Dr Swastee Ranjan

Swastee is a Lecturer at the Kent Law School where she teaches Property Law and is a member of Centre for Critical Thought. She completed her PhD from the University of Sussex in 2021. Her PhD, based on an autoethnography of Delhi, was a critical theoretical account of the relationship between environmental aesthetics and law particularly in relation to felt perceptions of nonhuman things that make up the built environment of cities such as streetlights. The study evaluated these against perceptions of fear and safety. For her PhD she was awarded the inaugural Adam Weiler Impact Award.  

She is an editor at the Critical Legal Thinking Blog as well as a founding member of Art/Law Network. She is also a convening member of Law and Social Sciences Research Network anchored at SOAS, UK. 

At her previous institution, Swastee has collaborated on projects that have received funding from Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), British Academy and Research England Policy Support Fund. Swastee has also taught modules on environmental law, Human Rights, law and technology and contract law.

Swastee is an interdisciplinary scholar who has been working towards developing theoretical and methodological frameworks that engage with different normative dimensions of nonhuman representation. Using creative approaches to understand the nonhuman, her work aims to understand law and explicate the processes of legal reasoning, legal rules, and legal practices.

Research Interests;

Philosophies of the non-human which includes different conceptualisations of ecological thought, concepts of nature.

Speculative Realism/Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontologies and Law

Relationship between Aesthetic Thought and Law: Includes Black Aesthetics, Affect theory, Atmospheric thinking, Art and Law.

Place Based Approaches to Ecosystem: Rights of Nature, Land Law

Law and the City - Post colonial approaches to the relationship Law and the City – includes study of aesthetics, atmospheres, questions of order, disorder and policing practices within city spaces.

LAWS5470: Property Law

LAWS6060: Advanced Topics in Property Law (Convenor)

LAWS4005: Introduction to Legal Theories

Swastee is interested in supervising students who work on any of the themes aligned with her research interests.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy