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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Malene JacobsenORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
In this article, we offer what we call “a feminist geo-legal reading” of documents used in spaces and practices of law. Legal cases and decisions are often based on different legal and non-legal documents, including laws, explanatory memorandums, testimonies, medical reports, etc. In contemporary asylum adjudication, Country-of-Origin Information reports (COIs) have become a crucial source of authoritative evidence as asylum officers and immigration judges uses these reports in their determination of a person’s need for and right to protection. However, there is no straight line from COIs’ substance to the prevailing authority that they command within asylum adjudication. Thus, we bring together insights from feminist legal geographies and critical refugee studies to develop a critical method of reading and analysis of documents, like COIs. Specifically, we provide a feminist geo-legal reading of a 2022 COI on El Salvador produced by the U.S. Department of State. Our reading interrogates COIs substance, what they are made of and what they obfuscate. We argue this method of reading can enable legal geographers to question the claimed neutrality, objectivity, and impartiality of documents used in law and juridical decisions through highlighting the legal and political geographies that these documents are part of and (re)produce. In this way, a feminist geo-legal reading functions as a mode of critique and enables scholars to make space for other knowledges. Thus, this article contributes to the growing body of work on methods and methodologies used by socio-legal scholars and legal geographers.
Author(s): Jacobsen MH, Crane A, Dosch E
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Area
Year: 2025
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 30/10/2025
Acceptance date: 29/09/2025
Date deposited: 07/11/2025
ISSN (print): 0004-0894
ISSN (electronic): 1475-4762
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70066
DOI: 10.1111/area.70066
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