When conference conversations continue: San Francisco, Ibadan and Bristol

At 10am on 14 September, I landed at Manchester Airport after a week at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where I had been visiting as a Visiting Professor. By 2pm, I was online, joining colleagues at the University of Bristol for the launch of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network.

I was tired. My suitcase was certainly not unpacked. But there was also something quite wonderful about it. I had spent the previous week talking with colleagues and students in Nigeria about legal education, institutional kindness and what international collaboration might look like. Four hours after landing back in the UK, I was part of another international conversation about race, empire, power, and legal education.

And, in some ways, that afternoon had begun several months earlier and several thousand miles away, in San Francisco.

Sanctuary, suspicion and structural kindness

With support from the LITE Conference Fund, alongside funding from the School of Law, I travelled to the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in May 2026.

I presented a paper entitled Sanctuary, Suspicion, and Structural Kindness: Reimagining Legal Education Beyond Neutrality. It asked a deceptively simple question: what would it mean for legal education institutions to function not merely as places in which students participate, but as places of sanctuary?

My argument was that sanctuary has to mean more than symbolic inclusion, representational diversity or simply telling students that they belong. If students experience our curricula, assessment practices, expectations of professionalism and institutional processes through suspicion, surveillance or conditional belonging, then asking them to trust us is not enough.

Trust must be deserved.

That has led me towards an idea I am increasingly describing as structural kindness. By kindness, I don’t mean everyone being a little nicer. I mean asking what universities would look like if our structures were designed to earn trust, recognise unequal access to institutional norms, resist deficit explanations of students and prioritise relationships and human dignity over suspicion and punishment.

More than presenting a paper

But some of the most important parts of LSA happened outside my own presentation.

I had also been invited to participate in Authoritarianism, Empire, and Legal Education: Building Global Solidarity in the Classroom and Beyond, the first official LSA roundtable of what was becoming the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network.

The roundtable brought together scholars working across the UK and US to think about how race, empire and authoritarianism enter our classrooms, but also about something broader: how teaching might itself build solidarity and how legal education might offer a form of sanctuary for critical work.

There was an obvious connection with the questions I was asking in my own paper. But there were also challenges to my thinking. Conversations about sanctuary and structural kindness look different when placed explicitly alongside questions of colonialism, empire, authoritarianism and academic freedom.

That is one of the things I value most about conferences. You arrive with a paper that feels reasonably settled. Then people start talking to you.

Conversations about sanctuary and structural kindness look different when placed explicitly alongside questions of colonialism, empire, authoritarianism and academic freedom.

San Francisco to Ibadan to Bristol

The conversations continued after San Francisco.

In September, supported separately by the School of Law, I spent a week at the University of Ibadan as a Visiting Professor. Again, I found myself discussing what it might mean to create kinder legal education: not kindness as an individual disposition, but as something expressed through our pedagogy, institutions and relationships.

And then came that slightly ridiculous Monday.

Manchester Airport at 10am. Home. Suitcase abandoned. Laptop open. Bristol at 2pm.

I had been invited to join the roundtable for the virtual launch of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network, hosted by the University of Bristol. Alongside Dr Rohini Sen, Professor Babatunde Fagbayibo and Professor Diamond Ashiagbor, and with Dr Mohsen al Attar chairing the discussion, I returned to a question that increasingly runs through my work: is there really such a thing as a neutral law school?

My answer is increasingly that there isn’t. What we teach, how we assess, what we recognise as legitimate knowledge and what we understand as academic or professional excellence are not merely technical choices. They distribute power, recognition and belonging.

The conversations that travel

Looking back, what strikes me about LITE’s support is that its value cannot really be captured by saying that it helped me attend a conference and present a paper.

LITE contributed towards my participation at LSA, with the School of Law supporting the remaining costs. That investment put me into conversations and relationships that continued after everyone left San Francisco.

A few months later, some of those conversations had travelled to Bristol. In between, my own thinking had travelled to Ibadan and back.

That feels important. Academic collaboration does not always begin with a grant application, a formal partnership or a carefully mapped set of outputs. Sometimes it begins with people sitting around a table, challenging one another’s ideas and deciding that the conversation should continue.

Sometimes, apparently, it also involves landing at Manchester Airport at 10am and being back on a panel by 2pm!