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Culture, Politicizing Law:
Legal Strategies for Black and Indigenous Land Rights Struggles in
The University of Texas
- What have been the predominant strategies for making land claims?
Which strategies have been successful in various domestic,
interregional, and international forums in asserting land or resource
- When people ground their demands for rights in assertions of cultural
difference, what notion(s) of culture come to the fore? Do legal
claims and processes favor certain notions of culture while
discouraging or even delegitimating others?
- If there is a predominant, favored language of culture (and identity)
in legal processes, what broader consequences tend to follow for the
political struggles in question? Are there assumptions or premises
built into these efforts to "adjudicate culture" that reinforce
hierarchies, exclusions, or patterns of inequality?
- What is the relationship between the current (and expanding) mode of
culture-based legal struggle, and ascendant strategies of neo liberal
governance? To what extent can popular organizations use these legal
strategies without adopting the full range of premises embedded in
legal notions of rights, culture, and identity?