Dr Jessica Hambly is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU College of Law, and Co-Director of the Law Reform and Social Justice program.
She is a socio-legal scholar with interests in: access to justice for people seeking asylum; asylum law and procedure; refugee rights; gender and migration; legal professions and radical lawyering; inclusion and participation in 'legal spaces'; court and tribunal (including online) architectures. Jess' work uses socio-legal and legal geography methodologies, particularly relating to materiality, spatiality, temporality and chrono-politics.
Jess's PhD was a socio-legal study of the role of lawyers in UK asylum appeals, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Jess has worked with a number of grassroots migrant and refugee rights organisations including Bristol Refugee Rights, Lesvos Legal Centre, and Samos Legal Centre.
Current projects include:
- Thinking transnationally about asylum appeals and design of review mechanisms and procedures. A co-authored book 'Inside Asylum Appeals: Access, Participation and Procedure’ (Gill, Hoellerer, Hambly, Fisher) is due out late 2023.
- Thinking critically about constructions of vulnerability and trauma in migration law. This strand of research considers, for example, possibilities and limits of trauma-informed lawyering, and medicalisation of vulnerability in asylum procedures.
- Casting a spatio-temporal lens on law, lawyers and social movements. Jess will teach a new course on Law and Social Movements in 2024 drawing on innovative socio-legal and legal geography methodologies.
- Funded project: 'Anglo-Indians and the ‘White Australia’ Policy: Constructions of the ‘Desirable Migrant in Australian Immigration Law’.
Past research projects include as a postdoctoral researcher on 'ASYFAIR' - a comparative study of asylum appeal procedures around Europe, where she conducted ethnography at the French National Asylum Court and research interviews in the Greek asylum system, and as a researcher on 'The Citizenship and Law Project', focusing on children's citizenship rights.