The view from somewhere: a legal psychogeography of the boxes

“I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.” Donna Harraway (1988) Situated Knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’. Feminist Studies, 14(3) 575-599, p589. Where’s always somewhere, and wherever that ‘there’ is gives us a framing for what we see, think and feel. As we move spatially we travel between these framings and ways-of-being. A simple trip to the office takes us through the conventions and orientations of our domestic space out into the normative bustle of the public sphere. In sitting on the bus we agree to its conditions of carriage, in entering the lawyer’s office we encounter (and…