Chapter 10

Law, everyday spaces and objects, and being human

Jill Marshall*

Introduction

In this chapter I identify, and draw on, connections between law, space and objects arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is part of my project exploring and probing law’s functions and the ways in which law shapes our understandings of who we are, of human freedom, identity and ways of life, especially by reference to Georges Perec’s ‘infra-ordinary’ (Perec 1999) and Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey around My Room (Maistre 1794/2017). This analysis explores how space and objects methods help us find our own anthropology with potential to change our ways of being and living in dynamic and transformative ways at this pivotal, potentially transformative moment during the COVID-19 pandemic. These methods provide a tool to highlight injustice and to illustrate how law shapes spaces and how spaces shape law. This enables us to interrogate our current ways of knowing, our understandings of who we are, who we want to be and how we want to live, and to carve new spaces based on these findings. Perec (1999, 210) says, for example, that ordinarily, ‘[w]e sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?’ A pandemic, with death and illness all around, showing the interconnectedness of global coexistence and physical confinement, must force us out of this sleep. These methods can, therefore, be part of a transformation to new and better ways of being human and living enabled by law.

This chapter begins by setting the scene within the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, before analysing aspects of Perec’s then Maistre’s work in Part One. Everyday objects and phenomenological works of some other theorists cast the backdrop for Part Two. This is followed by an exploration of the connections between our own anthropology and law through analysis of feminist insights into the construction of public and private spaces, and ways of learning from everyday spaces for International Human Rights Law in Part Three.

COVID-19 lockdown forced those of us previously free to move to different spaces and places into physical confinement. Emergency laws came into effect in national laws throughout the world. These took different forms but routinely restricted our ability to meet, associate and assemble with others, including often with family, friends and loved ones. These laws demanded social distancing, self-isolation and the wearing of face coverings, the latter previously not only highly unusual in most countries but banned in many, particularly in relation to the wearing of full-face veils by Muslim women (see, for example, Matwijkiw and Oriolo 2021). What was previously unthinkable became the norm: the state in liberal democracies telling its citizens that they were effectively detained or at least severely restricted in terms of movement and meeting others. For those of us complying with the rules and guidance, we stayed in those spaces and surroundings in which we were placed at the time of lockdown; for most, this was our own homes. For many of us working at home, maintaining family life and routines or living alone, reading, writing, producing artwork, we began to observe and record the somewhat mundane or normal events, occurrences and objects that surrounded us, which then took on new meaning. A conscious awareness of those things usually taken for granted – our coffee, our cornflakes, our cup and saucer, our TV, our computer and so forth, in short our everyday objects – was for many a useful method to transform them into imaginary flights of fancy: visionary journeys inside our heads mapped out on paper. We were forced to be in these places and could concentrate on those objects, those spaces, and be aware of how they made us feel, what they reminded us of, and noticing what worked and what was frustrating. What can we learn from what we have and want to have around us? For many, there was no such time, particularly for those working night and day in hospitals, supermarkets and food and essential goods’ supply chains. The pandemic and lockdowns highlighted this and, at least initially, positively focused on and highlighted those providing such services. It led to a questioning of the values by which we live and who is worthy of our gratitude, revealing how societies are interconnected and individuals are reliant on each other. Two short pieces of literature by Perec and Maistre are analysed in the next part of this chapter, demonstrating their potential to bring to life some opportunities arising from this dreadful pandemic.

Part one: Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces and Xavier de Maistre, A Journey Around My Room

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Georges Perec was a prolific and eloquent writer, with much work produced, especially in the 1970s. He demonstrated an unrivalled mastery of language in every kind of writing, from the apparently trivial – the observation of everyday objects and spaces – to the deeply personal. His personal history is important. He was born in France to Jewish Polish parents who had migrated to Paris with their families between the First and Second World Wars. His father enlisted and died during the Second World War. His mother was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and no record of her was found. In 1958 she was officially declared to have died in 1943 (Perec 1999, 41).

Perec’s work was celebrated in France during his lifetime and he received many awards. He worked as an archivist for most of his short life rather than as an academic or full-time writer. The exploration of his literary production by English speakers is more recent. Academic David Bellos has translated many of Perec’s books and wrote a highly regarded biography of his life during the 1990s (Bellos 1993/2010). Perec’s output has been explored within cultural studies and by French scholars as well as by some anthropologists. However, to date I have found little to no reference to him in legal literature or legal research. What I seek to highlight here is his L’Infra-ordinaire, before identifying connections with law and geography, and law and the ‘spatial turn’ (Blank and Rosen-Zvi 2010). In L’Infra-ordinaire, Perec examines what is truly daily, those everyday habits and material objects of which our lives consist, what goes without saying. He asks us to question our habitual spaces, those we do not question because we are so habituated to them. As Perec explains:

What speaks to us … is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary … Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked … Behind the event there has to be a scandal … as though life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal …

In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. ‘Social problems’ aren’t a ‘matter of concern’ when there’s a strike, they are intolerable 24 hours out of 24, 365 days a year (Perec 1999, 209).

