Chatting with Danish Sheikh

Welcome to the latest interview of the Völkerrechtsblog’s symposium ‘The Person behind the Academic’! With us we have Dr. Danish Sheikh, and through the following questions, we will try to get a glimpse of his interests, sources of inspiration and habits.

Welcome Dr. Sheikh and thank you very much for accepting our invitation!

May I first ask what it was that brought you to academia and what made you stay?

I’ve had a bit of a circuitous route to academia, often working alongside it in one way or another before finally taking the plunge as a PhD student and then as a full-time law lecturer.

I first began to think seriously about the law academy in the final year of my undergraduate law degree at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research. I took a seminar course titled ‘Justice Education and Pedagogy’ with Professor Amita Dhanda which culminated with each of the students presenting a devised curriculum for an entirely new subject. This was my first chance to devise a syllabus, and I absolutely relished the opportunity, imagining my dream course on Law and Popular Culture.

On graduating from law school, I joined the Alternative Law Forum, a collective of human rights lawyers in Bangalore. The Forum does a number of projects that sit across the world of legal practice and legal pedagogy, and some of these gave me the opportunity to continue to devise creative syllabi and even teach them at institutions across the country. Simultaneously, I enjoyed playing with the discipline of law and the genre of the scholarly article, with my position outside the academy at that point giving me a lot of freedom to do these experiments. The creative charge that I got from these projects, along with the pleasure of thinking in community is what finally allowed me to consider academia as a full-time job.

If you were not an academic, what would you be?

Well, I did find my human rights lawyering practice very rewarding so that’s always been one alternative. I’ve also worked as a legal consultant for the International Commission of Jurists, which was an exciting position that allowed me to engage with a whole range of civil society organisations on questions of LGBT rights. Realistically, I would be in roles of this nature.

What was the inspiration behind the plays featured in your book ‘Love and Reparation’? What inspired you to try playwriting?

Being a lawyer, watching courtroom exchanges and reading court transcripts is what brought me to playwrighting and to these particular plays – to start with, anyway. The specific inspiration behind ‘Contempt’, which is the first play in ‘Love and Reparation’ was the loss of a major litigation battle, and my desire to make sense of it. I’d tried a whole bunch of genres to explore what had gone wrong in the courtroom, and it was theatre that finally helped me approach the question in the most productive and interesting way. It opened me up to the possibilities of playwrighting – how I could present multiple conflicting propositions alongside each other without necessarily resolving them or how I could present interesting arguments about the law simply by juxtaposing a number of different sites/ scenes and letting the dramatic friction do some work for me.

Have you ever drawn influence from any form of art in your academic work? Is there anything artistic about teaching or writing academic texts?

I think theatricality has infused my work both before and definitely after I began writing plays. I find it very valuable to write in my subject position into my work, as well as finding ways of experimenting with what it means to write with subject position in the first place. Working with theatre has also encouraged me to be more exploratory about things I can do with a scholarly article: how to conceive of it as an epistolary exchange for instance, or as a series of dramatic monologues.

With teaching as well, I find the metaphor of theatre to be quite instructive. I find this most clearly exhibited when I have to teach back to back classes on the same topic. Each class feels like a unique performance where you might have the same text and performer to begin with, but the manner in which they actually play out is vastly different, based on that particular alchemy of energy and interactions that happens in the room.

Would you say that your upbringing has had an impact on your research interests or your perception of justice?

Well, growing up queer in a time and place when homosexuality was a criminal offence is probably the single most impactful thing on both my research interests and my perception of justice. One way to think about this is the classic outsider perspective that attunes you to questions of injustice. But I think it’s also about the creativity that years of living in dissent to the law can spark. I think about all the ways in which I recrafted books and movies and tv shows in my imagination to make them appeal to my young queer self, and how that technique now plays out in so much of the work I do.

What is your favourite place to read and write? What is always near you when you read and write?

