Date: September 2, 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 4pm-5:30pm
Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Foluke Adebisi (Professor of Law, University of Bristol Law School)
Since 2015 and the Rhodes Must Fall movement’s moment in South Africa, universities in what is called the Global North have engaged in various strategies to include decolonisation into their work. This impetus increased in 2020 with the killing of George Floyd and a global antiracist uprising. Specific to law schools, these moves to “decolonise knowledge” recognise that Euro-modern colonial enterprises and their afterlives have had a damaging impact, not just on the socio-political realities of indigenous, colonised and racialised peoples, but also on the fundamentals of legal knowledge. In this work, even when done well, there has been a focus mostly on administrative practice and teaching. This paper considers the reasons and ways we need to be able to, in legal research, respond to questions about colonially-derived and global entanglements of power in the knowledge bases, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, ethics, and transmission of legal knowledge. The aim of the paper is an invitation to all of us to approach our own scholarship within the law in a way that begins to answer the question: how do we dream of new anti-racist worlds from within the law school?
Foluke Ifejola Adebisi is a Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol. Her scholarly work is concerned with what happens at the intersection of legal education, law, society, and a history of changing ideas of what it means to be human. Thus, her current scholarship focuses mainly on the relationship between theories of decolonisation and how they do and can interact with legal knowledge. She has written widely in this area. For example, she edited a special issue for the Law Teacher journal on decolonisation in 2019. She found and runs Forever Africa Conference and Events (FACE), a Pan-African interdisciplinary conference. She blogs about her scholarship and pedagogy on her website ‘Foluke’s African Skies’ at https://FolukeAfrica.com. In 2024, she was one of 5 finalists for Oxford University Press’ Law Teacher of the Year Award. Her monograph “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility” was published by Bristol University Press in March 2023 and won the Society of Legal Scholars’ Margaret Brazier book prize for Outstanding Mid-Career scholarship in 2024.
Chair: Valeria Vázquez Guevara, Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=108769.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.