Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: towards a grassroots politics of redistribution
This project draws on socio-legal and critical political economy analysis, collaborative policy design, and prefigurative law-making methodology to conceptualise a grassroots-inspired framework for transnational social security law that considers the risks and potential of digital technologies in implementing social protection schemes globally. The project is motivated by the urgency to address the growing global inequality and maldistribution of power and wealth enabled by the current international legal order. It aims to explore the reparative and revolutionary potential of transnational social security law to contribute to a global politics of redistribution that critically engages with the changes brought by digitalisation. This research will bring together community and activist groups, researchers, international organisations and other relevant stakeholders to establish the field of transnational social security law while reimagining a radically redistributive role for digital technology.
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Rosa Luxemburg & International Law
2021 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg: a revolutionary theorist and political activist, whose work has provided important political economy critiques of imperialism, capitalism, nationalism and advocated for the collective commitment to social justice. While recent books have celebrated her life and intellectual and political legacy, engagement with her work in international law, although with some notable exceptions, has been largely marginal. Despite her sharp and insightful analysis of the nexus between colonialism and capitalist accumulation and her commitment to anti-militarism and internationalism, Luxemburg鈥檚 work remains less visible and prominent than male social thinkers and political economists. This project brings together researchers from different parts of the world to collectively explore what an engagement with Rosa Luxemburg鈥檚 work may offer at this juncture of neoliberal capitalism, climate disaster, and pandemic.
Co-organised with Christine Schw枚bel-Patel.
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A Feminist Recovery Plan for Covid-19 and Beyond: Learning from Grassroots Activism
The Covid-19 crisis has exposed deep inequalities embedded in national and international socio-economic systems and legal frameworks. Over-stretched social services and an over-reliance on unpaid and precarious labour compensate for the inadequacies of social infrastructure, economic policies and labour regulation, instead of inspiring more social justice-driven approaches. The crisis can provide an opportunity to identify the limits of such systems and reimagine the policies that shape them. This project aims to bring together activists, academics and policy-makers to collectively reimagine a feminist recovery plan for Covid-19 and beyond by placing grassroots feminisms at the centre of policy-making, learning from the past and looking at the future.
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The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion
For the last ten years Serena has been working on feminist critiques of financial inclusion. Her recent monograph The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls (Routledge 2020) examines the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality, arguing for a decolonial politics of redistribution to guide digital financial inclusion projects. This book is based on her PhD thesis completed at Kent Law School 'Mobile Money and the Limits of Financial Inclusion: A Gender Analysis of M-Pesa in Kenya'. In collaboration with scholars and practitioners, Serena is now investigating the redistributive dynamics of digital financial platforms in Brazil, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and India and theorising the possibility to realise a New Digital Economic Order that reconciles the anti-colonial politics of NIEO with grassroots activism.
Inclusionary Practices Project
Serena is part of the British Academy-funded Inclusionary Practices Project led by Prof Toni Williams from Kent Law School and Prof Fabricio Polido from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). This project examines multiple ways in which legal and regulatory techniques are used to implement social and economic inclusion policies in Europe, Latin America and in the digital domain. The research team is currently working on an edited collection for the Elgar series in Law, Development and Global Justice. Beyond its contribution to scholarship and policy debates, the project has created new research and teaching collaborations with scholars from Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. Particularly relevant is Serena鈥檚 collaboration with Professors Pedro Gravata Nicoli and Marcelo Macier Ramos, founders of the DIVERSO project (N煤cleo Jur铆dico de Diversidade Sexual e de G锚nero) at UFMG.
The IEL Collective
This collaborative project aims to provide a space for critical reflection on the knowledge, institutions and logics that govern the global economy, and stimulate conversations about plurality and representation in researching, teaching and practising international economic law (IEL).
More details available at .
