Workshop on: "Hope, Rights and Justice in times of Crisis"

Reflecting on the overlapping crises of 2026 (environmental, humanitarian, armed conflicts, authoritarianism, anti-rights etc) and inspired by Akosua Adomako Ampofo’s call in “Peacemaking and Healing Strategies: Chronicling Stories of Kindness and Justice Work” (2025), this workshop invites participants to analyse the roles of care, hope and imagination in movements for socio-legal change, for social justices. The workshop will assemble scholars from various fields who seek to disrupt dominant and unjust hierarchies of knowledge, and, consequently, to address the profound inequalities of our time. Of course, all projects that critique forms of injustice encode demands for more just relations. Yet, the dominant epistemologies that structure legal liberalism often limit what is thinkable within law. Building on decolonial, antiracist, Indigenous, more-than-human, and feminist approaches (amongst others), we are looking for, and occupying, cracks in the edifice of dominant legal (neo)-liberalism through which alternative foundations can be empowered.

Our collective and creative discussion will take up the challenge of cultivating future-oriented socio-legal scholarships grounded in hope and care. Davina Cooper reminds us in her 2020 blog post, Responding to gender critical feminism, that, “to think better futures are possible, it helps to identify progressive changes that have already occurred. Otherwise, we remain waiting for the deus ex machina – the moment of rupture or transformation that has not yet arrived.” This workshop builds on Cooper’s advice to identify existing and incremental changes along with speculative, not yet, or hopeful imaginings for socio-legal change that contribute to broader visions of justice.

Insights from epistemic justice, Indigenous legal traditions, global health equity, and transformative reparative justice are guiding pillars for this socio-legal conversation about the role of law, justice and hope in creating alternative futures. Global health scholars and practitioners, navigating an increasingly complex humanitarian terrain, are advancing hope‑centred, community‑driven approaches that sustain rights‑based and reparative forms of justice (UNDP 2025). Scholars writing in prefigurative legality similarly “describe efforts to use the language, form, and legitimacy of law to imagine law otherwise” – ‘as if’ (Cohen & Morgan 2023). Traditional ontologies account powerfully for interconnectedness across beings and generations. We are interested in the role of law and grounded notions of justice (Everyday Peace Indicators). Participants will explore the tension between the oppressive nature of law and progressive aspiration placed in law — with a new focus on praxes of care, hope and imagination (Hope in Law project, LSE 2025; Krystalli & Schulz 2022) to ground new directions in law and society.