Legally coding humans, nature, and technology with Bhumika Billa

In this talk, I will screen my short choreopoetry film titled ‘(IN)VISIBLE’ on the lived realities of women lawyers in India. The film will launch an inquiry into how systemic bias and a sense of place seep into the letter of the law and why these observations are strikingly universal. Based on this visual provocation that challenges the neutrality of law-making processes using spoken word, movement, sound, screen, and colour, I will highlight patterns by which legal language tends to exclude certain forms of information as irrelevant or illegible. This exclusion of information further renders certain bodies, rhythms, and realities as ‘out of sync’ with the law, pushing them to the margins of meanings.

Using this critical and creative framework, we will think about the relationship between legal language/concepts and different forms of realities i.e. human, natural, and technological. Why does law categorise humans based on identities like gender, religion, and race? What would the world look like if law had considered rivers, whales, and forests as equal legal subjects with agency and rights? Is law likely going to treat robots as agents who have duties? Whose voices and what information are currently informing the prospective answers?

The talk will end with a short creative workshop. Using ‘erasure poetry’ (also known as ‘blackout poetry’), I will facilitate a poetry workshop that will provoke and equip participants to identify hidden and excluded information from textual excerpts about recent legal developments, explore the correlation between language and power, and subvert legal narratives and meanings by ‘visibalising’ the voices and information not explicitly captured by common legal discourse

Bhumika Billa is a multidisciplinary academic, spoken word poet, kathak dancer, creative facilitator, and filmmaker. She completed her PhD at the Cambridge Faculty of Law as a Cambridge Trust scholar and is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research at Judge. She reads, writes, teaches, and performs on cross-cutting themes of law, identity, and technology using socio-legal, critical, and creative approaches. Her academic and creative works on page, on stage, and on film have awarded or commissioned by the BBC, Amnesty International, Royal Historic Palaces, Button Poetry, Out-Spoken Press, and Harvard University, among others.