Geographers play an essential but often invisible role in shaping and interpreting laws around the environment, social justice and human rights
You don’t need to be a legal geographer to be involved in legal work,’ says Katherine Brickell, a professor of urban studies at King’s College London. Brickell’s work focuses on women’s experiences of domestic violence and forced eviction in Cambodia. In 2012, she led the first comprehensive appraisal of Cambodia’s first-ever domestic violence law, introduced in 2005. So when a highly complex US deportation case concerning a Cambodian citizen and domestic violence survivor reached the immigration courts, Brickell got a call out of the blue. ‘They needed someone to produce an expert witness statement that could prove that Cambodia was not a safe place for a domestic violence victim,’ says Brickell. ‘They contacted me as they could not find a scholar on domestic violence in Cambodia, which is obviously quite a niche subject.’
Brickell was required to produce a testament in written form, based on her research. She was then cross-examined by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency over video, which she describes as a daunting experience. ‘I felt a huge weight of responsibility, but had no real training on how to write an expert witness statement, what it means to be in a courtroom, or what would be expected of me as a geographer,’ says Brickell.
Brickell’s experience isn’t an anomaly, as she reveals in a new RGS-IBG-funded report written in collaboration with Alex Jeffrey, a human geography professor at the University of Cambridge, and Fiona McConnell, a political geography professor at the University of Oxford. The report draws on interviews with geographers with varied experiences of undertaking legal work, either as expert witnesses providing court testimonies, as legal consultants for research groups, or as advocates working on behalf of marginalised groups. More often than not, their work falls within the fields of environmental, social justice and human rights research.
Brickell and her colleagues found that while a wide range of geographers are engaged in work that has an important legal impact, many interviewees felt that this work is invisible, lacks support and is often physically and emotionally exhausting. ‘[I had] no support institutionally or from the geography community. I was in tears the evening after a one-and-a-half-day cross-examination by a very aggressive barrister,’ reports one of the geographers who was interviewed. ‘I think so much of the impact work that people do isn’t on colleagues’ radars,’ says Brickell.
In addition to their already heavy workloads, many found that they were given stringent deadlines to provide evidence for legal use, often leaving no time to ask others for advice – if, indeed, there was anyone to whom they could turn. ‘Some of the people that we spoke to felt that they were quite unprotected; they’re standing as experts in the field, but there could be legal liabilities,’ Brickell says. ‘Sometimes there are other risks involved in taking part in legal work.’
Another problem is that it can be difficult to know whether you’re acting as an individual or on behalf of your university. ‘There’s a lot of murky water at the moment,’ Brickell adds.
One of the more complicated issues Brickell faced was having to justify her presence in the first place. ‘Why would a geographer be working on domestic violence law in Cambodia? I had to explain what human geography was and, to an extent, educate them about what ethnographic research involves,’ she says.
For Brickell, the breadth of geography is one of the wonderful things about it, and it’s precisely this that makes geographers so well-placed to connect different areas of expertise. But that can be difficult to explain to laypeople, particularly those in the legal domain.
In many cases, the interviewees spoke of acting as conduits between lawmakers and community organisations. Rupert Stuart-Smith, a research associate in climate science and the law at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme and one of the study’s respondents, has worked closely with climate scientists and lawyers to bridge the gap between existing climate science and the evidence that’s needed for climate lawsuits. He has worked on the impact of climate change on glacial retreat in Peru in the context of an ongoing lawsuit, as well as cases that seek compensation for impacts of climate change, including mortality from heatwaves.
Brickell says that the role of geographers in courts and legal proceedings is nothing new. ‘What is new is that we’re trying to bring this work into the public realm, to showcase the breadth of geography and the breadth of different legal areas that geographers are working in. These contributions of geographers need to be celebrated and institutions should do more to support those undertaking legal impact work.’
That support could come in the form of formal training in legal procedures, legal advice and protection, psychological support and peer-to-peer mentoring through a network of geographers – although Brickell again acknowledges the existing challenges of academic workloads.
Greater publicity and recognition of the roles played by geographers, however, will be key. ‘There’s a reason we’ve called this a scoping report,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot more to do, and many more experiences to hear about.
