Beneath the Courthouse: A critical phenomenology of judicial space

Foregrounding the way disadvantaged litigants experience the architectural features, organisational practices and geography of London's courthouses, this transdisciplinary project gives new meaning to questions of cultural marginalisation and our surroundings. Whilst central to the real and allegorical traversal of law, courthouses have

been neglected against the spectacle of adjudication and statute. I ask whether these distinct places might together constitute material legal infrastructure which subordinates the marginalised, restoring this idea of judicial space to conversations around accessing, being alienated by, and receiving unequal versions of, justice. Through

phenomenological interview and theoretical analysis, Beneath the Courthouse tests this theory by speaking to litigants about their experiences with law's embodiment. Doing so critically, it offers insight into marginality, our cultural value system and its concretisation, what judicial space is and what it might become.