015/16 with few expectations for a posthuman turn within legal geography, and I still don’t see signs of it becoming a powerful force any time soon, but as Päivi notes, there are some scholars who can now be pointed to who are starting to bring some posthuman perspectives into the field.

But what has more so got my attention is how within critical / radical environmental law academic circles scholars and activists are increasingly asserting the need for a nonanthropogenic view of law, rights, presence and protection. And that Rights of Nature movement (aided by scholarly interest in indigenous law (and lore) and spirituality as part of legal pluralism) has given special attention to asserting environmental rights (and separate legal personality) for rivers. Through seeing rivers as (in some hard-to-define senses) “living” this does seems to mark the emergence of a posthuman perspective within law, and notably one set within an agentive framing.

Whilst there is nothing new about seeking to “protect” vulnerable nonhuman objects through conferring legal frameworks to control interactions with those things, the Rights of Nature movement seems to have a wider view of who and what should be empowered to act within (and/or be allowed to operate outside of the confines of) legal frameworks. This development seemed to be nudging at a thing-celebrating (and human de-centring) position which I’d been seeing in the non-law literature that I’d been considering back in the mid 2010s. So, this sparked my curiosity and led me to curate a special issue of the Journal of Property. Planning & Environmental Law on ‘Rights for Rivers’ which has now been published.

Here is an extract from my editorial for that collection, which sets out the rationale and achievement of the Special Issue. Perhaps my “not-quite-yet-persuaded-that-a-posthuman-position-on-law-is-possible” remains as evident in that editorial as it was in my other writings on posthumanism and law/the material world:

“Over the last decade a vocal Rights of Nature movement has emerged within scholarly, activist and policy-making circles. This movement asserts that existing anthropocentric modes of environmental law fail to give adequate protection and entitlement directly to the creatures, structures and systems of the non-human ‘natural’ world. Within this movement rivers have had a particular prominence as entities whose rights should be better protected, often via a proposal that some form of separate legal status (i.e. legal personhood) should be acknowledged and defended for these essential worldly systems.

Whilst the talk within the Rights of Nature movement has asserted the ‘Rights of Rivers’ this Special Issue is framed around the alternative formulation of ‘Rights for Rivers’. This reframing is intentional (and somewhat provocative). Holding that rivers and other natural things have separate existence as entities to which certain rights are pre-existing (and thus should be acknowledged by humans and their laws) is primarily a matter of philosophy. By focussing this Special Issue on Rights for Rivers, the aim is to foreground matters of how such rights (regardless of their philosophical foundation) are implemented into human law and thereafter implemented into environmental governance practices. In short, the Special Issue seeks to explore the opportunities, challenges and emergent techniques by which any such asserted rights are operationalised.

To achieve this goal the Special Issue brings together a diverse range of perspectives, ranging from keen advocates of the Rights of Nature, to more critical voices who question whether that new approach to environmental law is either needed, or workable. The assembled commentators comprise both established voices within the field and its debates and also more junior scholars who raise new issues (or clarify older ones) in order to hopefully draw a range of readers into this rapidly expanding field. Furthermore, the six articles presented in this Special Issue have a global span, presenting insights into the development of Rights for Rivers in the Americas, Africa, India, the Middle East, Europe and Australia, notably adding new areas of consideration (Middle East and Africa) which have tended not yet to feature in the scholarship.” (Bennett, 2026: 89).

The full editorial (which includes my summary of each of the six contributory articles) is available to read here: https://www.emerald.com/jppel/article/18/2/89/1369230/Guest-editorial-Rights-for-rivers-special-issue

References

Bennett, Luke (2016) Thinking like a brick: posthumanism and building materials. In: Taylor CA and Hughes C (eds) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 58–74.

Bennett, Luke (2025) Thinking about “thinking like a brick”. Qualitative Research Journal 1–12, Ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-02-20250058

Bennett, Luke (2026) Guest Editorial: Rights for rivers special issue. Journal of Property, Planning & Environmental Law, https://doi.org/10.1108/JPPEL-07-2026-085

Bennett, Luke and Layard, Antonia (2015) Legal geography: becoming spatial detectives. Geography Compass 9(7): 406–422. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12209

Kymäläinen, Päivi (2026) Legal geography III: Legal agency, Progress in Human Geography, Ahead-of-print. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03091325261450344

Image source

November 2016 – Postcard Cafe – ‘ Contemplation’ a river sculpture by Dan Dan, River Don, Sheffield 2016

Filed under ANT, OOO and Thingology, Built environments, Law & place, Law & things, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Stone, brick, concrete, Tracework, Urban mining, Wandering, Water

The view from the NPC: a legal psychogeography of the bystander

June 24, 2026 Leave a comment

“The pavement and the road are crowded with purchasers and street sellers. The housewife in her thick shawl, with the market-basket on her arm, walks slowly on, stopping now to look at the stall of caps, and now a cheapen a bunch of greens. Little boys, holding three or four onions in their hand, creep between the people, wriggling their way through every interstice, and asking for custom in whining tones, as if seeking charity. Then the tumult of the thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices, at one and the same time, is almost bewildering.”

Henry Mayhew (1851), ‘The London Street Markets on a Saturday Night’ in London Labour and the London Poor (Vol. 1) George Woodfall & Son, p9.

At great length Henry Mayhew chronicled the street life of London. Consistent with his mid-Victorian times and vantage point, he gazed with a mixture of fascination, philanthropy, disgust and a relentless urge to categorise. His project brought to home shores the colonial classificatory project of anthroplogy. In short – he said to his genteel audience – there are strange, fascinating and fearful tribes amongst us.

In stepping into the street and observing and characterising the distinct roles and practices making up the urban throng Mayhew took time to stare in order to delineate. The throng is not a singular, it is made up of individuals and their projects and observation reveals the sophistication, intentionality and role-based nature of those individuals paths and actions.

Mayhew was a psychogeographer of sorts, albeit one largely turned towards the detailing of the observed actions of others rather than of his own experience of being-in-place. But this is pretty close to the classic flâneur. A privileged observer, with time to take in the urban throng, and with a sense that their fascination with the shaddy goings on witnessed upon the street is not entirely detached. There is a sense of thrill, vice and desire lurking in the flâneur’s attentive observation; an urban voyerism perhaps. Contemporary psychogeographers are perhaps happier to acknowledge their attraction to this dark-side, and are less concerned to present their observational/experiential accounts as an urban science (although someone should write a book about how psychogeographically inclined academics balance their urban adventuring urges with their claims to be doing research).

