Grant from the American Society of Legal History for Mariana Dias Paes

Mariana Dias Paes has received a grant from the American Society for Legal History in order to produce an online video course entitled “Court Cases in Lusophone Africa: An Introduction." In order to demonstrate the potential value of court cases for the writing of the legal history of Lusophone Africa, the course will focus on how to access, read and analyse court cases stored in archives of territories formerly under Portuguese colonial rule. In addition of being of interest to Africanists and legal historians, the course’s main target group are undergraduate and graduate students based in African countries. The recent Covid-19 pandemic showed that there is a huge discrepancy between the accessibility of online materials and e-learning offers for students based in the Global North and those in the Global South. Many movies, documentaries, articles, books and other online tools either lie behind a ‘linguistic wall’ – they are mostly in English, a language that is not widely spoken in countries formerly under Portuguese colonial rule – or behind a paywall. Therefore, the course will comprise a series of ten videos to be uploaded to YouTube. In addition to the videos, the initiative will also publish a list of open access secondary bibliography that complements the content of the videos. The videos will be in Portuguese but will also have English subtitles in order to be of use to non-Portuguese speaking researchers and students, as well.

This is an outcome of the Global Legal History on the Ground project and therefore the other project members – Raquel Sirotti, Juelma de Matos Ñgala and Maysa Espíndola Souza – will also be involved the production of the course.