He continues:

The daily papers talk of everything except the daily … what’s really going on, what we’re experiencing … where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day; the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? (Perec 1999, 209–10)

Perec says these things do not seem to pose any problems. We live in and through them without thinking, as if they contain ‘neither questions nor answers’, as if they did not convey information:

This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? (Perec 1999, 210)

He guards against being numb to the importance of these things. Instead, we can ask what they may tell us about what is important in life, what makes it worth living. We need, he says, to question ‘what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins’ (Perec 1999, 210). Perec talks of ‘the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world … as the rediscovery of a meaning … the earth [as] a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors’ (79; emphasis in the original). What is needed is an ability, a language, a way of being that will enable us to speak of these ‘common things’ to assist us in tracking them down, to ‘flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired’, in order to more honestly be aware of who and what we are (210).

What is the everyday, the infra-ordinary, the endotic? These are the material realities of our everyday existence. We therefore need to question bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms: ‘To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us’ (210).

Perec’s method

Perec explains that this questioning is fragmentary, ‘barely indicative of a method’. It matters that these everyday objects and spaces seem trivial and even futile, for, in his view, it is this which makes them so essential. So he urges us to ‘make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out’ (Perec 1999, 210). As we see from Perec’s own documentation, he meticulously accounts from the void to the page, to the bed, to the bedroom, the apartment, the street, the neighbourhood, the town, the countryside, the country, the world, space. Even whilst Perec may stay at home in familiar, everyday surroundings, his generous essays and projects invite us to wander critically and imaginatively with him. Before exploring their potential use in law, I pause to incorporate another French author, this time from the late eighteenth century.

A Journey around My Room

In spring 1790 a twenty-seven-year-old took a journey round his own room (Maistre 1794/2017). Finding himself in forced isolation, Xavier de Maistre wrote a short book in which he explained what objects he had in his room – those things most taken for granted. Yet, as Andrew Brown notes in his Introduction to Maistre’s Journey, there is nothing which can say more about who we are than the things with which we surround ourselves (Brown 2017, xii). Earlier in his life, Maistre had secured himself a place in a hot air balloon which floated above his home town for a few moments before crashing into a pine forest. In describing his room-travel journey in isolation, it is therefore perhaps not unsurprising that he starts with his geographical bearings and the size of the room. However, he then proceeds to cross it without rule or method with ‘his soul open to every kind of idea, taste and sentiment to avidly receive what presents itself’, rather than setting an ‘itinerary in advance’ (Maistre 1794/2017, 7). The isolated and stationary traveller goes from a table to a picture then towards the door. He meets an armchair on the way, a fire, books, pens and so on. During the ‘journey’ he reminisces, telling us stories of the objects and of himself. As is visible on the front cover illustration of the 2017 Alma Classics reprint, he travels in and through the everyday and the objects wrapped in his dressing gown, satisfied by the confines of his own bedroom. Alain de Botton sees Maistre ‘gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen’ (Botton 2017, viii).

Part two: law and spaces

Studies of the everyday, including works by Simmel (1971), Lefebvre (1991), Certeau (1984) and Perec (1999), have been used by human geographers, those working on urban studies, anthropology, cultural studies and the humanities. But can study of the everyday inform our methods and ways of understanding law? Law shapes our understandings of identity, our environments and our ways of living. Law has the power to regulate, adjudicate and interpret social and cultural meanings, creating fixed definitions within the legal system. This means that any such definitions are vitally important and have disciplinary consequences. Our existence depends on legal, social and cultural contexts, environments, spaces and places, where our individual personalities are formed and have potential to flourish. Any understandings of how we live our lives are contextual. Our relationships with others, including non-human animals, developments in artificial intelligence and the environment, are crucial. The use of the everyday can illuminate this and help us to creatively reimagine new futures in which law is enmeshed. Once again, Brown, in the Introduction to Maistre’s Journey, sees the writer as making us reflect on the extent to which ‘[t]he journey around your room may be as good as any trip around that slightly bigger but equally finite room, the world’ (Brown 2017, xv). Maistre’s focus on the objects in his room is used as an illustration of how to deal with a challenge ‘to become more truly self-aware and to use our freedom to change ourselves for the better’ (Stevenson and Haberman 2009, 199). This is not solipsistic, as, by doing this, ‘we can work toward a worldwide society in which all people have equal opportunity to exercise their freedom’ (199). This is a method to cultivate an imaginary sphere, providing a window to its more directly lived counterpart (Bauman 1993; Woodyer 2012). It is a way of seeing otherwise familiar things and places. This is a method designed ‘to let something else be apprehended obliquely, something utterly serious and important’ (Sheringham 2006, 250). The process is ‘not just to imagine, but to make the world otherwise’ (Levinas 2013).