I share Mayhew’s fascination with what other people are doing – and more particularly why they are doing it. Like him, I want to stare at the throng and to see it clarify into segmented populations: an array of role-guided actors each ernestly implementing projects of importance to them. Whilst some may lift a rock to study the purposeful tracks of ants, spiders, woodlice and other creepy crawlies. I stare out into the street and guess at the stories that animate each passerby.

And it was that yearning that brought me to study law. I went to University originally to study sociology. That subject had got deeply inside my head at Sixth Form. Every aspect of social life baffled me at that age, and sociology seemed to offer a way to understand the rules and mechanisms of life that I needed to master in order to become a competent adult.

But arriving at University things didn’t quite work out as planned. I came to realise that sociology didn’t give me the directionality or insights that I needed. My mind and intentions wandered. And I ended up transferring to a law degree.

The realisation had hit me suddenly:

“So, you want to understand the rules of social life Luke?” (said a voice in my head).

“Err, yes” a voice somewhere else in my head, that felt more like me, cautiously replied.

“Well, it’s obvious!” (said that other, alien and uncharacteristically self-assured voice). “The rules are mostly written down in laws, so study law and see how the world is constructed by those rules”.

“Oh, ok” (I said, and marched off to make enquiries of the law school).

Returning to academia at the age of 40, I had the opportunity to revisit my sociology side, with my Masters in social research methods being taught by two ethnographically inclined cultural sociologists. The circled closed and set my psychogeographically, and meaning-making focussed research trajectory. This led to me affiliating to ‘legal geography’, having done studies about how legal and wider cultural frameworks shape places and human action within those sites for a number of years. By the early 2010s I came to realise that there were others doing similar work in this field.

One of the first academic conferences I went to was a 2012 interdisciplinary event themed around “Affective Landscapes”. That event proved inspirational in many ways. One way was the work exhibited there by a New Zealand artist, Lisa Chandler which featured crowds swirling at mundane locations (like airports), with each figure moving intently but without revealed purpose. I’ve chosen one of Lisa’s less busy pieces to open this blog post, because it captures the idea of ‘subtraction’ that lies at the heart of what I’m exploring here. Namely, what do we see when we zoom in to “meet” one of the myriad anonymous passers-by, and by what means can we sense the rule frameworks that are guiding their passage and purpose?

One month ago. My adult sons are talking as we drive by. “Hey, its that weird guy who’s always stood outside his house!”, “Yeah, what an NPC!”

One year ago. My wife is talking to a former work colleague, and I overhear: “Ah yes, we see your husband walking past our house every morning with one of your dogs. We always think its funny that he walks your dogs separately. My partner says that he can set his watch by the regularity of your husband’s circuits of the neigbourhood”.

Forty years ago. I look out from the car window. We are passing through a village in East Devon that I have never visited before (or since). We see a group of youths at a street corner. I stare at them as background – like they are decoration for my journey. But then it hits me. They are as real and as intentional as me, and my face peering from the back window of a car is decoration to their day and its plans and purposes. And here – the non-place where they have gathered in this moment – is oh so much more meaningful to them than it is to me. As they recede from view I wonder the lives that they live that I will never know of, and marvel at the way in which I can use a few available clues to build a partial impression of who and where-in they were.

NPC (Non Player Character) is a contemporary term of abuse. It alludes to the presence of pre-programmed chaarcters in computer games who have no agency. They are not under direction of the player(s) and ‘merely’ repeatedly and faithfully enact a script given to them by the game (story) designer. They are inconsequential. They are there to serve as a backdrop to an otherwise (and otherways) chosen storyline of decision and action,

And yet we are all NPCs in other people’s passings-by. As socially conpetent humans we learn how to make working assumptions of people and places as they pass by. Doing so is an integral part of life, it is not inherently literary or scholarly. But equally (if you find yourself to be so-inclinded) finding a way to harness that detective instinct, to reveal to yourself and an audience how you are reading the world and its people, and seeking to tease out a sense of the structures of meaning that shape the world around you is – I feel – something worth doing. Indeed, it is what this blog has been all about since it started in 2012!

So, take time to spot the NPCs, watch what they do. See what they repeat. Their actions and rituals will reveal the patterns and rules of the real, physical world, just as breaking open the computer code and peering into it would reveal the algorithms that set the tracks and tasking of NPCs in computer games. And marvel at how even in computer games the NPCs have the ability to improvise their purposes and/or to occaisonally glitch and reveal something of the mundane rules that lie beneath everyday action. Above all, be humble: you are as much an NPC as anyone else.

Picture credit: Lisa Chandler (2011) THE OTHER, 2011, 200 x 150cm, Acrylic on Canvas, from the Negotiating the Non-Place exhibition, https://www.lisachandler.co.nz/exhibitions#/projects-archive/

Filed under Built environments, Law & place, Meaning making, Tracework, Urban exploration, Wandering

The view from the park: a legal psychogeography of the field

May 26, 2026 Leave a comment

“When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to belive that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.”

Erving Goffman, (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York. P.17.

I recall us gleefully striding around the park after school. It was early evening, but summertime so still fully daylight. We had brought a telescope, but my memory has us striding around and not actually still enough to have set up it up. We were calling out, to whoever would listen (the universe as a whole?). We were looking for UFOs and this local hilltop park seemed the best place to do so. The mission had been a subject of contemplation for many days (or so it feels in recollection). Giddy on that glut of UFO-focused films and wider popular culture of the early 1980s, it seemed just a matter of putting ourselves into a given frame of reference and the adventure would begin.

We imagined a coastal sky teeming with extraterrestrial craft, all we needed to do was make a little reality-piercing attempt to look up. Did we really believe this? I don’t know. I can recall a mental image of what the sky might look like when subjected to this anticipation. But we hadn’t made any preparations for being whisked off to other worlds. We still expected to be at home in time for tea. This was play. Scripted play. This was being knowlingly playful within a then-abundant cultural register. Maybe that’s what all play is, and has ever been, whether simulating a hunt for prey in ancient times or in a ‘cowboys and indians’ stylee of a later cultural form.

A park is a place enabled for play. It may have play apparatus (swings and suchlike) but more importantly it will have openness. It presence a blank canvas of possibility and a context in which roles and realities can be tried out, collaboratively and individually. It is also a place specifically enabled for children and their projects. Signage sets the parameters for those projects, but above all the expectation is that the use of the park will not change its state or leave any of its features changed or appropriated. A park has a ‘wipe clean after use’ quality. A park is not a place where you can build a den and expect it to remain yours, beyond the session in which it is first created.

