Dr Brenna Bhandar

Lecturer in Property Law

Location: Mile End
email: b.bhandar@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7882 3970

Brenna Bhandar's research engages theories of property ownership in colonial and post-colonial contexts, including Canada and Palestine. Examining claims for the recognition of land rights in the post-colonial context, she undertakes an analysis of the ways in which property ownership is a constitutive aspect of political citizenship.

Traversing the domains of post-colonial and critical theory, she has published in the areas of indigenous rights, multiculturalism and secularism, feminist theory and critical legal theory.

Prior to joining Queen Mary, Brenna was a lecturer at Kent Law School (2007-2011). Brenna was called to the Bar of  British Columbia, Canada before embarking on her PhD at Birkbeck School of Law. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Julien Mezey Dissertation Prize by the Association for Law, Cultures and the Humanities. Brenna has been a visiting lecturer in South Africa and Canada.

Brenna teaches Property I and co-convenes Property II. She has also taught in the areas of intellectual property, jurisprudence, and indigenous rights.

Publications:

Articles 

  • 2012 “Strategies of Legal Rupture: the politics of judgment” in Windsor Access to Justice Yearbook (forthcoming)
  • 2011 “Plasticity and post-colonial recognition: owning, knowing and being” in Law and Critique, Vol 22, Issue 3 (12,433 words)
  • 2009 “The Ties that Bind: multiculturalism and secularism reconsidered” in Journal of Law and Society Vol.36, Issue 2, pp 301-326
  • 2007 “Re-covering the Limits of Recognition: The Politics of Difference and Decolonisation in John Borrows’ Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law” in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, Vol.27, pp 125-155
  • 2004 “Anxious reconciliation(s): unsettling foundations and spatializing history”    in Environment and Planning Journal, Society and Space, Vol.22 Issue 6,     pp 831-845
  • 2002 “Always on the Defence: The Myth of Universality and the Persistence of Privilege in Legal Education” in Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Vol.14, No.2, pp 341-361

Book Chapters

  • 2012 “Disassembling legal form: ownership and the racial body” in New Critical Legal Thinking: Law, Politics and the Political eds Douzinas, Costas, Matt Stone and Ilan Rua Wall (London: Routledge, forthcoming)
  • 2010 “The conceit of sovereignty: towards post-colonial technique” in Storied Communities:  Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Political Community, eds. H. Lessard, R. Johnson and J. Webber (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press) 68-88
  • 2007 “‘Spatializing history’ and opening time: resisting the reproduction of the proper subject” in Law and the Politics of Reconciliation ed. Scott Veitch (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 93-109

Book Reviews

  • 2011 Review of  Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, by Catherine Malabou (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) in Theory and Event, Vol. 14, Issue 1,  (co-authored with Jon Goldberg-Hiller)
  • 2010 Review of A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency, by Zeina B. Ghandour (London: Routledge, 2010) in Modern Law Review, Nov., 73:6
  • 2009 Review of Hegel’s Laws: the Legitimacy of a Modern Legal Order by William Conklin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) in Journal of Law, Cultures and Humanities, October, Vol 5
  • 2009 Review of Politics of the Veil by Joan Scott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) in Feminist Legal Studies, Vol 17(3)
  • 2004 “Unmapping Myths and Deterritorializing Knowledge(s)” a review of
    Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, edited by Sherene H. Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), in Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Vol.16, No.1

Undergraduate teaching:

  • LAW4004 Law of Property I (Tutorials)
  • LAW5024 Law of Property II
  • LAW6008 Law of Property III