The method of focusing on and through objects can assist us in learning about law and life, raising many questions for exploration: what are the object’s origins; who made it; what material is used and has that damaged the natural environment; how was the object manufactured and who got paid; who gave you the object; of what does it remind you? Further, we can ask: is the object necessary for life itself – is it food or medicine – and do we even have access to these objects at all? These are all questions crucial to law. They show how law does or does not enable certain ways of living and provides justice, equality, non-discrimination and human rights to enable us to survive, and even flourish. The method can be part of the transformation to new and better ways of being human and living that are enabled through law.

Space and law – and law and geography more generally – have become objects of study in the last few decades. Space is not just the natural environment around us which we inhabit, although, of course, that is important. There is a growing body of work on how the law shapes this environment, its social spaces and organizations, and our subjective awareness and mental understandings of the world, and how we make sense of it. ‘[T]he politics of space is enacted and negotiated’ in law and this needs ‘an understanding of the extent to which legal spaces are embedded in broader social and political claims’ (Blomley 1994, xi; Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann and Griffiths 2009, 3–4 citing Lefebvre 1991). Lefebvre classifies space into the material, the social and the mental-subjective. The relationship between these is intertwined: spatial practice highlights lived-space, representations of space reflect state-centred conceptions and ordering of space, and representational spaces embody the ways in which space is perceived from citizens’ perspectives. ‘[S]pace not only serves “as a means of production but also as a means of control and hence of domination of power”’ (Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann and Griffiths 2009, 3–4, citing Lefebvre 1991). Further, the level of the everyday is associated with creative potential: revealing its contradictions and ambiguities is to want to change them, and to want to change equates to change in and of itself for Lefebvre. This focus on space can reveal the extent to which law is a powerful tool that is constantly dynamic, being used in different ways for different purposes to ‘create frameworks for the exercise of power and control over people and resources on varying scales’ (Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann and Griffiths 2009, chapter 1).

A number of socio-legal scholars have more recently examined the construction of spaces, mostly in relation to communal and public, social spaces (Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann and Griffiths 2009; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007; Cooper 2013; Blank and Rosen-Zvi 2010; Layard 2012, 2019; Koch 2018). In terms of social spaces, the law recognizes pre-existing social organizations and constructs new ones (Blank and Rosen-Zvi 2010). In terms of mental space, legal geographers have studied the impact of legal norms on subjective experiences of space. This has much in common with phenomenological scholarship in philosophy and literature, which is concerned not just with the objects themselves but also with the discourses around them. As Blank and Rosen-Zvi (2010, 15) point out, ‘phenomenology stresses the inseparability of the subject, the object and the intentionality of the former towards the latter. Hence, material space becomes wholly entwined with the experiencing subjects and the intersubjective mediation of the two.’ This leads to questions such as: what are the ways in which legal concepts, rules and principles create certain human subjects with specific needs and values; and how does law maintain and reproduce this world? Cross-disciplinary work attempts to discover how legal rules and ideas produce spaces which, in turn, construct specific human subjectivities. In this approach, the human subject is a product, rather than being ahistorical, pre-legal and pre-social. Blank and Rosen-Zvi (2010) regard Simmel as influential in this regard in developing a typology of urban and village types, seeing the urban type as the manifestation of modernity and capitalism.

This creation of the human by law has been explored by critical and feminist legal theorists, who highlight how law creates and produces a certain idealized person (Naffine 2009; Lloyd 1984; Frazer and Lacey 1993; Okin 1979, 1989; Marshall 2005). In Part Three, I explore how some of these theorists expose how this happens through the distinction between public and private spaces and how identities are formed, enabled or restricted in such spaces. If an idealized person of law maps to a human being, this can result in exclusion of others, as it is a representation of economic man, traditionally an adult, detached and self-interested: that is, someone fully able to always make decisions, with rational capacity and free will, able to freely choose his own way to live, seemingly without attachments (Marshall 2005, Chapter 2). I then move on to focus on the human of International Human Rights Law and what might be learned from Perec’s strategies and methods.

