Principal speaker
Professor Lee Godden
This seminar is part of the Socio-Legal Research Centre Seminar Series.
Presented by Professor Lee Godden, The University of Melbourne
This paper explores the existential crisis of ‘Life on the Edge’ that is posed by climate change through the constructs of vulnerability and resilience. Climate change imperatives requires that ‘bare life’ adapt to the shifting spatial and temporal dimensions that renders people and places as either resilient or vulnerable to impacts, such as the increased probability of disasters. These binary classifications, first articulated in scientific terms, are increasingly deployed as technologies of disciplining in legal and policy contexts; shaping an emergent bodily subjectivity that is brought into being by the bounding of the body in space and time by reference to changing climate zones. The paper provides examples drawn from research on adaptation to climate change within Australia where the vulnerability/ resilience binary aligns to classic legal forms predicated upon the public /private divide. The inscription of a public/ private divide has implicit ramifications for how loss is spread under a climate change risk management regime.
Professor Lee Godden, The University of Melbourne Law School, holds a concurrent position with the Australian Law Reform Commission. Most recently, she has published extensively in environmental law and climate change law from a theoretical and historical perspective. Her research is multidisciplinary in orientation, crossing environmental law, indigenous rights, property law and legal theory. Her legal academic career began with a very new Griffith Law School in 1993. Recent publications include: Zahar, A., Peel, J. and Godden L. Australian Climate Law in Global Context, Cambridge University Press, 2013 and Godden, L., Rochford, F., Peel, J., Caripis, L. and Carter, R., ‘Law, governance and risk: Deconstructing the Public/Private Divide in Climate Change Adaptation’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, vol.36(1), 2013, pp. 224-255.
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Event contact details
- Madonna Adcock
- 07 3735 5747