GLaD program researcher Dr Sean Mulcahy will soon visit Europe to take part in conferences and research opportunities as part of our drugs and human rights project.
Sean will visit Verona to speak at the Law and Humanities Roundtable. There, he will be presenting a paper co-authored with GLaD research lead, Associate Prof Kate Seear, entitled ‘“The tribunes of the people, the tongues o’ the common mouth”: Parliamentarians as representatives when scrutinising laws’.
The paper considers the relationship between Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and contemporary Australian parliamentarians. More particularly, it explores how parliamentarians approach and grapple with their role as representatives of the people when undertaking human rights scrutiny of proposed laws, in relation to the tribunes, the quasi-parliamentarian characters of Shakespeare’s play. It concludes with reflections on how parliamentarians, due to their representative character, may deprioritise abstract human rights and emphasise material popular concerns, and privilege popular opinion over expert evidence.
Sean will then visit Sheffield as a visiting scholar at the Department of Law and Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University, as part of its strategic partnership with La Trobe University.
The trip will conclude with a visit to London to speak at the Applied Legal Storytelling Conference. There, Sean will present another paper co-authored with Kate Seear entitled ‘Imaging people who use drugs: How parliamentary actors picture and tell stories about the subjects of drug law reform’.
The paper considers parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes in the context of alcohol and other drugs legislation and examines the use of storytelling and imaging by parliamentary actors when picturing people who use drugs.
We’ll be reporting more on the outcomes of this trip on our website and Twitter. You can follow us at @GLADLaTrobe.