Around the time of the UFO expedition my friends and I were also in our den-building phase of childhood. We had recently been granted licence to ‘play out’. The geographical ambit of that licence was confined to an agreed territory (our ‘neighbourhood’) and we had by that point comprensively surveyed each hedgerow, backgarden and clump of trees. Attempts had been made at making dens there. Each had lasted briefly, but have been found lacking (or otherwise found by others). So, we were now looking for something more durable. To achieve this our new hoped-for den needed to be further out of view, somewhat beyond the bounds of our suburban neighbourhood, and further into the surrounding countryside.

We lived at the edge of town, that zone where the urban suddenly stops and agriculture commences. These fields were largely non-spaces to us. They were just pads of grass with surrounding hedgerows. They were a further trek than the park and didn’t offer up much more than the park in terms of open play spaces. They also felt very-much off-limits. How this impression came to be is the legal psyschogeography part. Somehow, even as young kids, we knew that fields of grass presented as ‘farmers’ fields’ were different to fields of grass given up to us as municipal parks. No-one had sat us down and explictly told us this. We just knew, and felt.

So, I recall a further trip to the park. This time we didn’t bring the telescope and we were not acting out a script of UFO-hunters. But were still verymuch acting in a scripted mode.

This time we strode around the park calling out “anyone know a farmer?”, “we want a den”. In my memory we shouted this out loudly, over many iterations, as we moved around the park. The park was actually all-but-empty and we weren’t striving to attract the attention of anyone in particular (and I suspect that we would have been rather shocked if anyone – farmer or otherwise – had come up to us in response to our calls). Instead I think we were having another chat with the universe, and once again not in an entirely serious or intentional way. Looking back it is easy to ascribe a wry or ironic sensibility to this performance. But I’m not sure we saw it that (hollow) way. Instead, I think this was an act of invocation or acknowledgement of the contextual swirl that sits behind almost any event. In that moment we realised – and were expressing – that our desire for a ‘stable’ den intersected with adult territorial structures pertaining in those fields. We were playfully acknowledging (and exploring) the realisation that we’d need to reach an accommodation with the adult spatial world if we wanted more than session-limited dens. We were also invoking a rich cultural register of kid-movies and kid-fiction in which the playful trespassory tendencies of the Famous Five (or whoever) come up against (and are ultimately thwarted by) the territorial strictures of Farmer Bloggs. Our performatory behaviour was both a nod to these constrainst and an emergent adult-understanding that durable experiences and possessions might perhaps be best achieved by working within given adult structures of ownership and control.

We never did forge a deal with a farmer.

Instead, a few years later (well into teenage years) we found ourselves at a party in what we thought was an abandoned barn. A couple of hours into our revelry a shout shot through the group: “Police!” We looked out to see a group of cops running towards the barn, we made a quick exit, and didn’t return. That night was another reminder of law’s quiet command, even in empty fields. And another reminder of the powerful role of scripts and framings, this time of our youthful group reported by someone to the authorities as a disorderly threat to adult property.

Picture credit: Luke Bennett, Armada Park, Torquay – May 2026.

Filed under Abandoned buildings, Access/liability, Built environments, Climbing, parkour and other playscaping, Law & place, Meaning making, Territory, Urban exploration, Wandering

The view from the shore: a legal psychogeography of the bay

April 22, 2026 Leave a comment

“But even as I try to apply sweeping reductive principles to the manner in which buildings and cities affect us, I can still sometimes feel the trembling legs of the six-year-old version of me, reminding me that reducing the meaning of a piece of architecture to a set of equations will always cause us to miss out on answers to some of the most important questions.”

Colin Ellard (2015) Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life, Bellevue Literary Press: NY, p.254.

Writing as an environmental psychologist Colin Ellard presents a different take on “psychogeography”. In a parallel coining, he eschews the heavy philosophical baggage of European psychogeography, and uses the term instead as a way to popularise his empirical psychological research into place attachment and place effects. But ultimately he reaches a similar place to the continentals: namely that places have an affective realm and resonance which is more visceral and whole than any attempt to depict a place through the abstractions and generalisations of systematic modes of accounting.

But I’ve been here before, and a recent re-encounter with the image above has reminded me that – in the name of advocating for a Legal Psychogeography – I’ve argued for the affective value of alternative, structural layers and levels of analysis. Namely, what if we also (in the true spirit of seeking a holistic account of any place) allow into the phenomenological accounting the presence (and sensing) of underlying systems, such as (in my case) law?

I’ve made this argument previously in two published essays. First in Tina Richardson’s edited collection Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015), where I saught to show psychogeographers how law’s quiet, underlying structuring of urban forms and experiences could – and should – form part of psychogeographers’ ruminations. Then in 2019 in an essay published in a French academic journal in which I re-mixed and re-presented that 2015 essay for a legal geography audience. In both versions my essential point was the same, and was developed from a cross-reading of a passage in Nick Papadimitriou’s 2012 psychogeographical book Scarp in which a civil engineer’s site visit to inspect the route proposed for constructing a new road is momentarily broken by his sudden attentiveness to a nearby bird and other nature signs. My point was an inversion (or supplementation) of Ellard’s anti-reductionism quoted above. My point was:

“But psychogeography’s embrace of incongruity (its productive acknowledgement of the simultaneous co-existence of multiple frames of perception) must not stop at a celebration of reverie. A holistic psychogeography should equally be able to show how the workaday preoccupations of an instrumentalist science can invade a thought-stream of more affective purpose, showing how the ‘straight’ world reasserts itself, barging itself back to the foreground, in short how it re-colonizes consciousness and gaze. So for example, Papadimitriou’s engineer’s reverie – his tumble back to environment related childhood memories – is fleeting, itself inevitably undermined by the ‘day job’ returning to his consciousness, the ‘real world’ bringing him back down to earth, and back to the prosaic task in hand, as he turns away from reminiscence and resumes his survey of this countryside and its future road course. This counter-reverie, this turn back towards the serious rather than the fanciful, is something that contemporary British psychogeographic writings mention only with distain (if they address it at all), but for a legal geographer this is the moment of law’s spatialization, this is the moment where law appears to consciousness and most clearly acts upon actor, via colonisation of their subjectivity. This is the moment (the phenomenon) that legal geographers need to turn more attention to.” (8)

I was reminded of this passage when recently gazing at the above photograph. Initially I found myself drawn to the frozen-ness of the waves (classic psychogeographic reverie) but then almost instantly started thinking to myself, that if I was a physicist, my instinct would be to think of the wave mechanics at play in this shoreline. And if I was a geologist I might think about the Deep Time erosion mechanisms that have hewn the nearby soft cliffs and made the gritting red sand. But I am neither, instead my default is to (almost instantly) start thinking about the human (social) systems that compose this beach and its arrangement. My urge is to know that system in order to feel comfortably ‘in place’. This could be something as simple as knowing the answer to the question “am I permitted to be here?” or something more ruminatory like, who owns the pebbles?

