Sydney Law School early career researchers awarded $870K
Dr Rosemary Grey, Sydney Law School
Dr Rosemary Grey, Postdoctoral Fellow at Sydney Law School, has been awarded $429,936 for her project, Reproductive Crimes in International Law: Lessons from Cambodia.
She will examine the international community’s inadequate response to reproductive crimes such as forced pregnancy and forced abortion. Using the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia as a case study, Dr Grey will identify legal and practical barriers to prosecuting reproductive crimes and formulate new strategies to enable their prosecution in international courts.
The issue at the heart of this project - reproductive autonomy - is critically important in both times of war and times of peace”, Dr Grey said. “It's excellent that the Australian Research Council and Sydney University are backing this project, which I hope will have significance in Cambodia and beyond.
Dr Carolyn McKay, Sydney Law School
Dr Carolyn McKay, Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law at Sydney Law School, has been awarded $440,000 for her project, The Digital Criminal Justice Project: Vulnerability and the Digital Subject.
As economic imperatives drive the digitisation of courts and legal procedures, not enough attention is paid to negative impacts on vulnerable individuals like prisoners, the elderly and the cognitively impaired. Dr McKay will address the scope and nature of digital inequality in the criminal justice system across Australia and formulate strategies to advance a more inclusive and humane digital justice model.
Dr McKay said she is “honoured to be a recipient of this research award. The timing is perfect as, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rapid shift to digital justice.”
The impacts of this unexpected large-scale social experiment remain to be assessed, especially for vulnerable participants in the high stakes of criminal procedure. I’m looking forward to generating strategies to better protect the vulnerable under digital justice.
Head of School and Dean, Professor Simon Bronitt, congratulated Drs Grey and McKay on their well-deserved success. He said, “through tackling global and local challenges, embracing cross-disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, these fellowships lay the foundations and offer new directions in our research capability in international criminal law and criminology respectively.”
Dr Grey’s research focuses on gender and international criminal law, particularly the prosecution of gender-based crimes in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). She has consulted and interned for key organisations in the international criminal justice field, including Amnesty International, Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, the International Bar Association, and the ICC.
Dr Grey is also a member of the Sydney Institute of Criminology, the Sydney Centre for International Law and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Her monograph, Prosecuting Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes at the International Criminal Court: Practice, Progress and Potential, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Dr McKay is a criminal law scholar and an award-winning visual artist and curator who works at the intersections of technologies and criminal justice. She is co-Deputy Director of the Sydney Institute of Criminology. Her monograph, The Pixelated Prisoner: Prison Video Links, Court ‘Appearance’ and the Justice Matrix, was published by Routledge in 2018.
Dr McKay curated the critically acclaimed exhibition, justiceINjustice (The Lock Up, Newcastle, 2018), which explored high profile cases of wrongful conviction and other miscarriages of justice.
View a full list of 2021 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award recipients with project summaries on the ARC website.
Banner image by Bill Oxford on Unsplash.