Part three: public and private spaces and learning from everyday spaces for International Human Rights Law

Public and private spaces

Second-wave feminists in particular exposed the way a favoured version of the person is constructed through the distinction between public and private spheres or spaces. Put in the language of spaces and law, the very definition of the person of public life was shown to be cast from the male experience. Further, feminists demonstrated that the concept of public spaces is delineated by the construction of what is private. These different spaces have an asymmetrical and hierarchical nature. The economy, politics, law, employed work – public spaces – are dominant and more valued (Olsen 1995; O’Donovan 1985; Lacey 1998). Nikki Lacey explains that ‘a consequence of this is the consolidation of the status quo: the de facto support of pre-existing power relations and distributions of goods within the “private sphere”’ (Lacey 1998, 77). The existence of the public sphere is upheld by the existence of the private, with domestic, family relations being explained as the ‘natural’ foundation of civil life that required little critical scrutiny but ought to be ‘simply’ legally recognized. Feminist analysis demonstrated how women have been prevented, or at least greatly hindered, from participating in the public sphere. This can prevent women from realizing and creating their own freedom (Marshall 2005, 27). What were routinely explained as women’s ‘natural’ functions and capacities led to the apparently universal category of the individual in public life being exposed as often sexually particular, constructed on the basis of male attributes, capacities and modes of activity. As Susan Moller Okin stated, if what is defined as ‘human nature’ is applicable only to certain men in a gendered society, then clearly human nature needs to be rethought (1989, Afterword). These criticisms often made explicit that the term ‘certain men’ applied to the stereotypical masculine heterosexual norm of Western life, and therefore men who did not ‘fit’ within this description would also be disadvantaged and suffer discriminatory treatment.

Carole Pateman (1987, 1988) explains that the public figure depends on the corresponding private space where men recoup their energy after a hard day’s work in public life. The history of this division shows women excluded from the world of the marketplace and instead looking after others, particularly men who work outside the home and live daily in the public sphere. This role is seen as more important than women’s own self-sufficiency and autonomy. The private sphere gives men literal breathing space. As Fran Olsen (1995) explains, men can relax and be compensated for the failure of the marketplace, with its lack of meaning in capitalism and its failure to fulfil men’s needs. Socialist and Marxist scholars and certain feminist scholars, notably Pateman and Olsen, argue that liberal ideology creates a false division within the self, alienating humans from their own true self. The division of the public and the private into two binaries leads us to understand ourselves as divided into our private and public selves. Projecting each ‘self’ onto a different space denies our true nature, with resulting fragmented, self-alienated individuals.

If women have traditionally been allocated to the private sphere, and the public sphere individual is the norm, this conception of the constructed human self takes little account of the lived experiences of women. This circular argument means that women are said to lack the capacities required for life in the public space of free and equal individuals. Women have been given less opportunities in public, so their experiences have not been taken into account in developing public life and spaces. Instead, these experiences and ways of living are seen as existing more ‘properly’ in the private space, where care, love, nurture, kindness, compassion and particularized focus are seen as appropriate. This is why one of the earliest rallying cries of second-wave feminists was ‘the personal is the political’. Consciousness-raising became the method of feminism (e.g. MacKinnon 1987). This is an interactive, collaborative process of articulating one’s experiences and making meaning of them with others who also articulate their experiences (Bartlett 1990).

Debates within feminism highlighted the ‘colour’ of feminist approaches to the public and private. Many pointed out the injustice to groups or sections of women that had been ignored. Western-based notions of patriarchy obscured intersectional discrimination faced by Black women and women of colour (Harris 1990). The ‘feminine mystique’ of the disenchanted suburban American housewife and the confinement of women in domestic circumstances in the modern family uncovered in the early 1960s by Betty Friedan (1963) overlooks the role of the racial ethnic ‘domestic help’ which eases the burden of those other women and their private spaces, and is correspondingly public. The public and the private are not straightforward. Story-telling narrative methods – so strong in Black feminist theory in particular – demonstrate the empowering character of transforming the articulation of everyday experiences. When people are socially powerless, their freedom, starting with expressing subjective understandings, can change the story, and create new ways of thinking and knowledge production (Collins 1991; Williams 1991). To paraphrase Perec, this is our ability to have a language to speak of these common, everyday things (Perec 1999, 210).

The feminist analysis of the public and the private linked to consciousness-raising highlights the patriarchal nature of the governance of spaces. Critical theory focuses on the problems of law and legal frameworks, highlighting what is wrong with them; but this can result in a failure to imagine alternatives. This is not the case with most feminist legal theory/jurisprudence. Feminist jurisprudence asks, how can law protect us and be used to improve lives in an unequal and hierarchical world to avoid entrenching stereotypes and existing inequalities? How can we examine what people actually value now while seeking to address the normative question of what it is right or appropriate to value and why? (Frazer, Hornsby and Lovibond 1992). How can we produce normative ideals while helping real situated people without reinforcing inequalities and stereotypes? What would be of moral importance in a post-patriarchal world? In what ways do traditional conceptions of the human or person and ways of living need to change to construct a better place, and way, to live?

