Scotland is incorporating economic, social and cultural rights into devolved law, including the rights to housing, food, health and cultural life. The justice framework in Scotland is not yet equipped to deliver effective remedies for a violation of these rights. JustRight Scotland has called for recognition of the right to an effective remedy. This PhD uses emancipatory arts based methodologies to situate the voices of Gypsy Traveller communities in legal and policy reform. It asks what an effective remedy means in law and whether indigenous oral traditions provide new insights that counter dominant framings of justice in practice.

The project seeks to address the following research questions:

• What traditional stories, songs and/or music resonate with GTC in the context of justice, rights and remedies? And what new insights does this provide, including challenging existing dominant framings of justice?
• What does the right to an effective remedy mean in law and in practice and how can delivery of effective remedies be improved?

The project adopts interdisciplinary legal and anthropological methods to address these questions. First, it examines what the right to an effective remedy means drawing on international and comparative law. Second, the PhD uses Arts Based Engagement Ethnography to co-produce new counter-framings of justice, rights and remedies from the perspective of GTC using oral traditions. The PhD student will adopt a critical ethnographic stance as an apprentice to the oral tradition – undertaking a long-term immersive experience through embodied understanding of the participants’ traditions and practices by learning them. Ethnographic fieldwork is further complemented with wider focus groups bringing together research participants, legal practitioners, civil society, civil service and government stakeholders, as well as representatives of the justice system. The focus groups will be used to analyse and interpret the findings. Representatives of the justice system will learn new ways of understanding their profession through the voices of the research participants. Third, the project identifies critical discourse analysis as an appropriate method to analyse and critically theorise the PhD findings alongside ‘law and literature’ and ‘law and music’ as complementary analytical frameworks. The layered methodology will facilitate several outputs, in addition to the thesis, that includes legal briefings, a cultural discography/anthology, interdisciplinary briefings and a toolkit for accessing justice from the margins.

The successful applicant will be supervised by Professor Katie Boyle (University of Strathclyde), Professor Jo Ferrie (University of Glasgow), Dr Saskia Vermeyen (University of Strathclyde) and Barbara Bolton (JustRight Scotland).

Further information

Open to both Home and International applicants.