Traversing Legal Modern Concepts through New Materialist and Decolonial Conversations

The violence inherent in Western modern law has been scrutinized for several decades. Recently, however, relational theories, particularly new materialism and decoloniality, have gained interest in legal research. These theories share attempts to overcome the entanglement of colonialism, global capitalism, and eurocentrism of Western modernity. However, a common critique of new materialism is its seemingly limited potential to address urgent issues. Specifically, despite its claims to transcend dualisms, it remains highly theoretical and academic. Decoloniality, on the other hand, is grounded in political struggles and activism but has long been criticized for lacking the theoretical rigor associated with more established academic frameworks. I propose that both decoloniality and new materialism critique Modernity in similar ways and aim to address its problems, though they use different tools to do so. By engaging in deep conversation, both can help to find new, more inclusive, and effective ways to advance socio legal research, and also enable each theory to address the criticisms they have faced individually. In this presentation I introduce my exploratory project to investigate How might conversations between new materialism and decoloniality contribute to the creation of innovative and inclusive approaches to reimagining legal research and praxis to better address complex social issues.