And as I raise my gaze from the lapping waves I look out across the familiar bay and see the elegant buildings dotted along the facing hillside. I look and I stare and I’m reminded that this view, from the beach across to the hillside, was one of the most formative and recurrent of my youth.

I grew up in this seaside town. The shore was a place of play, in daylight as a child and in darkness as a youth. But the impression looking across the bay was always the same, a feeling of slight alienation, and of a need to know. The far buildings signalled many things to me: history (time and structures that had existed since before me), municipal ordering (spatial planning for the origination of these sites, building control for their alteration), economic flows (many were hotels – some I would briefly work in – with their weekly ingestion and explusion of coach loads of temporary residents). Above all this view gave me an impression of this seaside town being a machine, with parts, inter-relationships, codes and logics. I needed to know how the machine worked into order to feel confortable within it.

And that, for me, was the root of my legal geographical sensibility, and why I’ve always framed it as essentially psychogeographical in nature.

The main roots of legal geography lie in the Critical social sciences. Most legal geographers are seeking to excavate the spatio-legal co-ordinates and effects of political power. A conventional legal geography of this seaside town would focus on law’s co-option into the consolidation of hotel ownership in the hands of a few, likely point to links between local business networks and the local council and the effect of these connections upon the evolution of the town’s built form and its zoning. They would probably also point to the shaping role of law and policy in implicating some of the town’s hotels into precarious accommodation ‘solutions’ for migrants and other vulnerable incomers. But for me its about how the legal dimension is subtly entwined in a sense of place, and how dwelling somewhere requires a sensing of and accommodation to such underlying features, alongside the vivid, particularised colour of family activities and relations than make a place memorable through lived experiences.

My call is not to replace the personal with the structural, it is instead a call for an analysis that combines both. Thus: one youthful night I found myself stood by a junction cabinet just above the beach. For some reason I decided to clamber onto the top of the cabinet in order to sit there and admire the view across the bay. But as I pulled myself up onto the box something strange happened. Most of the decorative lights strung alongside the bay went off. And for one night only, I had control of the machine and some power over this place.

Image Source: Luke Bennett, 2012

A copy of the 2019 article is here: Towards a Legal Psychogeography: pragmatism, affective-materialism and the spatio-legal

Filed under ANT, OOO and Thingology, Built environments, Law & place, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Tracework, Urban exploration, Wandering

Open Call for Papers – UK Property Law themed submissions invited for the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law

March 25, 2026 Leave a comment

“Over the course of this parliament, the government is determined to honour the commitments made in our manifesto and do what is necessary to finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end.”

Matthew Pennycook, Minsiter of State for Housing and Planning, House of Commons Statement, 21-11-24 https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-11-21/hcws244

The Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law publishes original legal research for academic scholars, policy makers and practitioners, including those working in real property, housing, legal and real estate practice, landlord and tenant law, environmental regulation and land use planning.

In recent years the journal has increasingly attracted submissions from around the world exploring contemporary issues in the property law realm, using both jurisdiction-specific and comparative approaches, including the following articles:

EU law developments in non-performing loans: the new Directive on Secondary Mortgage Markets
Speculative land fragmentation in the Netherlands: the potential of Nordic land formation tools to combat land shredding
Is mandatory seller disclosure of flood risk necessary? A Brisbane case study
Legal structures and contractual frameworks in hybrid real estate development: a Finnish perspective
Legal change in property law: a case study on the tragedy of Chilean lithium
The “just and equitable” test in New Zealand’s strata law: reflections and lessons for other jurisdictions
Can community land trust models work in Peru? Researching community-based land tenure models for affordable housing
Regulating informal housing for the Syrian reconstruction. Between urban renewal and upgrading

From a UK property law perspective the journal’s recent articles have included:

A devious and risible device’? Examining land transactions designed to engage Section 203 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016
Delivering a culture change in property guardianship: recommendations for reform to the regulatory landscape
Homes and home working: a property law perspective
Enforcing the Nationally Described Space Standard: the regulation of “Sub-standard” English housing
“From the lease’s point of view”: the role of tied leases in shaping the UK pub sector

As editors we are keen to maintain an innovative and balanced blend of global and UK-focussed submissions.

Noting the rapid pace of change within the UK property law scene at the moment we therefore would especially welcome submissions from scholars working in this area. This could include analysis of recent property law legislation such as the Leasehold Reform and Urban Development Act 2025, the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 or Scotland’s Land Reform Bill. Or it might comprise examination of the property law impacts of policies such as Biodiversity Net Gain, buildings safety, energy efficiency, business rates reform or enabling housing development. Equally, contributions might examine longer-standing doctrinal or socio-legal themes within property law, such as housing law, commercial leases, rights to light, boundary disputes, conveyancing or agricultural property. We are happy to consider all suggestions.

Authors are invited to discuss potential submissions with either of the journal’s assistant editors (who are both UK property law scholars). The journal’s editorial team comprises:

Role	Name	Institution	Email	Specialism
Editor	Dr Luke Bennett	Sheffield Hallam University	l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk	Planning & Environmental Law; Legal Geography
Assistant Editor	Dr Michael Poulsom	Manchester Metropolitan University	m.poulsom@mmu.ac.uk	Property Law
Assistant Editor	Dr Emily Walsh	University of Portsmouth	emily.walsh@port.ac.uk	Property Law; Socio-Legal Studies

This is an Open Call for submissions, and therefore it does not have a deadline. Submissions that pass peer review will be published in our forthcoming general issues.

To check author guidelines, and to submit a manuscript please do so via the journal’s submission page here: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jppel.

We are also happy to receive proposals for Special Issues on Property Law topics (or on any other topic which falls within the Journal’s scope). Please discuss your idea with a member of the editorial team in the first instance.

Details of this Call are also available here: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-papers/open-call-papers-journal-property-planning-and-environmental-law

Image source: https://thehistoryjar.com/tag/feudal-pyramid/

Filed under Built environments, Law & place, Law & things

Something or nothing: on the joys and errors of reading people by their bookcases

February 23, 2026 Leave a comment

“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special wariness of others.”

Erving Goffman (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Vintage Books: New York p.229

I like reading people by their bookshelves. It’s a fairly standard 20th century habit of the chattering classes to attempt to do so, and this passtime is anchored in an assumption that that the display of books is intentional (by the book owner) and can be taken by the observer to be a summation of the book owner’s tastes.