Feminist – and other – visions of the future, as well as utopian models of transformation to a more just and post-patriarchal society, have played vital roles in changing lives for the better. However, they can also lead to accusations that such proposals are too abstract and authoritarian, and are perceived as dictating to people how to correct their behaviour while setting out a single right answer to overcome oppression. Davina Cooper persuasively suggests moving away from a binary of critique or hopeful reimagining. She posits that it does not need to be one or the other, which thereby avoids arguments about which is most worthy of our time and attention. Instead, we can develop richer ways of thinking through the interconnections between critique and transformation (Cooper 2013, 2014, 2017, 2020).

In her analysis, Cooper explores the work of Marina Valverde and Ruth Levinas (Valverde 2012; Levinas 2013). Marina Valverde’s focus on ‘the everyday’ through the traditions of Certeau and Bourdieu demonstrates how close study of the seemingly mundane – in the context of the Toronto urban experience – can reveal key insights into the functioning and failures of – in this case – urban city governance. Ruth Levinas seeks to reclaim the hope of utopian studies through her theory. She argues that a utopian method for the twenty-first century ‘facilitates genuinely holistic thinking about possible futures … it requires us to think about our conceptions of human needs and human flourishing in those possible futures. The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise … [it is] better understood as a method than a goal’ (Levinas 2013, xi). Levinas calls this the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. It involves locating ourselves within our ‘natural’ or material environment or spaces and challenges the assumption that sociology constitutes a form of knowledge while utopianism is simply a form of speculation. This is because all societies involve knowledge and what she is talking about involves a ‘transformation both of existential experience and of the objective structures of the social world that generates that experience’ (xvii).

Perec’s strategy is to try to resist oppressing narratives – specifically, to find ways to write new narratives about the self and the concept of self, in order to allow new narratives of the self to take shape (O’Brien 2017). In the next section I use insights from his work on everyday spaces and objects to inform our ways of thinking in International Human Rights Law (IHRL). This focus is timely. The COVID-19 pandemic is global. Increasingly, the traditional perspective of legal regulation by self-contained domestic or national states is shown not only to be empirically untrue, but also to lack coherence and meaning in a world affected by global catastrophes and issues that impact everyone. IHRL highlights what we all share in common. Its underlying purpose is to recognize the inherent dignity, equality and rights of everyone based on the ideal of free human beings. This abstract universalism seeks to uphold universal characteristics which we all share by virtue of being human. This is a potentially liberatory norm. In Patricia Williams’ words: ‘[f]or the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity: rights imply a respect that places one in the referential range of self and others, that elevates one’s status from human being to social being’ (Williams 1991, 153). However, as I now explain, to have meaning when put into practice, IHRL needs to be informed by varied and inclusionary lived experiences.

Learning from everyday spaces for International Human Rights Law

Possessing human rights is a normative statement about social status, one that determines access to a range of resources used in constructing ourselves in and through interconnected material, social and mental-subjective spaces. Yet when universal dignity, equality and rights are put into practice, a notion of the abstract human needs to somehow protect and encompass the messiness of who we actually are in our lived realities. Closing the gap involves adding ‘flesh, blood and sex to the pale outline of the “human” … and extending the dignities and privileges of the powerful (the characteristics of normative humanity) to empirical humanity’ (Douzinas 2013).

There is an anthropological notion of culture set out in Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which emphasizes a sense of belonging to a community and enjoyment of one’s own culture and, relatedly, rights to profess and practise one’s own religion and beliefs. These are our situated lives. We live our lives in and through relationships with others in communities and cultures, intersubjectively, feeling included or excluded, with a sense of belonging or not in these spaces, be that through exclusion, isolation or governmental or other non-recognition or stigmatization. In terms of IHRL, this requires respecting the situatedness of those involved in the violations and the specificity of the lives concerned, listening to, and taking seriously, those who have lived and are living through their own unique experiences of human rights abuses and social injustice. Through participation of survivors of human rights violations, their individual, culturally situated, grounded-in-reality experiences will be expressed. Hearing and feeling their expressions and ensuring that legal regulation is then informed by them should be the starting point for the ‘human’ of human rights law to be given ‘flesh’. The articulations can be gleaned through methods more familiar to anthropology, cultural studies and human geography than law, with the latter’s traditionally hierarchical system of knowledge based in written technical, detached legal language and form. Needs and experiences can be expressed through participatory research methods, to hear participatory forms of knowledge emerge, to ‘give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are’ (Perec 1999, 210). Patricia Leavy (2015, ix), for example, argues that arts-based methods ‘can uniquely educate, inspire, illuminate, resist, heal and persuade’. They encourage us to discover what other ‘shapes’ our research can take, what ‘structure’ we might build, and build anew, and also to consider what new audiences we ‘might speak to and with’.

