Hub member Fleur Johns awarded Future Fellowship

Professor Johns has been awarded AUD $951,471.00 to work on a project entitled ‘Diplomatic Knowledge, Disasters and the Future of International Legal Order’.   

As explained here, these are four year, mid-career fellowships of which up to one hundred are awarded each year nationally across all disciplines. Professor John's fellowship was the only one awarded to a legal scholar in 2020.

The project addresses the problem of global discord, divergence and misunderstanding – both factual and normative – impeding effective international coordination in the face of natural disasters. It does so by: (a) examining how (from what sources, in what formats, via what media etc.) diplomats acquire and share knowledge – scientific, environmental, political, social and economic knowledge – on the basis of which to act and advise the governments that they represent; (b) identifying shortcomings and blindspots amid these practices; and (c) proposing ways of addressing these and of understanding and theorising their ramifications for international legal order. The original plan was to study three disaster events of the 2010-20 decade: (a) the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and associated nuclear disaster of 2011; (b) the Nepal earthquake of 2015; and (c) Hurricane Dorian in 2019. However, Professor Johns is revisiting these case studies and fieldwork plans in light of the pandemic.

She will commence the project in early 2021. This new project builds upon her existing Australian Research Council-funded project – on which she has been working with fellow Hub researchers Wayne Wobcke and Caroline Compton: ‘Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law & Policy Challenges’.

The fellowship is one of 10 awarded to researchers at UNSW, all of which can be viewed here