I mostly indulge this hobby when watching commentators on international affairs being interviewed on television news. I peer around the side of the talking head, I strain, squint and often-times tilt my head to try to make out the titles on display. Sometimes I spot a book by the distinctive design of its spine or front cover, other times I actually make out the title.

Increasingly nowadays these talking heads are very intentional – they position copies of their own books in a prominent position, literally setting out their stall for all to see. This feels a bit crass to me, but only because I don’t remember it being done ‘back in the day’ (and maybe it was, but Standard Definition TV images never let these shameless plugs reach the eyes of the viewers).

It it is still a standard authority indicator to speak with a wall of books behind you. But sometimes the interviewee’s home office is their spare bedroom and the books case behind is sparce to say the least, a few random domestic ornaments and some mid-brow fiction titles. These send the sign that this authority on Yemen (for example) can read, and likes to kick back and relax with Harry Potter when not thinking about Yemen. But call me old fashioned, a few books about Yemen in the bookcase would help me take the speaker’s words more seriously. So, maybe this emptiness is worse than heavy duty self-promotion. If this speaker has written seven books about Yemen maybe I’d prefer to have that shoved into my face.

It is fun also to look at what else creeps in – the quirky reveals that suggest a complexity of character and interest, of the intermixing of two or more inhabitant’s book collections. These are comparatively rare (in my experience even longstanding co-habiters don’t seem to intertwine their book collections, at least not in their home office(s)).

The strangest character read that I’ve been offered by an interview in recent months was with an international relations commentator based in Germany. He was interviewed not with his book shelves in view, but rather with his CD collection on display behind him. This middle aged authority figured opined on matters of European political economy whilst I constructed a succinct account of his formative 20s and 30s listening to Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian and Kraftwerk.

It’s a fun game trying to read these authority figures via their book shelves. But whilst it can be very curated behaviour – with every book displayed in order to create an effect, more often there is less control than this, and it is the incongruities and tells that fascinate.

Since covid took our interactions online (courtesy of Zooms and Teams) a few hundred folk have peered down the electric pipes that lead into my attic study. They have had the pleasure of staring at the book shelves behind my desk. Occasionally someone has commented on what they have seen on the shelves behind me, but mostly they have kept their interpretations to themselves. At times I’ve experimented with filters to try and mask the visual distraction that my cluttered shelves must comprise, but my relatively lo-spec laptop chops my ears off when I use a filter, which I find distracting (and quite unnerving). So. I’ve carried on in “full display”, not really giving much thought to what viewers (colleagues, students, interviewers) might make of what they are able to see.

But what I know – but they don’t – is that this is not my only bookshelf! So, what they can see is but a fraction of my more-books-than-I-will-ever-get-the-chance-to-read collection. And each bookshelf spread around my house accounts for a particular phase of book gathering. For instance my books about bunkers sit elsewhere in my office. There’s no big reason for their being out of sight of my webcam, there has been no effort made to hide these from public view. It’s just that the shelves behind me were full of more general environmental, law and social science materials before I went down that particular rabbit hole and needed somewhere to store that pile of books. Elsewhere in the house there are history books, climate change monographs and recent tomes on AI and the future of work. But these just happen not to be stored on the shelves that are in front of the camera.

Also out of sight (because they predate my co-opting this attic room as my office) are downstairs shelves featuring fiction (an almost – but not quite – intermixing with my partners’ fiction books) and then in a stairwell sit my collection of ‘cultural anxiety’ books. These are books purchased from the early 1990s onwards from charity shops as people discarded their early 1980s onwards education into the existential challenges of feared apocalypses. This collection now spans urban dereliction / land contamination, the rise of the internet and Y2K, globalisation, 9/11, the ‘war on terror’, the 2008 crash and covid. How these books wash up in charity shops approximately 10 years after they are published and the crisis is raging is what fascinates me.

Viewing all of these bookshelves would enable a fuller reading of me than just that sub-set viewable on screen. But even then the reading would be a limited one, for not all of the books that I own are in physical form. Many books sit on my Kindle and there are also hundreds of books sitting in thematic folders in Perlego awaiting a future free year or two in which those enticing tangents could be fully explored. My Perlego roster opens up whole vistas of non-physical rabbit holes from recent years: ‘Antarctica, Mars & Oceans’; ‘Portuguese Coastal Defence’; ‘Oil, Gas & Carbon Capture’; ‘Campus Development’; ‘Social Theory & Thing Theory’. And then there are the hundreds of folders of pdfs holding articles, policy papers, research notes on topics that may – or may not – have any physical presence upon any of my book shelves.

So, staring at a bookshelf is a imprecise way to get to know someone. But it can still be fun.

Image Credit: my attic office as filtered through ChatGPT.

Filed under Archives, repositories and data stores, Dwelling, house & home, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Time capsules, Tracework, Urban mining

Tending towards something: on values, change and curiosity

January 27, 2026 Leave a comment

“Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.”

Albert Einstein, speaking a few weeks before his death in 1955 (quoted in the 2-5-55 issue of TIME magazine)

A year ago I was sitting in a function hall. Normally the space was used for weddings, and its luscious ivory curtains, ornate pedaments and crisp table cloths spoke to that. But today was a careers fair for jobs in nature conservation. I was there as a favour to someone I knew. My role was to chat to students about careers in this field. These punters shuffled into the hall and I arranged some sweets on my table to try and attract the passing traffic. All I had to offer was my experience from my years in Higher Education teaching in the natural and built environment sector, and my career before that as an environmental lawyer.

Half a dozen conversations ensued that afternoon, and I remember each one. Some were with energetic undergraduates, clearly destined for existing careers in something but unsure of which path to focus upon. Others were conversations with less confident souls, who just wanted any door to open and for someone to see their potential and give them a chance to make a contribution. I felt for them all. I hope that my words of encouragement and suggestions for angles and opportunities of approach helped. I was left with the feeling that they did. And that was a nice warm feeling to take away, and something that I held onto deep down inside throughout 2025, as a few days after this event I started my most recent job: a quasi-judicial governmental role. Having left my long-standing university position in the Spring of 2024 I’d been searching around for my next chapter, and I’d thought that re-visiting my lawyer side would be the way to go.