My absolute favourite thing about living in Melbourne is its incredible public libraries. Pretty much every suburb has its own eclectic library. I enjoy reading and writing in these spaces, and particularly value the chance to flit from one library to another on different weeks. Each space seems to stimulate my mind in a different way. For instance, I am thinking through this very question in the Carlton library, which is one of the more modest city libraries in many ways, but still comes with dazzling light and has a lovely little park right across the road for the many little breaks I need.

I can tell you what *isn’t* near me when I write: my phone. I do my best to write with my phone physically out of sight and preferably in airplane mode. What I do always carry with me is a slim notebook and pen where I’m constantly jotting thoughts. I’m quite terrible at revisiting these notebooks in a systematic kind of manner, but I’ve realised that the simple activity of moving ideas from my head to the page has a value in and of itself.

What is an energy and inspiration booster, at times when you have none?

The musical stylings of Taylor Swift. For one, I am in love with this woman’s songwriting craft, as this essay will testify. At the same time, I am astounded by her boundless energy and ability to find sources of inspiration. When I’m in particularly dire straits energy-wise, I’ll play a video from her Eras tour and find my energy levels jumping up almost immediately.

Besides Taylor, I enjoy using music to push myself into different affective states which allow me to harness different kinds of writing styles. Often this will entail me picking a song and listening to it on repeat, three or four times while doing nothing else and focusing very carefully on the music and lyrics. And then I’ll find that I’m in the appropriate state of mind to write the way I want to write.

Which of your academic publications is your favourite one? And which of them is your least favourite?

My favourite is very easy to pick. It’s this article called Translating Dark into Bright: Diary of a Postcritical Year published with Law and Critique. I researched and wrote it with my friend André Dao over the course of 2 years as we progressed through our PhD journeys at the Melbourne Law School. The article chronicles and reflects on a reading project where we tried to find hope and vitality in theory at a time when hope and vitality felt like they were in very short supply. There is something so wonderful about thinking and writing with a collaborator who you are fully attuned with, and I think that joyful energy we had while writing it comes across quite clearly to the reader.

I don’t particularly like the things I wrote and published when I first started out writing, mostly because I wasn’t confident in writing in my voice and so they just don’t feel like my work. I don’t revisit them, but I imagine if I did, the experience would be like watching my past self gasping for air.

If you could, which unspoken rule of academia would you instantly erase?

This is not even an unspoken rule and more of an explicit assumption: the idea of what is traditional and non-traditional research and what counts as good, rigorous research (the former, evidently) versus what is merely a flight of fancy (as if flights of fancy weren’t the most vital things for our sustenance). I think, erase that distinction, and instead think carefully about what would constitute good rigorous scholarship, regardless of the genre within which we choose to express it.

What would you say is the most difficult part of the academic life?

Finding time to read. I think I can thrash out writing in 15 minute blocks when I absolutely have to, but reading, deep and extensive reading, seems to require a kind of flow state that the demands of a full time teaching position make very difficult to access (even with a significant research component). There was a particularly dark point earlier this year where the only scholarly reading I was doing that didn’t have a very instrumental bearing on my writing was in the context of a monthly reading group. This is quite unfortunate because for your scholarship to flourish, you do need to read and sit within a breadth of ideas and not just that narrow reading list that is essential to churn out an article.

I’m happy to say that this is one thing I’ve started to become a little better at as the year comes to a close, even if it means having to change my relationship with productivity a little bit.

What are you working on currently? What may we anticipate in the near future?

Flowing from my earlier point about the illusory boundary between traditional and non-traditional research, I’ve recently started a research project titled ‘Genre Trouble: Bridging the Critical and the Creative’. As part of this project, I’m documenting and analysing the work of legal scholars who are pushing the boundaries of legal research and what it means to be a law scholar by experimenting with creative genres – whether that’s through curation, fiction writing, graphic novels, narrative podcasts, or theatre to name a few. I’d like to see what thinking within different genres seems to enable legal academics to do, and how those insights refract back into their other research.

I’m also finalising the manuscript of my monograph, currently titled ‘Lawful Repair’. I hope to get a chance to talk a lot more about that fairly soon!

Thank you very much, Dr. Sheikh, for participating in our symposium and for having taken the time to respond to our questions!