​UNCANNY JUSTNESS: Living, learning and thriving  beyond the Climate Crisis

"UNEARTHING VALUED BEINGS AND DOINGS TO RE-EARTH HUMANS"

To communicate climate mitigation, probe and mobilise its absences, depth and scope for learning, living and thriving in the climate crisis, one needs ‘Uncanny Justness’. This project, brings together a team of creative social learning practitioners from South Africa (with some contributions from India and Colombia). In South Africa, a country that paradoxically produces the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world, while having extremely high levels of poverty. There is a desperate need for people to learn, live and thrive while they mobilise to combat the climate crisis together.

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UNCANNY LORE: FROM RESISTENCE TO RE-EXISTANCE - LEgal empowerment, RECLAIMING heritage, ANCESTRAL LAND & JUSTICE in SOUTHERN AFRICA

The Uncanny Lore project collaboratively investigates how a holistic understanding of Indigenous cultural practices can legally empower Indigenous activists to secure and protect access to ancestral land and preserve cultural heritage. Driven by the Hai||om community involved in an ancestral land claim for the Etosha willderness, in collaboration with the Khoi-San Council of Namibia, human rights lawyers, earth lawyers, legal anthropologists, educational sociologists and other scholar activists. What we are aiming for is shifting the way in which legal empowerment movements shift the rule of law, where it is directly adjusted by Indigenous peoples’ needs. This can provide a robust and inclusive legal framework as part of the recognition that culture can play an important role in the achievement of dignity, secure access to land and natural resources and recognition of human rights of indigenous peoples. The wider co-created research programme provides evidence to inform changes in national legislation to reform cultural heritage management, access to ancestral land and rights of nature. The longer term project also explores the legal reform that is needed so marginalised communities can voice their concerns in Courts and mobilise their culture, beliefs and worldviews as a source of law, ensuring the courts change to become more empathetic and receptive to plural knowledge systems. The wider ethos of this project is to boost local capacity so Indigenous communities can use effectively the rule of law to protect and preserve their ancestral land and cultural heritage. The project also strives to enhance health and welfare of Indigenous peoples through a greater understanding of existing local health practices and applications of traditional healing.This is part of a wider quest to decolonise law and legal practices.​ See our work on "Decolonising law". 

Decolonising LAWwith UNcanny Lore: Decolonising Law through a South African and Scottish Wild Jurisprudence and Environmental Justice tribunal. ​

This project is incubating innovative practice-based co-engaged research for the creation of a decolonial liberatory environmental law pedagogy. The intention is creating a transgressive legal conduit that embraces cultural and legal fluidity as a pathway to protect access to natural livelihoods and sacred sites for indigenous peoples, including opening up the cognitive, physical, aesthetic and spiritual spaces needed to foster growing wild jurisprudence education within South Africa and the UK. This generative space, explores the rights of indigenous peoples and the natural world they inhabit through expansive transformative and transgressive learning. South African and Scottish sites and will incubate the pedagogical development of nuanced, uncanny, and embodied ways of knowing and being that currently fall outside mainstream legal curricula of legal channels. The tribunals will be used as a catalytic ‘germ cell’ process to launch an annual Summer School in ‘Decolonising Liberatory Law for wild jurisprudence and environmental justice’.
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