Date: October 29, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 4pm – 5:30pm
Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Karen Crawley (Senior Lecturer, Griffith University Law School)
This masterclass asks what it means to be doing postgraduate research in law at a moment when the conditions of scholarly research have become intertwined with LLMs and other AI-enabled technologies. Starting from the editorial ‘Welcome to the Slop-verse’, we will scrutinise the advice that universities and publishers have actually issued, and situate our own research habits of reading, writing and thinking within these conditions. We will take seriously the risks those documents do not name: the disclosure penalty, the loss of any felt ownership over one’s own text, the deskilling of a generation of scholars once trained through research assistance, the homogenisation of critique by a system optimised for the mean, and the double bind facing writers of English as a second language. From there we will work towards strategies for retaining our collective capacity to read, write and think, and for safeguarding what a community of scholars knows and is able to say.
Dr Karen Crawley is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith Law School, where she teaches legal theory and research methods. Her research on issues of law and justice uses insights and methods derived from art and the humanities. She is the former Managing Editor of the Australian Feminist Law Journal (2013-2020) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies (Routledge, 2024).
Chair: Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor & Deputy Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=109409. A paper will be circulated among registrants to read.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.