Foregrounding vulnerability: materiality’s porous affectability as a methodological platform

Grear, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2993-1370 2017. Foregrounding vulnerability: materiality’s porous affectability as a methodological platform. Philippoloulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas and Brookes, Victoria, eds. Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 3-28.

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Abstract

Law's paradigmatic subject has been criticised, especially by feminist theorists, as being relatively invulnerable, complexly disembodied, rationalistic and separatively autonomous. This is a subject governing the ‘centre’, for whom living materiality—even the human body itself—is merely an objectified periphery—and whose scopophilic view ‘from nowhere’ reflects a relentlessly assumed ontological and epistemological priority. Against the impugned subject-object assumptions underlying traditional legal methodological approaches, this chapter explores some theoretical gains offered by foregrounding, in place of the ‘autonomous liberal subject’/disembodied knower, the notion of vulnerable eco-subjectivities within an open ecology yielding a radical epistemic leveling. What might replace the binary subject-object relations assumed by the autonomous liberal subject/disembodied knower? And what might foregrounding vulnerability—understood here as materiality’s porous affectability—indicate for environmental legal methodology/ies?

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Schools:	Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Publisher:	Edward Elgar
ISBN:	9781784712563
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	25 May 2016
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2024 13:07
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/88970

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