Dr Sarah Keenan

Overview

Biography

Sarah Keenan joined Birkbeck Law School in 2015, having previously held posts at SOAS and Oxford Brookes University. Sarah co-founded the Centre for Research on Race and Law and teaches across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules. She is presently co-director of Postgraduate Research.

Raised on Giabal and Jarowair land in Toowoomba, Australia, Sarah worked in Brisbane as a Judge’s Associate in the Supreme Court of Queensland and as a solicitor at Prisoners’ Legal Service before moving to the UK to take up a PhD studentship at Kent Law School. Sarah has held visiting positions at York University (Toronto), the University of Wollongong, the University of British Columbia, and the LSE. Sarah is an editor of the Routledge Social Justice Book Series, a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law, and a member of the Association of Law, Property and Society.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Kent Law School, 2012
• PG Cert (Teaching in Higher Education), Oxford Brookes University, 2012
• Solicitor, Supreme Courts of New South Wales and Queensland, 2005
• Grad Dip (Professional Legal Practice), College of Law (Australia), 2005
• BA/LLB (Hons), Australian National University, 2003

Web profiles

• Sarah Keenan Wordpress

ORCID

0000-0003-4258-3331

Research

Research overview

Sarah Keenan’s research sits at the intersection of legal and political thought, geography, feminist theory and postcolonial studies. She has a particular interest in the widely expansive and politically potent concept of property, and the ways in which it might be rethought. In 2017-2018 she received a Leverhulme Fellowship for her project ‘Making Land Liquid: The Temporality of Title Registration’.

Sarah’s monograph, ‘Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging’ explores the relationship between space, subjectivity, and property in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property. In doing so, the book puts forward a theory of property as a contingent and malleable relation, and demonstrates that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about it in terms of space and belonging, rather than solely in terms of exclusion. Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, the book shifts focus away from the propertied subject and onto the broader spaces in and through which the propertied subject is located.

Sarah regularly writes short essays on issues related to her research, including the Grenfell Tower fire, Australia’s border regime, creative modes of direct political action, and the campaign to repatriate the Gweagal shield from the British Museum. Sarah has been commissioned to write artistic texts about property for exhibitions in Berlin, Toronto and Seattle.

Research Centres and Institutes

• Co-Director, Centre for Research on Race and Law
• Centre for Law and the Humanities
• Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

2

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of research interest.

Current doctoral researchers

• SARAH BEKKALI

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

• SURIYAKUMARI LANE

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2018 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Legal Protection for Climate Change Migrants who Cross Borders

Publications