Inspiration

In my last post I talked about momentum. One way you can get momentum is from an outside push, from a source of inspiration. It can be a post you read, a story in the news, a new book someone recommends.

For me, inspiration this week came in the form of a talk by Professor Foluke Adebisi, given to the Law and History Network.1 Professor Adebisi addressed the issue of decolonisation and legal knowledge, the topic of one of her recent books. In the talk she covered law’s coloniality, how it informed and is informed by the ‘logics’ of the colonial project- even as it obscures them. All this in the context of how the law school understands and teaches the law.

What inspired me?

The challenge to think differently about how law is taught, and about how the law school understands itself. 

The way in which discussions of the law school and knowledge show how engagement can be a way for the law school to not only share knowledge out, but find and understand other knowledges, other epistemologies (and ontologies…)

The connections I could draw with other scholarship I have read and used- on law and critique, on decentering the law, on law and time, law and the body…

The possibilities that engaging with Professor Adebisi’s work- and those she cites- creates.

So, next writing round will focus on getting those topics into the ‘skeleton’ draft- as headings and short paragraphs, so I don’t forget them. And use that as a launchpad- more momentum!

  1. Thanks to Russell Sandberg- https://bsky.app/profile/sandbergrlaw.bsky.social ↩︎

Momentum

A big part of writing is momentum. It’s important to take breaks, of course, and writing when you don’t want to can be a quick road to demotivation. But it is important to write more often than not.

What can hold that back is worry about quality. The time you take to write can be considerable, and if at the end of it what you’ve produced is less than good… well, it can just put you off and drain that momentum.

So, what do I do? The big thing I learned in the PhD process- and something many writers I follow1 have said- is you can work to make bad writing good, but you’ve got to have that bad writing in the first place. As long as you start with an idea of what you want to write about, getting something down that’s even half good helps you feel like you’re moving forward. You’ve got something to edit, which gives a break from writing whilst keeping that forward movement.

With that in mind I fired up the dictation machine… ahem, opened Word… and got down some thoughts on Streetlaw in school. Definitions of Streetlaw, what it’s for, why schools are a common site for such works, the challenges of evaluation… It shook out some thoughts and reminded me of some things I want to follow up on, so it was a good session, and I feel happy to go onto the next bit where I’m going to cover School Tasking.2

  1. e.g Gareth L Powell (https://bsky.app/profile/garethlpowell.bsky.social) Tade Thompson (https://bsky.app/profile/tadethompson.bsky.social) Premee Mohammed (https://bsky.app/profile/premeemohamed.com) ↩︎
  2. https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/?newsItem=8a1785d88c5ec9b5018c6e5842731d62 ↩︎