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.

Details

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

Schedule: Thursdays every four weeks

RSVP and Resources

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

Distinction Collapse Reading Group (2025)

La Trobe International and Comparative Law Cluster (ICLC) invites you to join our 2025 Reading Group. This in-person reading group is a space for building scholarly interest and community focused on questions related to international and comparative law. In 2025, our theme is Distinction Collapse. Distinction Collapse invites critical reflection 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 21stCentury, 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 is co-convened by Associate Professor Maria Elander and Professor Luis Eslava. We meet in person at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybrook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building) on Thursdays every four weeks.

Anthropocene Reading Group (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