But, increasingly as 2025 marched on I found myself missing the pastoral side of my old academic job, and those pleasant experiences. That warm feeling gained in that wedding hall kept niggling away at me. This was an odd internal conversation because it pitted the blunt force of a jobbing judicial mindset against the contrastingly fluid and nebulous realm of values, purpose and big “what do I want out of life?” questions. Some days pragmatism (or cynicism) won out, but at gut level the signalling from within was pretty clear and consistent. Two conclusions were there waiting to be noticed: that that job wasn’t right for me and also that the signage for another path was already erected and clear to see, if I could bring myself to look.

So, now, in early 2026, I now find myself as a volunteer career coach and mentor working with academics, university and sixth form students. I am doing what I’ve always enjoyed doing and I’m coming away with that feeling of having given something of value to others, and to have enjoyed the process of doing so. I also remain engaged in academic projects alongside this, writing articles, editing the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law, and collaboriating internationally around Legal Geography.

This isn’t a story of an easy transition. It has been a scary and uncertain journey. Not all days have felt as clear-cut (or clear-minded) as others. But here’s where I stand now, and I can see a path ahead. Looking back I think that my long-winded machinations could have been shortened by working with a career coach. So, going forwards I’d like to be the guide that I didn’t have in my own tortuous process.

That’s not to say that friends and family didn’t help me along the way – they certainly did. They have provided love (soft and tough – as appropriate), reassured me of my abilities and their regard for those, and I have also found that in conversation with them I would hear myself presenting a more incisive, summarised, version of my internal monologue. But they also carried the burden of my glum, withdrawn days and the impenetrability of my incessant internal processing. Some days I did not want to talk about where my head was at, partly because my conclusions on that day were too unstable, but also because the stakes of sharing those thoughts with friends and family felt too loaded and/or indulgent.

The benefits of a coach or mentor are that they are there specifically for that particular journey and its conversations, and their lives (and identities) are not also entwined with yours in myriad other complex ways.

Picture credit: https://xerte.nottingham.ac.uk/play_22886#page1

Filed under Meaning making, Mentoring & Career Coaching

The Bin Looks Back: Silent Judgment, Breaking Bad, and the Rise of the Reverse Vending Machine

December 18, 2025 1 Comment

“New tasks emerge where machines reach their limits — in empathy, judgment, creativity, and hope….Automation scales output; augmentation scales intelligence.” http://www.futureneers.io/blog, 8/11/25

One of the small pleasures of rewatching Breaking Bad is noticing, again and again, how oddly it is filmed. Not just the obvious bravura sequences—the desert vistas, the meth-lab montages, the moral rot unfolding in close-up—but the quieter, stranger choices. The camera keeps ending up in places cameras are not supposed to be. Inside cupboards. Inside fridges. Inside washing machines. And, most memorably, inside rubbish bins.

These shots are not rare accidents or one‑off visual jokes. They are a recurring motif. The viewer looks outwards from darkness, framed by plastic rims, metal lids, or greasy apertures, as human characters loom above, distorted, impatient, careless. We see Walt, Jesse, Skyler, Saul, and others from below, as if from the point of view of the discarded.

It is tempting to read these shots merely as stylistic novelty—a show showing off. But novelty alone does not sustain repetition across five seasons. Something else is going on. The bin, I want to suggest, is not neutral. It is watching. And in watching, it is judging.

This blog post is about that gaze—and about how it might help us think about an apparently unrelated development: the planned introduction of reverse vending machines across England from October 2027, under the Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England & Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025. These machines, developed under the oversight of the government‑appointed Delivery Management Organisation (DMO), will also look back at us. And like the bins in Breaking Bad, they will do so silently, mechanically, and with an unsettling moral clarity.

Filming from the Wrong Place

The “inside-the-bin” shot in Breaking Bad is disorientating because it reverses a familiar hierarchy. Normally, rubbish bins are endpoints. They receive. They contain. They disappear things. They are the bottom of the chain. But when the camera is placed inside them, they become origins of perspective. They are no longer passive; they are observational.

From inside a bin, the human body looks clumsy and excessive. Hands enter the frame aggressively. Faces appear partially, cut off by the rim. Dialogue becomes brusque, transactional. The characters are not performing for one another; they are performing for the act of disposal itself.

The bin witnesses moments of concealment, panic, guilt, and denial. Guns are thrown in. Evidence is dumped. Bodies (sometimes dissolved, sometimes not). The bin becomes complicit, but never consenting. It absorbs consequence without comment.

Crucially, the bin never reacts. It does not move. It does not speak. It does not forgive. It simply records.

In that sense, the bin’s “judgment” is not emotional or moralistic. It is infrastructural. The bin judges by existing. By being there when things go wrong. By holding what should not have existed in the first place.

This is a deeply Breaking Bad idea. The show is obsessed with systems that do not care: chemistry, markets, cartels, cancer, capitalism. The bin belongs to this ecology. It is a mundane object that outlives intention. Walt may rationalise his actions endlessly, but the bin receives the material residue without narrative.

Judgment Without Voice

What makes these shots powerful is precisely that the bin does not accuse. There is no finger‑wagging. No moral soundtrack. The judgment emerges from framing.

By placing the viewer inside the bin, the show forces us to occupy a position usually denied to consciousness. We become the thing that receives the fallout. We are asked, briefly, to identify not with the chooser but with the container.

This matters because Breaking Bad is a show about justifications. Everyone has reasons. Everyone has a story. The bin has none. It does not know why the gun is here. It does not care about Walt’s pride or Jesse’s trauma. It merely holds the object, inertly, damningly.

In this way, the bin functions almost like an environmental conscience. It is the physical world registering harm long after rationalisations have moved on.

From Fictional Bins to Real Machines

This brings us, unexpectedly but inevitably, to reverse vending machines.

From October 2027, consumers in England (and Northern Ireland) will encounter a new kind of everyday object as part of the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), established under the Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England & Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025. Plastic beverage bottles and cans will carry a refundable deposit, reclaimable when the container is returned to a collection point—often via a reverse vending machine (RVM).

These machines are being developed and standardised under the oversight of the Delivery Management Organisation (DMO), a body tasked with designing and managing the system by which consumers return containers and receive payment. The DMO has already published detailed technical specifications for RVMs, outlining how they must identify, accept, reject, compact, record, and account for returned items (see: https://dmouk.com/news/dmo-publishes-reverse-vending-machine-rvm-specification-a-key-milestone-for-the-deposit-return-scheme/).

On one level, this is a straightforward environmental policy instrument. On another, it is something stranger.

Because unlike a traditional bin, the reverse vending machine does not simply receive waste. It evaluates it.

The Machine That Looks Back

The RVM is not a passive container. It scans barcodes. It checks shapes. It measures weight. It decides whether the object you are offering is valid or invalid, compliant or non‑compliant. It accepts or rejects. It keeps records. It allocates value. And in doing so, it introduces a subtle inversion of agency.

