Practical engagements in legal geography: Collaborative feminist approaches to immigration advocacy in Denmark

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how collaboration can yield new insights into inquiries of legal geography and transform the ways that legal work is carried out. Drawing on feminist methodologies, I put forward feminist legal collaboration – a method and praxis – through which legal geographers can address the everyday manifestations and contestations of power in relation to law and space, while at the same time build alliances with people whose (legal) rights are currently contested. I reflect on my experiences of doing everyday collaborative work with legal practitioners, activists, and forced migrants at community centres in Denmark. Through two empirical examples of legal collaboration, I show how collaboration offers insights into migration law and legal procedures that are impossible to gain from just reading the law. The process of collaborating can teach us about the politics in law and reveal political possibilities within these socio-legal spaces. We might think of feminist legal collaboration as a method and praxis that takes place through direct engagement with the law and legal practices in order to co-produce knowledge and radically reconfigure existing approaches to legal counselling. The feminist legal collaborative approach, which I put forward here, is not limited to research on the legal geographies of (forced) migration. Rather, I imagine that feminist legal collaboration can be used in relation to different legal issues, grounded in the local empirical context(s) and attending to the needs and injustices on the ground.