Aspects of connecting law and IHRL to our own everyday lives, spaces and objects have been brought to life and put into practice in our recently organized research projects and events. The aim was to bring new perspectives as to whose voices count in shaping the world we see and experience, and in turn the laws we create within it.1 Elements of those events are explored here. The first event was part of the Being Human 2020: a Festival of Humanities programme. We collaborated with the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association (ACAA) to organize and host a café event.2 The ACAA is a charity that provides support and advice for refugees and migrants in the Afghan communities based in west and south-east London. ACAA runs a wide variety of events and projects, with the aim of supporting refugees and immigrants throughout the UK who feel isolated and are in need of advice and support. Student volunteers from our Legal Advice Centre, together with me and Nicola Antoniou, Director of the Clinic, took part in the ‘Afghan Women Small Spaces Café: Sewing Pathways to Human Rights’. This was held in ACAA’s community hub, where in November 2020 women from the regular sewing class met and the rest of us and some other participants joined via Zoom.

Nicola and I worked with the Sycamore Trust at their Autism Hub for the second related event in June 2021. The Sycamore Trust is a charity dedicated to providing a variety of tailored services to support families, carers and individuals affected by autistic spectrum disorders. Services offered by the organization range from parent support groups and youth clubs to a girls’ and young women’s project – a scheme designed exclusively for girls and young women with autism. In addition to these programmes, the organization aims to raise awareness about autism.3 The experimental session was largely carried out in person, with one student attending remotely. This sought to encourage the young women at the Autism Hub to express their experiences and thoughts about their daily lives and challenges through various creative outlets such as painting, drawing and air-drying clay. This methodology has also been incorporated into an interdisciplinary, international collaborative research project with the University of Ibague in Colombia, co-designed with the Chaparral Women’s Network for Peace and the rural people’s cooperative of Tolima. These communities have been deeply exposed to multiple traumatic events including armed conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic.4 In these projects, participants were encouraged to express their own creativity.

Everyday spaces methods and the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and government reactions have emphasized existing inequalities through, for example, who has died, the unequal global vaccine rollout, and the imbalance in health and social care within our own societies and globally. Our lives have been shown to be intricately connected to each other; what happened far away has affected the whole world, and the local and the global are deeply connected, whether people like it or not. There is potential in everyday spaces research methods to help us find our own anthropology to change the injustices highlighted by the pandemic: it gave many of us an awareness of the everyday in which we were confined, what this means and says to us and what this tell us about others and the material world. We have tools to reveal injustices and can learn to use them at this pivotal, potentially transformative moment. The projects described in the previous section aimed to apply what Joanne Lee calls Perec’s willingness ‘just to see what happens’. She argues for alternative, more mobile considerations of the intellectual and affective rigour applied to creative and critical work (Lee 2017). This can involve, to paraphrase Lee, a free-floating sort of attention pursued at a desk or in a café, like Perec’s drifting and meandering as thoughts or observations prompt recollection and digression. Similarly, Emma Cocker considers investigations through practice as a form of resistance in that they are sometimes about ‘making something less known’. The tactics of remaining receptive, wandering and getting lost – ‘an endless series of maybes, an interminable set of tests of trials’ – through which there is no definitive conclusion offers ways ‘to stop things getting assimilated all too quickly back into meaning, from being classified or (re)claimed swiftly by existing knowledge’ (Cocker 2013, 130). Cocker writes that it is ‘necessary to know how not to know’ and that ‘not knowing is not experience stripped clean of knowledge, but a mode of thinking where knowledge is put into question, made restless or unsure. Not knowing unsettles the illusory fixity of the known, shaking it up a little in order to conceive of things differently’ (131).

Everyday spaces and objects can be part of a process to find resistance to oppressing narratives: to find ways to write new narratives about the self and the concept of self, to allow new narratives of the self to take shape (O’Brien 2017). Human rights begin at home, in our daily everyday actions and practices, where we are now, and entail an awareness of who is able to freely speak and express their perceptions of their spaces and objects and ways of being human. As Sheringham observes:

the everyday … is where we already are: to find it, we cannot ‘arise and go there’, in Yeats’s phrase, but have somehow to bring about a transformation that will make it visible or palpable … The everyday is both superficial and profound, strange and familiar, insignificant and fundamental, outside praxis yet the harbinger of anarchic energies (Sheringham 2006, 188).

