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Dr Sarah Keenan’s new book receives excellent review from prestigious journal

Antipode describes book as ‘a well researched, theoretically solid, and important addition to the scholarship of property’

The recent publication of Dr Sarah Keenan’s Subversive Property has received an excellent review in top radical geography journal.

Reviewer Sig Langegger writes: 'Subversive Property is a well researched, theoretically solid, and important addition to the scholarship of property.

‘Sarah Keenan constructs her argument upon the firm foundation of her deep knowledge of land use policy, refugee law, legal geography, and philosophies of identity. Her brilliant insights wrench readers away from the conceptually-flat notion of property as a bounded resource over which individuals exercise a bundle of rights, and open multiple avenues for exploring the power and agency of those who exercise or, as the case may be, flout rights to property.

‘By focusing our attention on action, she compels us to move beyond familiar, commonsensical explanations as to why certain people and behaviors belong in certain spaces while others do not.

Subversive Property, published by Routledge, explores the relationship between space, subjectivity and property in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property.

Sarah Keenan demonstrates that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about property in terms of space and belonging, rather than exclusion.

Using case studies, such as analyses of compulsory leases under Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention and lesbian asylum cases from a range of jurisdictions, Keenan argues that these spaces consist of networks of relations that revolve around belonging: not just belonging between subject and object, as property is traditionally understood, but also the less explored relation of belonging between the part and the whole.

The Antipode journal publishes peer-reviewed papers which offer a radical analysis of geographical issues.

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