WORK IN PROGRESS
Prof. Livia Holden is the Principal Investigator of Cultural Expertise in Europe: What is it useful for? - EURO-EXPERT, project funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant September 2016 to September 2021.
EURO-EXPERT was based at the University of Oxford from the 1st October 2017 to 29 February 2020 and moved to Paris Nanterre on the 1st March 2020.
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Special Issue "Cultural Expertise: An Emergent Concept and Evolving Practices" ed. by Livia Holden, Laws (ISSN 2075-471X).
This Special Issue focuses on the contemporary evolution and variation of cultural expertise as an emergent concept providing a conceptual umbrella to a variety of evolving practices, which all include the use of the special knowledge of social sciences for the resolution of conflicts. It surveys the application of cultural expertise in the legal process with an unprecedented span of fields going from ethnopsychiatry to the recognition of the rights of autochthone minorities including linguistic expertise, historical expertise in situations of transitional justice, and post-colonial reformulation of cultural rights. The stress of this Special Issue is on the development and change of culture-related expert witnessing over recent times, culture-related adjudication, and resolution of disputes, criminal litigation, and other kinds of court and out-of-court procedures. This Special Issue offers descriptions of judicial practices involving experts of local laws and customs and surveys of the most frequent fields of expert witnessing that are related with culture; interrogates who the experts are; their links with local communities and also with the courts and the state power and politics; how cultural expert witnessing has been received by judges; how cultural expertise has developed across the sister disciplines of history and psychiatry; and eventually, it asks whether academic truth and legal truth are commensurable across time and space.