Human Rights, Law and Social Justice Panel at Graphic Justice in Times of Crisis 2020

Human Rights, Law and Social Justice (Chair: Thom Giddens)
Shapeless Shapes and Justice for the Stateless in Times of Crisis - Hanna Kim and Amal de Chickera
Abstract: “The world was full of shapes…” A fairy tale, a history book, a call to action to shape our future!
Statelessness- having no nationality-is one of the most acute, but invisible human rights violations in the world. The 15+ million stateless people are often forced to live in the shadows, where they face further marginalisation due to COVID-19. Shapeless Shapes is a collaborative arts and advocacy project by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (housed in Middlesex University) that challenges narratives and highlights activism around the instrumentalisation of citizenship. It is a graphic novel about identity, belonging, history, freedom, discrimination, injustice, activism and statelessness. It tells a story of a world that was, is and can be. This graphic novel explains this complex human rights issue as never before, and it has taken new-found relevance in our COVID-19 world. This book seeks to untangle the complex legal, historical, and political forces that create and justify state-sanctioned exclusion and mobilize the public on this issue. As co-authors of Shapeless Shapes, Hanna Kim and Amal de Chickera will offer a discussion on how this book can contribute to raising awareness, strengthening solidarity, and movement building on this little-known issue, to promote justice for the stateless in the time of COVID-19. They will present the central themes of the book while underscoring the connection between visual representation, narrative, and justice. By using this graphic narrative as a mirror, they aim to shine light on the public’s role in bringing justice to the stateless community.
Keywords: #statelessness #humanrights #citizenship #identity #belonging #activism
Melancholias Lunar and Legal in Tom Gauld’s Mooncop - Thom Giddens
Abstract: Tom Gauld’s Mooncop presents a vision of the dissipation of law. Set on the Moon, in the final days of the first human lunar colony, amidst the gentle crisis of the colony’s failure, Gauld’s work depicts the re-emergence of a peaceful cosmos and individual life outside the strictures of law and governance. Across 95 brief pages of Gauld’s characteristically charming, clean inscriptions, Mooncop articulates a powerful and lasting glimpse of the complex melancholias of the human and legal conditions, and the hopeful possibility of a receding legality. This paper will explore the temporal and atemporal database of Mooncop’s multiframe in an exploration of the subject’s entanglement within the labyrinth database aesthetic of law’s ratio scripta-and the possibility of escape.
Informed consent and dangerousness: Is it possible to control an unimaginable power? - Renato Antonia Constantino Caycho
Abstract: For years, Law has ousted madness. Madness (and people with psychosocial disabilities) have been confined to psychiatric institutions (Foucault, 2001, 2014). Their lives are controlled in every little aspect (Goffman, 2001). This is why they have been typically excluded from the possibility to make their own decisions (Dhanda, 2007). In comic books, madness is the representation of the opposite of the rationality that Law seeks (Giddens, 2018). But, madness “is part of our humanity” (Giddens, 2018, p. 66).
In Dark Phoenix (Kinberg, 2019) and X Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006), Charles Xavier decides to intervene in Jean Grey’s psyche in order to protect her and the world. Something similar happens in House of M, regarding Scarlet Witch (Bendis & Coipel, 2008). Who gets to decide about persons with disabilities when in crisis is still a problematic issue in human rights (Martin & Gurbai, 2019). The X-Men cases bring up a more difficult situation: how to deal with an unimaginable power. In this presentation, I will try to set the current standards on informed consent for persons with disabilities (Burch, 2017; Dawson, 2015; Gooding & Flynn, 2015; Szmukler, 2018) and under what circumstances may coercion be applied (Bach & Kerzner, 2010; Flynn & Arstein-Kerslake, 2017). After that, I will analyse if the dangerousness approach changes when dealing with unimaginable power. Then, I will propose who get to decide and under what criteria. Finally, I will address the problems balancing paternalism, autonomy and the rights of others.
Keywords: psychosocial disability, dangerousness, madness, mutant, informed consent