When you place a bottle into a reverse vending machine, you are not discarding it. You are submitting it. The machine inspects your offering. If the bottle is crushed, dirty, or incorrect, it may refuse it. The slot closes. The screen flashes. The transaction fails.

Anyone who has used an RVM in countries where they already exist knows the peculiar feeling this creates. You are briefly at the mercy of an object. You stand there holding waste that is not yet waste. You wait to see whether the machine will approve of how you have behaved.

This is not unlike the Breaking Bad bin shot.

In both cases, the object occupies a position of evaluative stillness. The human actor hovers awkwardly above, hoping not to be found wanting.

Silent Moral Infrastructures

What connects the rubbish bins of Breaking Bad and the reverse vending machines of future England is not morality in the conventional sense, but moral infrastructure.

Neither bin nor machine lectures. Neither explains itself. Both simply operate according to rules that pre‑exist the individual moment. And both force humans to confront the material consequences of their actions without narrative cushioning.

In Breaking Bad, the bin receives the residue of moral collapse. In the DRS, the RVM receives the residue of consumption. In both cases, the object asks—silently—what have you done with the things you used?

The difference is that the RVM will be explicitly designed to look back. Screens, lights, scanners, slots. It will face the consumer directly. It will perform judgment procedurally, not symbolically.

And yet the affect may be similar. A faint embarrassment. A moment of exposure. The sense that the object knows something about you.

Watching the Watchers

There is a final, deeper connection here. Breaking Bad uses bin‑perspective shots to remind us that no action truly disappears. Disposal is an illusion. Things persist somewhere, watched by systems we do not control.

The DRS institutionalises that insight. It makes disposal reversible. It insists that objects return to the system. It refuses the fantasy of “away”.

In that sense, reverse vending machines are bins that have learned to remember.

They will log transactions. They will count returns. They will generate data. They will, in aggregate, tell stories about our habits that we cannot easily explain away. The judgment they cast will not be moral but statistical—and perhaps that is more unsettling.

Conclusion: Living with the Gaze of Objects

When Breaking Bad places us inside a rubbish bin, it momentarily aligns us with the world that bears the weight of human decisions. It asks us to feel what it is like to be the thing that remains after intention has passed.

Reverse vending machines will do something similar, but permanently, and at scale. They will stand in supermarkets and public spaces, quietly evaluating our behaviour, one bottle at a time.

They will not accuse us. They will not forgive us. They will simply accept—or reject—what we offer. And like the bins in Breaking Bad, they will remind us that the material world is not indifferent. It records. It persists. It looks back.

Even when it says nothing at all.

NB: The above was written by AI (GPT 5.2). I’ve never previously used AI in any way to generate material for this blog. But I thought it was time to give it a try. Having now done so, I feel dirty, shocked – but also humbled. The AI came up with more angles than I’d thought of, I almost felt that it understood me, that it ‘got’ the idea that I had fed it. This is – of course an illusion – but wow. Maybe I’m redundant now. Or maybe not, juxtaposing Breaking Bad’s distinctive shots and linking this to judgment and reverse vending machines was my original idea. AI wouldn’t have made that juxtaposition. But it did run with the ball I gave it…

Here’s the prompt I used:

“write a 1,500 blog post in the style of https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com about how there is a novelty in how the tv series Breaking Bad is filmed. The novelty is that there are often camera shots filmed from inside objects looking out at the human characters and their actions. A frequent example of this is shots filmed from inside rubbish bins. Link this observation to the idea that perhaps these shots are intended to suggest that the inanimate object (i.e. the bin) is casting silent judgment upon the characters and their observed actions. Then link this to the planned introduction of so-called reverse vending machines in England from October 2027 in accordance with the The Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England & Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025. The reverse vending machines are being developed by an organisation called the Delivery Management Organisation (DMO) which has been given responsibility by the government for developing ways in which consumers will be able to return plastic beveridge bottles to shops and receive their payments for returning such items. The DMO’s technical specification for the design of reverse vending machines is here: https://dmouk.com/news/dmo-publishes-reverse-vending-machine-rvm-specification-a-key-milestone-for-the-deposit-return-scheme/?_gl=1*1pixp8x*_up*MQ..*_ga*ODg4MjIwNTIxLjE3NjYwNzg2NTI.*_ga_7JP9L9KDY6*czE3NjYwNzg2NTAkbzEkZzAkdDE3NjYwNzg2NTAkajYwJGwwJGgw . Ruminate on how these reverse vending machines will be like the rubbish bins in Breaking Bad: they will both be casting silent judgment on the humans and their actions.”

Image Credit: https://images.kinorium.com/movie/shot/400796/w1500_52120074.jpg

Filed under AI, ANT, OOO and Thingology, Infrastructure, Law & things, Meaning making, Urban mining

Into place (with the wolves): a Legal Geography Special Issue of the Journal of Property, Planning & Environmental Law, is now available

November 10, 2025 Leave a comment

“It is time to address the places of law and ask: How and why does place matter in legal geographical scholarship? What can be found beyond the generic legal places? And What are the unexplored or underused potentials of place in legal geography?”

Päivi Kymäläinen (2025) ‘Legal Geography II: The possibilities and disruptions of place’, Progress in Human Geography, 49(3): 323-331.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a legal geography-themed special issue of the Journal of Property, Planning & Environmental Law. Jointly guest edited by Gustav Stenseke Arup (Karlstad University, Sweden) and Jenny Kanellopoulou (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), their editorial for the Special Issue is available here: Legal geography: discussions across borders, scales and landscapes.

The Special Issue presents four articles, each originating from a legal geography panel at Lund University, Sweden’s Critical Legal Conference in 2024. Each article uses innovative methods by which to explore the legal geographies of four very different places. Whilst the Special Issue was the product of a separate line of flight, the four articles deftly rise to the challenge set above by Kymäläinen.

