In December, GLaD researchers Prof Kate Seear and Dr Sean Mulcahy attended the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia conference at the University of Hong Kong.
During the conference, they presented as part of the panel, ‘Bodies of Law’, chaired by Sean and also featuring Marett Leiboff, Carolyn McKay, and Maria Federica Moscati.
Their presentation, entitled ‘Are we human or are we dancer?: Sex, drugs, and bodies of law’, examined the legislative human rights scrutiny processes in Australian parliaments and questioned: who is the ‘human’ that is entitled to human rights in the context of drug-related laws.
The analysis in our paper drew from interviews undertaken with parliamentarians and parliamentary staff involved in these human rights scrutiny processes as part of our human rights and drug policy project, and particularly on their reflections on the subjects of drug laws.
As part of our analysis, our paper questioned whether these processes are so mechanised that the subjects of drug law reform become dehumanised, and that the parliamentary actors themselves become desensitised and therefore disconnected to the subjects of law reform.
Kate also presented a further paper, entitled ‘When tobacco screams’, which considered what the emerging area of ‘plant acoustics’ might mean for drug policy and law, drawing from a recent experiment that found that tobacco plants emit sounds under stress in the form of clicks. These clicks which grab and capture our attention – and which have been described as ‘screams’ in the media – are difficult to interpret, compelling us to listen beyond certitude and attesting to the unpredictability of sonic encounters.
The paper raised several questions. How might we experience plants or ‘drugs’ once they become sonic objects? Could embodied listening experiences retune our relations with and practices regarding plants in drug policy? Might we see plants as more worthy of protection and care if we can hear them? Or could plant acoustics work to preserve the status quo, perhaps by reproducing conventional tropes of relationality, will, and ‘addiction’, in which people who use drugs are always-already constituted as less-than-human?
The paper also raises broader questions of law and the senses. Why do we need sound to communicate feeling? What is the value of the sonic and audibility? Does the value placed in the sonic implicitly devalue silence? Why is there an assumption that sensing means sentience?
Following the conference, Kate and Sean co-chaired a workshop, with Dr Danish Sheikh, exploring the possibilities of work at the intersection of law, theatre and drugs. The event was the product of a new collaboration exploring the development of a novel theatrical work on drug use, drug law reform, and drug-related stigma, drawing together experts in law, performance, human rights, alcohol and other drug regulation to consider how to approach this work and what direction such a work might take.
This workshop was made possible by the Australian Government Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia.
During the workshop, we explored:
- What possibilities theatre might hold for public understandings of and debates about drug law. What downsides, risks, or limitations there might be in developing theatre about the history, nature and adequacy of current drug laws.
- What issues, materials, and forms such a play could explore or adopt.
- What the proper approach should be for developing a play of this nature. How we can respectfully and meaningfully engage with all of those who might have a stake in a production like this (including people who use drugs and those affected by prohibition) in its development.
We look forward to sharing more about this project in the future.