Dr Sarah Keenan

Profile

Sarah Keenan joined Queen Mary University of London School of Law in September 2024, after having held academic posts at Birkbeck, SOAS and Oxford Brookes. At Birkbeck Sarah co-founded the Centre for Research on Race and Law. They have held visiting fellowships at the LSE, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, University of British Columbia, Osgoode Hall Law School, City University of New York Graduate Centre, University of Melbourne Law School and University of Wollongong School of Law. They remain a Visiting Reader at Birkbeck School of Law. Raised on Giabal and Jarowair land in Toowoomba, ‘Australia’, Sarah worked as a solicitor in the community legal sector and a Judge’s associate in the Supreme Court of Queensland before coming to academia.

Sarah’s work sits at the intersection of legal and political thought, geography, feminist theory and postcolonial studies. They are particularly interested in the malleability of the concept of property and how it might reshaped for a better world. Their work on property has been taken up beyond the academy including in artistic projects such as Before Law.

Research

Sarah’s research critically explores the concept of property in land. In conversation with legal geography work which highlights the productive power of property, Sarah’s research examines how property itself is produced as an element of spatial and temporal order. This production is explored in their monograph Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging (Routledge 2015) which examines the materiality of informal property rights in different empirical contexts to put forward a theory of property as a malleable and spatially contingent relation of belonging.

Supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship (2017-2018), Sarah has published a number of articles on the temporality of title registration, tracing the move away from the retrospection of unregistered common law conveyancing to the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens system. Examining the legal form produced through the Torrens system, they argue that its ‘fresh’, ‘clean’ and ‘new’ titles structurally remove Indigenous histories of land from legal view and orient titleholders toward a settled future racialised as white.

Their current research centres on interrogating property in the context of climate crisis, engaging with interdisciplinary work addressing the more-than-human world to consider what lessons might be learnt from vegetal life. Using a case study of Japanese knotweed in contemporary Britain, Sarah argues 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.

Publications

Monograph

2015 - Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging. Routledge.

Journal Articles

2023 - Keeping the Gweagal Shield: Property and Truth in Matters of Post-colonial Redistribution. - Legalities 3(2): 136-162.

2023 - The Transfer of What? Electronic Conveyancing and the Destabilisation of Property. Law, Technology and Humans 5(1):11-23.

2021 - Fumaça, cortinas e espelhos: a produção de raça por meio do tempo e do registro de títulos / Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration, translated by Ferreira, B.M.B. Revista Direito e Praxis 12(3): 2258 -2296.

2020 - Expanding Terra Nullius. The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs (Special Issue: Refugees and New Inequalities in the Pacific) 32(2): 449-460.

2019 - Keenan, S. & El-Enany, N. From Pacific to Traffic Islands: Challenging Australia's colonial use of the ocean through creative protest. Acta Academica (Special Issue: Space, Place and the Power of Ideas) 51(1): 28-52.

2019 - From Historical Chains to Derivative Futures: Title Registries as Time Machines. Social and Cultural Geography 20(3): 282-303.

2017 - The Gweagal Shield. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly (Special Issue: ‘The Pop-Up Museum of Legal Objects’. 68(3): 283-290.

2017 - Smoke, Mirrors and Curtains: Time, Race and Title Registration. Law and Critique 28(1): 87-108.

2014 - Swimming against the tide of history: Undoing Australian law’s historicization of Indigenous Australia in the post–Mabo era. Canadian Journal of Law and Society (Special Issue: Law and Decolonization) 29(2): 163-180.

2013 - Bringing the Outside(r) In: Law’s Appropriation of Subversive Identities. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 64(3): 299-316.

2013 - Property as Governance: Time, Space and Belonging in Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention. Modern Law Review 76(3): 464-493.

2010 - Subversive Property: Reshaping Malleable Spaces of Belonging. Social and Legal Studies 19(4): 423-439.

2009 - Australian Legal Geography and the Search for Postcolonial Space in Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island. Australian Feminist Law Journal 30: 173-199.

2009 - A blue wristband view of history? The death of Mulrunji Doomadgee and the illusion of postcolonial Australia. Alternative Law Journal 34(4): 248-252.

Book chapters

2023 - Clark, C., Keenan, S. & Page, J. Teaching Property critically in disparate parts of the former British Empire. Adebisi, F., Jivraj, S. & Tzouvala, N. (Eds) Decolonisation, Anti-Racism and Legal Pedagogy: Strategies, Successes and Challenges. Routledge. 103-116.

2022 - Ownership without Control? Mortgage Finance and Changing Formations of Property. Davies, M., Godden, L., & Graham, N. (Eds) Routledge Handbook on Property, Law and Society. Routledge. 453-463.

2020 - Space and Belonging. Clarke, K., Darian-Smith, E., Kotiswaran, P., & Valverde, M. (Eds) Routledge Handbook of Law and Society. Routledge. 225-228.

2019 - Property: Changing Formations of Having and Being. Del Mar, M., Meyler, B., & Stern, S. (Eds) Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities. Oxford University Press. 531-548.

2018 - Making Land Liquid: On Time and Title Registration. Beynon-Jones, S. & Grabham, E. (Eds) Law and Time. Routledge. 145-161.

2019 - A border in every street: Grenfell and the 'hostile environment’. Bulley, D., Edkins, J. &El-Enany, N. (Eds) After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response. Pluto Press. 79-91.

2018 - A Prison Around Your Ankle and a Border in Every Street: Theorising Law, Space and the Subject. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (Ed) Handbook of Law and Theory. Routledge. 71-90.

2011 - Safe Spaces for Dykes in Danger? Refugee Law’s Production of the Vulnerable Lesbian Subject. FitzGerald. S. (Ed). Regulating the international movement of women: From protection to control. Routledge. 29-47; (2016) Republished Harding, R. (Ed) Law and Sexuality: Critical Concepts in Law. Routledge.

Supervision

Dr Keenan welcomes proposals for postgraduate supervision on projects in the fields of legal geography, critical engagements with property, law and political theory, socio-legal studies, feminist legal theory, post-colonial theory, law and the more-than-human world, law and decolonisation, or settler colonial studies.

Public Engagement

2023 - Lost Property at the British Museum. Edinburgh University Press Blog.

2023 - Queerness and Property. Queering the Law Podcast

2021 - Objects with Personality. Before Law

2020 - What is the Australian Border? Overland.

2018 - Australia’s White Fragility. Verso Blog.

2017 - Land and Cities. City Road Podcast

2017 - A Border In Every Street. The Disorder of Things.

2016 - Give Back the Gweagal Shield. Critical Legal Thinking.

2016 - Hillary Clinton, Riot Grrrl and Subversive Property. Critical Legal Thinking.

2015 - Recipes for Racism? Kitchen Cabinet and the Politics of Food. The Conversation (Australia).

2013 - All Rise: What Does Justice Sound Like?’(on the civil trial against BP regarding the Deep Water Horizon oil spill). Critical Legal Thinking and Greenpeace.

2012 - Art as Disobedience: Liberate Tate’s Gift to the Nation’. Critical Legal Thinking.

2012 - Aboriginal Australians are part of the country’s present – not just its past. The Guardian.