Gustav Stenseke Arup’s own contribution – ‘A legal geography of wolves in Swedish landscapes: a morphogenetic approach’ – examines the normative landscape inscribed onto Scandinavia by a variety of measures aimed at protecting (or controlling) wolves. Gustav teases out the processual interrelations of morphology, wolf-worldmaking and human spatio-legal schema, which constantly make and re-make the legal geography of the wolves. Here law (and other socio-cultural) factors must mesh with ecological and geological processes. Gustav shows how law is importantly constitutive in forming the wolves’ landscape, but also that other very different factors have a key influence too, including the death of Ursula von der Leyen’s pony in 2022. As Gustav notes:

“When wolves move, their movements affect law like waves in a pond and cause intense vibrations in the landscapes, influencing elections, legislation, as well as legal and illegal hunting. Through their actions, such as attacking reindeer, livestock, elks, hunting dogs or just wandering around being wolves, they affect ecological and social processes, which contribute to shaping laws, their interpretations and effects.” (124)

In his article ‘The unfree sea: a legal geography of the dark fleet’, Dhiraj Nainani (National University of Singapore) takes us onto the high seas, to observe the shadowy movement of thousands of ageing oil tankers of ambiguous legal identity as they engage in the illegal trade in sanctioned oil and in doing so constantly interrupt the (supposedly) smooth architecture of the international law of the sea. Dhiraj uses legal geography as a fresh (processual) way of exploring the limits of any claimed stable and all-encompassing legal regime on the ‘high seas’. As Dhiraj puts it:

“In surveying the various human, non-human and sovereign actors that are implicated in the dark fleet, as well as its vast materiality – the vessels, the offshore companies that serve as flag registries, owners and insurers, and the variety of documents and technologies used to tether and untether these vessels from the law – this paper demonstrates how the fleet exposes the fragility of modern international law in mapping, regulating and protecting the spatiality of the sea. Seemingly caught between the political idealism of State sanctions, a salient complicity with global trade, the opaque role of corporate sovereignty, and the desire to safeguard the marine environment, the law struggles to adequately comprehend the “black box” or “antimatter” that is the “darkness” of the fleet, and in so doing fosters an unfree sea” (86).

Meanwhile, Emma Pratchett (Northumbria University, UK) examines a darkness dwelling within the homes of asylum seekers, using Remi Week’s horror film as a provocative vehicle by which to present ‘A cinematic jurisprudence of homemaking in ‘His House’ (2020)’. Emma presents this film’s portrayal of the uncanny (unsettling) and probationary (temporary, unstable) site of asylum seeker accommodation as:

“a particular theorisation of the law, in which the cinematic text captures the affective and aesthetic dimensions of the juridical framing of space (MacNeil, 2004). Reading the sensory depiction of the “timespace” of the probationary home the film provides an innovative lens through which to examine how the law shapes – and negates-spaces of inhabitation in the asylum process. A law-as-film approach adopts an interpretation of law as a form of visual representation of norms, read through a critical analysis of the various codes of meaning-making observed through, for example, camera framing and shot sizes, mise-en- scene or the use of sound” (73).

Emma’s analysis juxtaposes an analysis of uneasy dwelling as shown via these cinematic techniques, with asylum law’s satisfaction with a basic ‘adequacy’ of provided accommodation, and the wider context of a presenting a deterring (and hostile) environment to asylum seekers. This is a context in which homeliness is structurally undermined by spatio-legal configurations of space and time, and left fundamentally ‘unsettled’.

In ‘Legal geography, estuarine landscapes and the Anthropocene’ Caroline Buffery (Royal Agricultural University, UK) adopts a multi-generational perspective in order to observe how “sequent legal occupance” (successive use and alteration by varied owners across time) forms, maintains and evolves the landscape of three UK estuaries (the Severn, the Thames and the Humber). In doing so, Caroline revives and applies an ‘old’ method of geographical landscape analysis (sequent occupance) and inserts (and shows the importance of) a legal dimension of that analysis. Caroline emphasises how estuaries are dynamic environments, constantly made, and re-made, both by natural fluvial processes and by human intervention (and both physical and normative). She reminds us that landscape is something ‘made’ (both as an act of viewing, and material intervention). Positioning her analysis of the distinct local-legal factors shaping the evolution of each of the three estuaries (pollution on the Severn; overfishing on the Thames and erosion on the Humber) Caroline looks towards the global challenges facing the future (climate change) and the importance of including the local-legal (and its change over historical time) in any analysis and understanding of the future of these dynamic landscapes, as:

“It is suggested that the conceptual approach of sequent legal occupance can create a framework to provide an alternative method for the understanding of the relational nature between law and landscape, repositioning the focus of legal geography by moving away from the more transcendent notions of space to elaborate on notions of place and time.” (113).

Gustav’s article and the SI editorial are available open-access, and can be read here and here. Meanwhile Emma’s, Caroline’s and Dhiraj’s articles are available for subscriber access here.

As Editor in Chief of this journal, I’m keen to attract more legal geography scholarship to this journal. So, if you have a proposal for an article or a themed Special Issue please do get in touch (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk).

Image Credit: Luke Bennett (2025) as originally presented here: https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com/2025/02/27/legal-geography-a-place-first-approach/

Filed under ANT, OOO and Thingology, Dwelling, house & home, Ghosts of place, Law & place, Law & things, Meaning making

Diaries of a nobody: Is the unexamined life worth living?

October 22, 2025 Leave a comment

“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.”

James Joyce (1914) Dubliners

He’s done it again. My son’s lastest YouTube video essay ploughs furrows that I’ve always been ruminating upon myself throughout my adult life. This time he’s documented the obsessive journalling of Robert Shields, a Mid Western, mid-Twentieth Century everyman, who took it upon himself to document every 5 minutes of his life (and in the process created a very sizeable archive of material for posterity).

By his own admission Mr Shields was hoping that by accumulating thorough evidence of his life (including his bodily functions) future researchers would be able to gain insight into lived-life in ways that ellude us in the present.

His archive was donated to Washington State University, along with a dowry to enable/ensure its preservation. But like all things, Mr Shield’s boxes will likely turn to dust at some future point (feel free to speculate here on your favourite Deep Time engine of entropy).

Meanwhile, I’ve reached that age where I’m starting to realise that my hoard of old diaries, A’level notes, 2000AD comics, Smash Hits and LPs which had been sitting untouched in my attic for over 25 years are not a kind or helpful donation to posterity. If I don’t even ever examine this stuff (or know for precisely what future purpose I’m retaining it) then I shouldn’t be inflicting it on my kids.

It is said that Socrates declared at his trial that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. That still makes sense to me – but increasingly I’m realising that simply accumulating stuff for posterity should not be an end in itself. If someone’s going to “examine” this life then it’s only likely to be me (by and for me, and during my life). Sure, great authors can be better understood via interrogation of their archives, but us nobodies can only really pass on highlights, conclusions and shared moments. We need to do the editing, posterity won’t likely be all that bothered with the bulky raw material of our ordinary lives.

Picture credit: Luke Bennett, 2025

Filed under Archives, repositories and data stores, Dwelling, house & home, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Time capsules, Urban mining, Wandering

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