Legally coding humans, nature, and technology with Bhumika Billa

Why does law categorise humans based on our social identities like gender, religion, and race? What would the world look like if law had considered rivers, whales, and forests as equal legal subjects with agency and rights? Is law likely to consider robots as legal subjects who have duties?

Join us as for a screening and workshop as we explore Legally Coding Humans, Nature, and Technology. Bhumika will screen her short choreopoetry film titled ‘(IN)VISIBLE’ on the lived experience of women lawyers, and contextualise the film using her doctoral findings on how systemic bias seeps into the letter of the law.

Based on this visual provocation that challenges the neutrality of law-making processes, Bhumika will discuss the outcomes of law’s tendency to ‘code’ our world in ways that align with previously attributed power.

She will touch upon these questions in her talk which will lay ground for a creative and critical exploration through a workshop. Using ‘erasure poetry’ (also known as blackout poetry), she will facilitate a writing workshop that will provoke and equip participants to identify silences in media representations of latest legal reforms, explore the correlation between language and power, and challenge legal narratives by ‘visibalising’ excluded/silenced information not explicitly captured by legal language.

Bhumika Billa is a multidisciplinary academic, spoken word poet, kathak dancer, creative facilitator, and filmmaker from Delhi, India. Having recently completed her PhD at the Cambridge Faculty of Law as a Cambridge Trust scholar, she iscurrently a Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research and Associate Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work. Bhumika reads, writes, teaches, and performs on themes of law, identity, and technology using socio-legal, law and political economy, and law and humanities approaches. Her academic and creative works on page, on stage, and on film have been awarded/commissioned by the NHS, Amnesty International, Button Poetry, BBC Words First, Out-Spoken Press, and Harvard University, among others.

Profile links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhumika-billa/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bhumikabilla/

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