These are the ‘small spaces’ of our lives referred to by Eleanor Roosevelt when she asked where universal human rights begin. She answered:

In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; These include the neighborhood we live in; the school or college we attend; where we work: places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these human rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. If we do not uphold these rights close to home, we will look in vain for progress in the larger world.5

The formation of who we are starts in those small spaces. To paraphrase Perec, our material everyday world of seeking and seeing something clear and closer to us enables us to rediscover a meaning of which we are the authors (Perec 1999, 79). This is not something we sustain alone. Care and nurturance by others is necessary for human survival and flourishing. This is essential for newborns and infants but is also continually essential for many, as the pandemic has vividly shown. In IHRL terms, states are becoming ever more legally responsible for failing to ensure – directly or indirectly – that people within their territories have social conditions and resources that enable them to live their lives in peace, in safety, with clean water, with a roof of some type over their heads, with welfare and social care, with an education. There are many IHRL provisions setting out such rights. These include the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights 1966, the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 and regional treaties such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Banjul Charter) 1981. Reconceptualizations or reformulations of rights can make them more meaningful and inclusive. Law can play a role in how our ‘heads’ develop and become our own, through anti-discrimination and equality laws, education, the regulation of home life, and the care needed when growing up and at many points in life, and when caring for dependants – all part of who we are, our imagination and lived experiences.

Conclusions

In this chapter I have explored the focus on the everyday, especially through Perec’s work detailing an imaginary journey in our own immediate space, as invoked by Maistre. I have linked this to some work in law and geography, law and the humanities and cultural studies, feminist analysis of public and private spaces, and learning from everyday spaces for IHRL. The chapter forms part of my wider project exploring and probing law’s functions and the ways in which law shapes our understandings of who we are, our human freedom, identity and ways of life. In thinking through how to make the future better than what we have now, I have turned to the method of reflecting on the everyday. This provides for a focus on everyday objects and spaces, as explored by Perec and Maistre. This exploration has also been provoked by the sense of confinement in lockdown which, I argue, has potential to liberate our ways of living, starting in the present. There is something in the ordinary that comforts, heals and restores by resisting bigger ideologies of what it is to live or to be (O’Brien 2017). These strategies help us to find resistance to narratives that oppress. That includes finding ways to write new narratives about the self and the concept of self; allowing new narratives of the self to take shape in and through the law, including new legal landscapes unfolding in the future; and shaping the future to be a new and exciting place of equality, fairness, justice and liberation.

New and alternative understandings of how to live well continue to emerge, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on our lives globally, nationally and locally. We are all born into a set of ideas of the good life which are culturally available to us, and over which we have no control at birth. Existing inequalities have been starkly shown through and by the pandemic and reactions to it, including legal ones. Yet the interconnection to and reliance on each other globally, nationally, locally and intimately has highlighted the importance of how we care for each other, from our intimate partners and families to those we do not know. It has made visible the particular oppression of certain groups of people, such as the elderly, the homeless and the disabled. Forced confinement for many has made us more aware of how we feel at home – how secure or how fearful – and whether we feel disconnected, lost and alone. It has shown the public and the private spaces to be enmeshed, interconnected and overlapping. For many, this has challenged the very assumptions by which we live. An opportunity exists now to redress the balances, to distribute justice where it is due. Let’s hope it will be used.

Notes

1. See https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/law-and-criminology/news/autism-caf%C3%A9-an-exploration-of-how-our-everyday-surroundings-connect-to-our-understanding-of-law/ with thanks to Mariam Diaby for research assistance in relation to this event.

2. See https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/law-and-criminology/news/join-us-for-an-afghan-women-small-spaces-caf%C3%A9-with-the-afghan-and-central-asian-association/. Being Human is a festival of humanities large-scale week of events organized annually by the School of Advanced Study, University of London and funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.

3. http://www.sycamoretrust.org.uk/.

4. See https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and-teaching/departments-and-schools/law-and-criminology/news/prof-jill-marshall-and-prof-carl-stychin-will-be-hosting-a-being-human-festival-2021-caf%C3%A9/. This project was part of law–psychology fieldwork, some of which involved the production of two books of photographs of everyday objects and spaces, and of videos of exhibitions of the photographs which took place in the summer of 2021 in Tolima, Colombia. For further details, please contact the author. This work was presented at the Being Human festival in November 2021 in the form of a series of talks and discussions about the project, kindly hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and chaired by its director Professor Carl Stychin, assisted by Daly Sarcos.

5. https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/10-inspiring-eleanor-roosevelt-quotes/, emphasis added.

References

Bartlett, K. T. (1990) ‘Feminist legal methods’ 103 Harvard Law Review 829–88.

Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. London: Blackwell.

Bellos, D. (1993/reprint 2010) Perec: A Life in Words. London: Harvill Press.

Benda-Beckmann, F. von, K. von Benda-Beckmann and A. M. O. Griffiths (eds) (2009) Spatializing Law. Farnham: Ashgate.

Blank, Y. and I. Rosen-Zvi (2010) ‘The spatial turn in legal theory’ 10(1) Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identity 37–60 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2937221.

Blomley, N. (1994) Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford.

Botton, A. de (2017) ‘Foreword’ in X. de Maistre (1794/2017) A Journey around My Room. London: Alma Classics, v–vii.

Brown, A. (2017) ‘Introduction’ in X. de Maistre (1794/2017) A Journey around My Room. London: Alma Classics, ix–xv.

Certeau, M. de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California.

Cocker, E. (2013) ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’ in E. Fisher and R. Fortnum (eds) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think. London: Black Dog Publishing, 126–35.

Collins, P. (1991) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment 2nd edition. New York and London: Routledge.

Cooper, D. (2013) Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cooper, D. (2014) ‘Should we value academic fashions?’(12 June) https://davinascooper.wordpress.com/2014/06/.

Cooper, D. (2017) ‘What do we write to convey?’ (17 April) https://davinascooper.wordpress.com/2017/04/.

Cooper, D. (2020) ‘Debating gender and sex: meaning, reality and the creation of other futures’ (9 November) https://davinascooper.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/debating-gender-and-sex-meaning-reality-and-the-creation-of-other-futures/.

Douzinas, D. (2013) ‘The paradoxes of human rights’ 20 Constellations 51–67.

Frazer, E., J. Hornsby and S. Lovibond (1992) Ethics: A Feminist Reader. London: Blackwell.

Frazer, E. and N. Lacey (1993) The Politics of the Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester.

Friedan, B. (1963) The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin.

Harris, A. (1990) ‘Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory’ 42 Stanford Law Review 581–616.

Koch, I. (2018) Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics, and Welfare in Austerity Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Studies in Criminology.

Lacey, N. (1998) Unspeakable Subjects. Oxford: Hart.

Layard, A. (2012) ‘“Law and localism”: the case of multi-occupancy housing’ 32 Legal Studies 551–76.

Layard, A. (2019) ‘Reading Law Spatially’ in N. Creutzfeldt, M. Mason and K. McConnachie (eds) Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods. Abingdon: Routledge, 232–43.

Leavy, P. (2015) Method Meets Art: Arts Based Research Practice 2nd edition. New York: Guilford Press e-book.

Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso.

Lee, J. (2017) ‘On not staying put: Georges Perec’s “inter(in)disciplinarity” as an approach to research’ 3(1) Literary Geographies 11–26.

Levinas, R. (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lloyd, G. (1984) The Man of Reason. London: Methuen.

MacKinnon, C. A. (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Maistre, X. de (1794/2017) A Journey around My Room. London: Alma Classics reprint.

Marshall, J. (2005) Humanity, Freedom and Feminism. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Matwijkiw, A. and A. Oriolo (eds) (2021) Law, Cultural Studies and the ‘Burqa Ban’ Trend. Cambridge: Intersentia.

Naffine, N. (2009) Law’s Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal Person. Oxford: Hart.

O’Brien, S. (2017) ‘“Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic”: Georges Perec and performing the ordinary’ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318014645_Not_the_exotic_anymore_but_the_endotic_Georges_Perec_and_Performing_the_Ordinary.

O’Donovan, K. (1985) Sexual Divisions in the Law. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Okin, S. M. (1979) Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Okin, S. M. (1989) Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.

Olsen, F. (1995) ‘The Family and the Marketplace’ in F. Olsen (ed.) Feminist Legal Theory. London: Dartmouth, vol. 2, 509–27.

Pateman, C. (1987) ‘Feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy’, in A. Phillips (ed.) Feminism and Equality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 103–26.

Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Perec, G. (1999) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Classics.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (ed.) (2007) Law and the City. Abingdon: Routledge.

Sheringham, M. (2006) Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Simmel, G. (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stevenson, L. F. and D. L. Haberman (2009) Ten Theories of Human Nature 5th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Valverde, M. (2012) Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, P. (1991) The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Woodyer, T. (2012) ‘Ludic geographies: not merely child’s play’ 6 Geography Compass 313–26.

Legal sources

African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Nairobi, 27 June 1981, in force 21 October 1986).

Convention on the Rights of the Child (New York, 20 November 1989, in force 2 September 1990).

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (New York, 16 December 1966, in force 23 March 1976).

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (New York, 16 December 1966, in force 3 January 1976).