The DRS is pleased to announce the appointment of a new DRS Fellow. Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris is Professor of Law at Kent Law School and elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Professor Perry-Kessaris has pioneered and promoted the application of design research methods to enhance legal research for over a decade. She has contributed to the recognition and promotion of design as a creative act across legal domains; to advancing design theories, methods and practices within law; and to understanding relationships between design and legal education and practice.
Professor Perry-Kessaris’s publication Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode (2021) was the first ever exploration of how design research can enhance legal research, and was underpinned by a series of collaborative experiments with over 200 legal researchers and non-academics beginning in 2013. Other publications include the first integrated analysis of the application of design knowledge and techniques across legal practice, activism, policy and research (2019) and the first volume exploring the contribution that design knowledge and techniques can make to legal education (2022).
In education, Professor Perry-Kessaris has also formally integrated design knowledge and techniques into Research Methods in Law, a module that is compulsory to all PGR students at Kent Law School. . Other projects include a 2017 study using event design knowledge and techniques to prompt and facilitate legal researchers to engage with material culture in museum settings. In 2020 – 2022, she worked with non-government actors in Europe and India to show how prototyping might support participatory research around the sensitive topic of hate crime; and explored the potential of prefigurative design to make island-wide economic life more possible and probable in divided Cyprus. In 2023, Professor Perry-Kessaris co-designed Fantasy Legal Exhibitions, a two day experimental workshop across give cultural settings in central London, in which design research methods were used to prompt and facilitate legal researchers to speculatively ask what if, and prefiguratively act as if, they were using exhibition as a research method. Her recent work includes a collaboration with civil society actors to explore how participation in a designed immersive inter-species council experiences might activate public imagination in preparation for a possible citizens assembly for the future of Cyprus. She is also currently writing a monograph ‘Designerly ways with law, lawyerly ways with design’.
Speaking on about her appointment, Professor Perry-Kessaris’ said,
‘I look forward to to contributing to the DRS by encouraging interdisciplinary connections, especially by promoting design research among lawyers, and legal research among designers.’
Publications
Allbon and Perry-Kessaris eds. (2022) Design in Legal Education Routledge.
Perry-Kessaris (2021) Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode Routledge.
Perry-Kessaris and Perry (2020) ‘Enhancing participatory strategies with designerly
ways for sociolegal impact: Lessons from research aimed at making hate crime
visible in Europe’ 29:6 Social and Legal Studies 835-857.
Perry-Kessaris (2019) ‘Legal design for practice, activism, policy and research’ 46:2 Journal of Law and Society 185-210.
Perry-Kessaris (2017) ‘The pop-up museum of legal objects project: an experiment in“sociolegal design”’ 68:2 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 225-44.