This project opens an innovative new theoretical direction and methodology for international legal scholarship, prompted by the question: what would emerge or be revealed if we began with the material object – the paper shredder, say, or the armed drone, the AIDS virus or gavel – rather than the text?

In raising this question, I depart from existing scholarship and practice in two ways. First, the project rejects the discipline’s normal horizons, where the interpretation and proliferation of state-created text is the central – sometimes exclusive – reference point. Second, it resists the gulf between international law’s deep effects on the lives of individuals, and the perception of international law as remote and unaccountable.

The project’s theoretical innovation is the shift from regarding international law as state-focused, text-based and distant from ordinary lives, to understanding it as having a range of material effects and a major role in constructing the world around us. The methodological innovation is to begin with the object rather than the text or the intentions and motivations of states, and to use interdisciplinary approaches to ‘read’ objects and understand and demonstrate how they are given meaning and value by international law.

My current work (Hohmann & Joyce (eds), forthcoming late 2017) tests the ‘object’ methodology through an edited collection of forty material things. Each chapter examines an object and through it provides an account of international law's operation in the world. It opens up a rich vein of deep questions for international law, to be investigated during the fellowship. Through a monograph and web-gallery, I will draw on and apply insights on objects, things, and material cultures from disciplines including anthropology, museum studies, philosophy, sociology, design studies, architecture, science and technology studies, resulting in an account of a richly socially embedded and intensely relevant international law.