A Roundtable Conversation: Feminist Collaborative Ethos in International Law

This roundtable discussion focuses on the collective commitment and the praxis of a feminist collaborative ethos in international law to imagine and centre alternative futures in the field. This discussion took place as part of the virtual workshop ‘International Law Dis/Oriented: Queer Legacies, and Queer Futures Workshop’ from which this special issue emerged. In this transcript of the roundtable, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, Farnush Ghadery, and Rohini Sen discuss with Lena Holzer how turning to feminist collectivity – focused on care, collaboration, and solidarity – can help to disrupt and push against gendered, racialised, and colonial power structures embedded in academic spaces. They examine their intertwined positionalities along with various pedagogical and methodological approaches to determine the functions of critical feminist and queer thoughts in international law. Inculcating a praxis of feminist collaborative ethos in the scholarship and teaching of international law, they hope to present a challenge to the artificial individualisation of the profession and its increasing neoliberalisation.