Moving beyond binaries in mental capacity law

Dr Beverley Clough (School of Law) has started a new project called 'The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law' funded by a fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation.

Beverley’s project seeks to reinvigorate debates in mental capacity law, and disability more broadly, through interrogating the key concepts and binaries that currently frame and constrain legal analysis. This will be done through a critical exploration of the creation and maintenance of the contours of mental capacity law, with an eye to the norms and concepts which inform legal responses in practice, and the concrete consequences of these in terms of embodied experience. It seeks to expose what is obscured or hidden by the binary concepts that frame this area, as well as how recognising relationality and spatial dynamics can help to reconfigure the conceptual terrain. It will provide an important provocation in global debates surrounding the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) which has been hailed as ushering in a ‘paradigm shift’ in disability rights. This will not occur if we are constrained by the current boundaries of our legal approach.

Contact Beverley for more information.