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Isadora Bellati

Isadora

PhD Student

Email: i.dutrabadrabellati@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Thesis title

The field of senses and senses over the field - Rethinking Lawscapes for land Disputes in Brazil

Supervisors

Summary of research

Since colonial times, land expropriation and concentration in Brazil have been the most significant contributors to social inequality and epistemic coloniality. While some marginalized communities fight for the right to occupy territories and regulate them according to their own epistemologies, the agribusiness monoculture advances continuously in rural areas contributing to violence in the countryside and to the destruction of the environment. For the sake of competence, the Brazilian Supreme Court is responsible for several of the country most critical land dispute cases. When judges interpret legal conflicts around issues such as property rights, contractual relations, or possible uses of natural resources, they constantly imagine and represent the spaces reached by laws. In that sense, spaces are for legal decisions not as static/ontological realities but, instead, active, dynamic compositions between the Law, physical places, and social interactions, a set of economic and power relations – meaning, lawscapes[1]. The imaginaries over spaces[2], however, are not randomly built in the process of individual dreaming, but are part of social discourses, social imaginaries[3] which, therefore, can be traced through legal discourse analysis. Following this idea, this work seeks to delve into three main question: i) First, through a methodology of rhetorical analysis applied to old cases judged the Brazilian Supreme Court, investigate if, in complicity with the liberal tradition, this court follows the tendency to “de-spatialize law”. ii) Second, analyse what could be the effects of this supposedly neutral/apolitical imaginary over spaces for future land dispute cases resolutions? iii) Third, understand if a practice of critical map-making produced in the field with Landless Workers representatives could be possibly used as visual –and performative – advocacy resource to build new conceptions of space (meaning speculative narratives) – within this court.

Short biography

Isadora Bellati is a PhD Student at Queen Mary University of London, working with legal imaginaries and land conflicts within the Brazilian Supreme Court. She has worked as a legal practitioner for almost 5 years before finishing her Master’s degree in Law in Economics at the University of Hamburg (Germany). After that, she has also worked as a research assistant for one year at the Max Planck Institute for Private and Comparative Law, also in Hamburg, supporting the Decolonial Comparative Law group.

She is the recipient of a London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP) Studentship award.

Publications

Publication: BELLATI, Isadora Dutra Badra. Unmasking coloniality within Brazilian constitutional court decisions: the case of unlimited outsourcing of labor = Desmascarando a colonialidade nas decisões do tribunal constitucional brasileiro: o caso da terceirização ilimitada do trabalho. Revista do Tribunal Superior do Trabalho, São Paulo, v. 88, n. 4, p. 124-148, out./dez. 2022. Online version accessible.

Public speaking

  • Participation as Lecturer on the Panel “INTERDISCIPLINARY LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON COLONIALITY AND MIGRATION” on the Private International Law Festival. 16th and 17th of May 2022, University of Edinburgh, Scotland - United Kingdom.
  • Participation as Lecturer on the “Brazilian Supreme Court Decisions and Coloniality” .12th of December 2022. University of Ouro Preto - Minas Gerais, Brazil.
  • Participation as Lecturer the Global Law Study group at the University of Maestricht – Netherlands. 8th of February 2023. With the topic “Unmasking Coloniality in Supreme Court Decisions”.
  • Participation as Lecturer on the event “Methodologies for Imagining Alternative Methodologies in Human Rights. London School of Economics - London. July 2023. (paper to be published in 2024 the magazine of the university).

Footnotes

[1] Lawscapes according to Andreas PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, are the active landscapes mutually constituted by the presence of law and space in dynamics of dissimulation. See PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, Andreas. 2015.

[2] Spatial Imaginaries according to Henri LEFEBVRE, are mental picturing’s of the social/physical space interactions. See LEFEBVRE, Henri  [1974].

[3] Social Imaginaries are according to Bernard DEBARBIEUX, the frameworks or the matrix that give a collective orientation to all social practices and their related significations. It is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society.

 

Research

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