Figure 1: Searching for Legal Futures at The Horniman Museum. Image: Amanda Perry-Kessaris adapting images © The Horniman Museum and Gardens. The Horniman Museum and Gardens consists of a World Gallery, Music Gallery, Aquarium, Library, Animal Walk, Butterfly House, formal and informal Gardens. It is a unique site where living, non-living, and no-longer-living plants, animals, humans,… Continue reading Legal Futures at The Horniman Museum
Category: experiment
Enlivening legal education through The Postal Museum
The Postal Museum repository is alive. Image © Amanda Perry-Kessaris, 2025. We (Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Emily Allbon, and Access Archivist Susannah Coster) are partnering with The Postal Museum and a team of academic Collaborators to explore how we can use archives and museum collections to enliven legal education. We are beginning with an experiment: co-designing a… Continue reading Enlivening legal education through The Postal Museum
String theory-a conceptual experiment
Figure 1: Toolkit for String theory-a conceptual experiment (c) Amanda Perry-Kessaris 2025. This post introduces an experiment that I designed for as part of a Summer Research Residence on Conceptual Innovation, Methods & Law organised by Davina Cooper at Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London in 2025. For theoretical physicists, 'string theory' is… Continue reading String theory-a conceptual experiment
What if a citizens’ assembly were to design a future Cyprus peace process?
This blog post reports on a 2024 workshop, funded by a Socio-Legal Studies Association Impact Grant. The workshop was first envisaged in a paper prepared for ‘The Socio-Politics of Legal Design and their Epistemic Consequences’ Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of law (IISL) July 4-5 2024 co-ordinated by Siddharth Peter de Souza and Joaquín… Continue reading What if a citizens’ assembly were to design a future Cyprus peace process?
Edinburgh Legal Theory Bazaar
A version of this post is appeared on the Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies Blog How might model-making help us to respond to Margaret Davies’ call for ‘a more open, dynamic and responsive understanding of law’—one which understands theorisation less as a formalistic process aimed at conceptual unity, more as an experimental process aimed at conceptual co-existence? … Continue reading Edinburgh Legal Theory Bazaar
Experimenting with the concept of ‘hate crime’ in India
Note: formal findings from this project are now published in Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Mohsin Alam Bhat and Joanna Perry (2023) ‘Conceptual experimentation through design in pedagogical contexts: lessons from an anti-hate crime project in India’ The Law Teacher, DOI: 10.1080/03069400.2023.2275496 This post introduces preliminary findings from the ‘Evidencing and combatting hate crime in India: concepts, mindsets and… Continue reading Experimenting with the concept of ‘hate crime’ in India
Work in progress: Doing socio-legal research in design mode
How might design enhance our understanding of, and our ability to communicate about, law as a social phenomenon? At what cost? Mindsets, tools and processes from design such as visualisation, sprints and prototyping are increasingly identified as distinctive and useful; and adopted across legal fields from practice to activism to policy-making (Perry-Kessaris 2019). With the… Continue reading Work in progress: Doing socio-legal research in design mode
Making unity from and for diversity: The IEL Pop-Up Collection
The IEL Pop Up Collection was designed to ‘make unity from and for diversity’, visibly and tangibly, and with prefigurative spirit.
Sociolegal model making 7: object-based commentary in a curated space
Sociolegal model making 7: Object-based commentary in a curated setting from Amanda Perry-Kessaris on Vimeo. This is the seventh in a series of eight experiments investigating how model making can be used in sociolegal research processes. As these experiments have progressed I have come to realise that my intention is to understand how we can, and why… Continue reading Sociolegal model making 7: object-based commentary in a curated space
In pursuit of the copper ox-hide ingot
My first encounter with ox-hide ingots was on the cover of a specialist economic history text. Cyprus is home to the largest deposits of copper ore in the Mediterranean region, concentrated around the Trodoos mountains. I came face-to-face with, and became attached to, my ox-hide ingot during an experiment in object-based brainstorming that I conducted in… Continue reading In pursuit of the copper ox-hide ingot
