PhD candidate Sara Ross, whose paper is entitled “Buen Vivir and Subaltern Cosmopolitan Legality in Urban Cultural Governance and Redevelopment Frameworks: The Equitable Right to Diverse Iterations of Culture in the City and a New Urban Legal Anthropological Approach,” will be presented with the Austin Sarat Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (ASLCH) at a reception at Stanford University on March 31, 2017.
The Austin Sarat Award is a prize offered to a graduate student for an outstanding paper presented at the ASLCH annual conference.
Ross’s paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed City University of Hong Kong Law Review in December 2016, looks at how “alternative proposed approaches and reactions to development, such as buen vivir, subaltern cosmopolitanism, and a counterhegemonic use of hegemonic legal tools, can be used in the urban municipal redevelopment context where dominant urban redevelopment strategies fail to equitably valuate diverse iterations of culture and subculture. This work uses the city of Toronto, Canada as its central case study, specifically its current focus on ‘culture’ as a redevelopment strategy. It also applies critiques of dominant international development strategies to the local municipal context, and advocates the use of urban legal anthropology and transsystemic approaches in assessing the unequal treatment of different cultural and subcultural groups within municipal legal frameworks.”
Ross is the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholar at Osgoode, and her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.