New project announcement! The Choreography of Consent: experiments in dance/law research
Professor Marie-Andrée Jacob is Co-Investigator on the new and exciting Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Research Network.
Led by Primary Investigator Dr Anna Macdonald (Reader in Movement at UAL:Central Saint Martins) and running between September 2024 to March 2026, the Research Network’s mission is to develop and test innovative dance/law research methods that explore the movement of consent.
Professor Marie-Andrée Jacob and Dr Macdonald will be collaborating with dance practitioners and scholars from People Dancing: Foundation for community dance; ID: Independent Dance; and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Dr Amanda Keeling from the School of Law is joining the project as an expert advisor in the area of consent and capacity. The Network will address the growing emphasis on the embodied dimensions of the law and the developing recognition of the refined understanding of movement that dance can bring to legal studies.
The questions they aim to answer are:
- What are the distinctive offerings of practice-based dance research to legal and socio-legal research?
- How can law and dance be brought together to understand topical societal issues in a way that avoids simplistic oppositions between language based and embodied ways of looking at things?
- How might dance-based research enrich understandings of consent and in turn, how can legal forms of consent enrich dance research-specific, or dance embedded understandings of consent?
The Research Network will feature four events, which will involve dance workshops, performances, academic presentations, and dance/law pair working. The dissemination of their findings will be via an innovative blend of outputs, including blogs, podcasts, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations and an exhibition to be hosted at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
Marie-Andrée says:
We’re thrilled to start the work with a group of practitioners and scholars, and to make this network grow. With them, Anna and I hope to offer something distinct to legal research. Our offering does not aim to dance the law or represent the law through dance. We hope to examine how dance can effectively support methods to better understand legal knowledge, using consent as test case. We also want to explore common denominators between dance and law and show how they might work well together. For example, dance’s concern with pattern, rules and structures has a particular resonance with law.
Learn more about this fascinating project here and follow danceandlaw on Instagram.
Marie-Andrée is Primary investigator on the AHRC-funded project Making it to the Registers: Documenting Migrant Carers’ Experiences of Registration and Fitness to Practice and along with colleagues Dr Priyasha Saksena (as PI), Dr Amanda Spalding, Dr Amrita Limbu from the University of Leeds and Dr Adrienne Yong from City Law School has secured funding to host a 2025 W G Hart Legal Workshop. She is a member of the Centre for Law and Social Justice.
