an update (6 September 2015) – disclaimher

Linda Stewart

• BComm, LLB, LLM, LLD
• Professor of Law
• North-West University
• South Africa
• Email: [email protected]
• +27 832904573
• Skype: linnewho
• BLOG: fuZZY face
• Twitter: @linnewho
• Facebook: Linda Stewart

“Disclaimher”

I am a professor of law at the North-West University (Potchefstroom) South Africa. I teach legal hermeneutics and human rights. My research and consequential research outputs focused on poverty and the realization of socio-economic rights in terms of the South African Constitution. I deterritorialised from “The Law” after working as an human rights activist with a semi-urban collectivity in the North-West Province near the capital Mafikeng where after I did “everything by the book”, I realised that as a human rights lawyer, I desperately lacked understanding the complexities involved when dealing with collectivities fighting for access to water, land, food, sanitation in post-colonial South Africa. See “Rooigrond – Senzeni na” here https://humanrightssa2012.wordpress.com/. It took a great deal of unlearning to change my thinking and writing as a constitutional/human rights lawyer. Since 2012, I redirected my research towards analyzing human rights in constitutional states with particular reference to the radical philosophy of immanence of Deleuze and Guattari.

At this stage I wrote one published paper on “Rights discourse and practices, everyday violence and social protests: Who counts as subject and whose lives are real in the neo-colonial South African nation state?” 2014 LDD 1 – 21(http://www.ldd.org.za/by-type/refereed-articles/130-articles-vol-18/417-auto-generate-from-title.html).

I am attempting to write about Deleuze’s concept of Jurisprudence and wrote a number of unpublished papers on the subject. I have to admit that this presents me with numerous challenges because I have no arts/humanities background. As a child of apartheid born in 1970, I had little exposure to any kind of philosophy or critical theory. I received my first three degrees (one in commerce and two in law) at a university, called the Potchefstroom University of Christian Higher Education. I did my doctoral degree on social security as a fundamental human right in terms of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 at the Rand Afrikaans University. I completed my thesis in 2000. My thesis (as a then legal positivist) was solely grounded on the human rights approach and I merely focused on a comparative analysis of international and regional instruments and it’s possible application on the then very novel and progressive constitutional text in post-apartheid South Africa. My unpublished papers, since deterritorializing from “the law” include the following:

1. The self-negation of justice: just- ease, jus-tease – a Nietzschean Deleuzian reading;
2. Pure resistance;
3. Constitutional democracies – moving beyond abstraction and reflection – a politics of bodies, things and relations;
4. Law as a mixed form of thinking;
5. Fighting for freedom: Jurisprudence as creating rights
6. Passing through the faciality machine

I consider the above as the “in-between” on a project of writing a manifesto for a new earth a new people. [Yes, I also tend to stretch the limits of my BwO, but well, a girl may dream. 😉 ] I am also interested in exploring immanence and expressionism that goes beyond representationalism in language through a combination of poetry and multi-media. I learned from experience that I somehow always get poetic when I try to write about the stuff I read, and find myself catching words.

Curriculum Vitae

• Research project under FACULTY OF LAW’S RESEARCH UNIT: DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTIONAL STATE
• Book proposal
• Publications and Conferences 2012-2014 (Post-humanism and process philosophy)
• Publications and Conferences 1996-2011(Mainly human rights approaches)
• Teaching Experience
• Full CV