Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary. They talk to us about themselves and their work.
I came to academia after clerking for a judge and practicing as a solicitor in the community legal sector in Australia, where I grew up, and and went to Law School. Australia is a British settler colony founded, legally, on the idea that Indigenous people had no rights to the land on which they’d lived for at least 60,000 years: the legal idea was actually that the land was terra nullius or ‘empty’. It was a lie enabled by systemic racism that persists today and is reflected, for example, in the massively disproportionate level of Indigenous Australians in prison and in the way which dominant Australian culture treats land, namely as an endlessly extractable resource for capital and nation-building. At the same time, Australia has some of the most extreme and punitive regimes of migration control including the indefinite detention of refugees on remote Pacific islands, a policy that was introduced while I was an undergraduate. I was disturbed by all of this, and as a mixed race queer person I experienced some of the soft end of the structures of violence and inequality that accompany the legal regimes that maintain those structures. I did a BA/LLB, was involved in various queer, feminist and anti-racist collective initiatives as a student, and then worked briefly in the courts and legal sector. I have huge respect for community legal practitioners, but I felt frustrated at how limiting the law was, in terms of the material change we could facilitate for our clients, who were some of the most marginalised and oppressed people in society. I applied to do a PhD because I wanted to try to understand how more systemic change might be possible. I was very fortunate to do my PhD at the University of Kent, based at what was then the Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, where I learnt a huge amount from my supervisors, other colleagues and students about different methodologies and approaches to studying law in context.
Since starting my career as a lecturer I’ve been involved in several initiatives that seek to keep universities, and Law Schools in particular, as places where it’s possible to openly examine and think critically about how the state and society function, how injustice is translated in the legal system and how things might be different. Co-founding and directing the Centre for Research on Race and Law at Birkbeck was one such initiative, and working with my colleagues to reformulate the Property and Equity modules so as to give students an understanding of the role that these legal tools have had in Britain and its former empire, giving them a deeper understanding of the law and what it does. I enjoy my job as an academic and doing this kind of work. At the same time, I have of course been affected by the growing crisis in British higher education, the increasing material precarity of students, the reduced security of our jobs, and the general neoliberalisation of the sector. I suffered from burnout which contributed to my having Long Covid, at a time when Birkbeck was being restructured - I left thinking I might never be well enough to work again. I’m incredibly pleased to have recovered and to be joining Queen Mary School of Law, and I am committed to working with the union to make sure that we do all we can to maintain it as a healthy and sustainable place to work and think and organise.
My current research centres on interrogating property in the context of climate crisis, engaging with literature that takes seriously the more-than-human world. I’ve been fascinated by the British moral panic around the plant Japanese knotweed, and wondering what we might learn about property by examining this plant and ‘our’ relationship with it. I have a forthcoming article proposing that Japanese knotweed might be understood as a companion species, a concept developed by feminist scholar Donna Haraway to think through human co-dependence with the broader social and physical world. I’m interested in how a particular group of humans, namely British landowners, have co-evolved with this vegetal species that is feared and hated: its mere living existence has been found to be a nuisance to property, though it does no more physical damage than many other plants and trees. I plan to develop this argument into a book project, examining the various ways the plant has interacted with property since it was sent as a colonial specimen to Kew in the 1800s. This project builds on the conceptual work in my last book, Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging, which challenges the agentive/controlling subject and the inert/lifeless object distinction. Here I am tracing the agency and legal categorisation of vegetal life, and arguing that plantlife disrupts property both physically in terms of its persistent crossing of boundaries, and conceptually in terms of its status as an apparently agentive object.
I’m looking forward to working with colleagues to teach Property law in ways that give students a socially and historically grounded understanding of common law property concepts and the effects they have on the world. This builds on the work on reinvigorating the property curriculum at Birkbeck, an experience I’ve published on in the recent book Decolonisation, Anti-Racism, and Legal Pedagogy: Strategies, Successes, and Challenges (Adebisi et al). At a time of mass violence, displacement and inequality, facilitated, in significant part, by regimes of property law, it’s more important than ever that we teach this area of law in a way that includes its material history and ongoing effects.