Geo-Materializing the Legal Imaginary: The Cycle of Produced and Producing Geography

Geo-Materializing the Legal Imaginary examines how land once rendered 'null' was later claimed as 'full', and how these transformations continue to shape our imaginaries on political authority, identity, societal organization, governing systems, and the ways we conceive of land. Rana Göksu traces the juridical geographies of nullification and dispossession through a geohistorical connection between British colonial dispossession in Australia and the Australian state's territorial claims to 42% of Antarctica, exploring the role of geospatial techniques and their ideological geo-graphing in producing these imaginaries. Building on Lefebvre's theory of space production and engaging Povinelli, Yusoff, and Fanon, Göksu reframes ecological 'destruction', 'crisis', and 'death' as ontological resistance to colonial and capitalist imaginaries and their ideologically produced geographies, arguing that the political power of geo-materialities and their capacities for world- and system-making do not seek liberal emancipatory resolution, yet decisively correspond to it.

Scholars and advanced students in critical legal theory, political geography, postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities; researchers with interests in settler colonialism, Antarctic governance, and spatial theory.