Reading Groups

ICLC Reading Group

The ICLC Reading Group explores scholarship where creativity and form intersect with research design and presentation, focusing each year on a theme selected collectively by the group.

All ICLC members and friends are warmly invited to join. For more information, please contact the ICLC Leads.

We meet in person at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybrook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building, level 2) on Thursdays every four weeks from 12 pm to 1 pm.

Global Transformations – ICLC Reading Group 2026

The theme for 2026, Global Transformations, foregrounds law as both a terrain and an instrument of struggle in moments of profound political, economic, epistemic, and ecological change. Across the year, the reading group will explore how global orders are made and unmade through transformations in capitalism, infrastructure, governance, knowledge production, and relations between the human and the non-human. Transformation is approached not as a linear process or policy aspiration, but as a contested, uneven, and conflict-laden phenomenon, shaped by crisis, resistance, and institutional experimentation.

The programme deliberately zigzags across historical conjunctures and intellectual traditions, placing texts from moments of systemic rupture into conversation. Canonical works such as Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, written amid the collapse of the liberal international order, and Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, produced in the late Cold War context of technoscientific expansion and feminist critique, are treated as reference points within a wider critical archive rather than as fixed origins. Read alongside contemporary interventions such as Newell’s States of Transition, which engages directly with the present conjuncture of ecological breakdown, democratic strain, and institutional exhaustion, the programme examines the state as a contradictory arena of struggle and explores how different configurations of state power enable, displace, or foreclose deeper social and ecological transformation.

Organised around two linked strands – Political Economy as a Site of Struggle (Semester 1) and Knowledge as a Site of Struggle (Semester 2) – the reading group brings classic texts and critical new work into conversation to reflect on how global transformations are lived, governed, resisted, and narrated, and on the role of law in both stabilising and unsettling emerging orders.

Details

Location: La Trobe Law School – Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybrook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building, level 2

Schedule: Thursdays every four weeks, 12 – 1 pm

Readings: The readings for the 2026 Reading Group are available at ICLC Global transformations 2026.

RSVP and Resources

Please email Dr. Maria Elander or Professor Luis Eslava for questions or to join our email lists.

Past Reading Groups

La Trobe International and Comparative Law Cluster (ICLC) 2025 Reading Group’s theme was Distinction Collapse. Distinction Collapse invited critical reflected on the work of distinctions in upholding and/ or challenging the world order – at a time when the usual ‘order of things’ seems to be in question across the board.

Distinctions (in the sense of subdivisions and categorisations) have played a crucial role in knowledge production, meaning making, and political action. Thus, lawful is distinct from unlawful, citizen is distinct from foreigner, and academic writing is distinct from creative or opinion writing. Entire bodies of knowledge, disciplines and social orderings have been formed around these distinctions.

Similarly, while there are long scholarly traditions that are grounded on challenging particular distinctions (e.g. gender binaries, racial and civilisational categories and public/private spatial logics), other distinctions have been equally crucial in upholding juridical principles and ethical protocols (e.g. civilian/combatant, innocent/guilty). Both challenging and asserting distinctions can form part of claims to re-establish order, independence, autonomy and sovereignty (e.g., Indigenous/coloniser).At this point of the 21st Century, a moment characterised by crisis and uncertainties –most of them generated by certain distinctions (e.g. human / nature), or calling for a rejection of established categorisations (e.g., human / machine) –how does distinction collapse feed into our present predicaments, or how does it open new socio-political and economic horizons?

The group was co-convened by Associate Professor Maria Elander and Professor Luis Eslava. We met in person at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybrook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building) on Thursdays every four weeks.

Anthropocene (2022-24)

The Anthropocene Reading Group was an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional forum for engaging with encounters between law and other scholarly traditions in the context of the Anthropocene. Active from 2019 to 2024, the group was established during Dr Kathleen Birrell’s McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Melbourne Law School and ran for six years under her convenorship. At various points, she co-convened the group with graduate researchers Tim Lindgren and Roanna McClelland.

The group received support from the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School from 2019–2021 and again in 2024, and from the La Trobe International and Comparative Law Cluster (ICLC) from 2022–2024.

In its final year, 2024, the group explored ‘Genealogies of Geopower’ – reading texts concerned with the materiality of legal language, authority, and representation. Throughout its operation, the group was associated with, and shared common intellectual and activist commitments with, the La Trobe Climate Network.

Convenors:

Dr Kathleen Birrell, with Tim Lindgren and Roanna McClelland

Research Methodologies (2024)

Good research is, as we all know, hard. We make decisions about how to design and conduct our projects (whether to call them ‘projects’) as well as how then to present the outcomes so that we make the kind of interventions we seek to do.

In 2024, the International and Comparative Law Cluster (ICLC) and the Law in Context Cluster (LiC) co-organised a reading group on research methodologies. The texts we read are illustrative of scholarship where creativity and form intersect with research design and research presentation. While diverse, they all engage with questions of research methodologies in ways that are illustrative rather than instructive.

The group was co-convened by Dr Maria Elander and Dr Kathleen Birrell and met in person at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building, level 2) on Thursdays every four weeks.

Program and Readings: Research Methodologies – 2024 Reading Group

International Law’s Sites (2023)

In 2023, we focused on intersections between international law, spatiality and affect by exploring the sites of international law – its discursive and material emplacement and displacement, the positioning and performance of legal institutions and bodies in space, and the affective experience of this lawscape. 

The group was co-convened by Dr Maria Elander and Dr Kathleen Birrell and met in person at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building, level 2) on Thursdays every four weeks.

Program and Readings: International Law’s Sites – 2023 Reading Group