Charlotte Kelly

 Socio-Legal Studies (2015 cohort)

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My research, for which I receive a scholarship from the ESRC and Balliol College, focuses on children's law in Singapore and Malaysia. For my MSt, which I completed in early 2018, I explored through two case studies how legal, political and media discourse in Singapore had shaped and constructed the ‘image’ of the delinquent child. In my DPhil, I am broadening out my research to explore how the legal construction of the image of the adolescent in Singapore and Malaysia has changed in the span of time from the late colonial period to the present day, and what factors account for these changes. I am particularly interested in what drives legislative change regarding the minimum age at which children/ young women can undertake certain seminal events e.g. marriage. At present I am engaged in archival research of parliamentary records and I will be going on fieldwork to interview lawmakers in early 2019. 

My broader research interests include reform in family law in England, with a particular focus on how it serves children, comparative child protection law, a sociological analysis of children’s leisure culture, and exploring the intersection between transcultural psychiatry and socio-legal research. I am keenly active in the Oxford Disability Law and Policy Project, organising and presenting a paper at the inaugural conference and working on multiple committees to integrate disability studies into the law curriculum. 

 

Previous education/career experience: I completed my BA (Law) at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2014. In 2014-15, funded by the Hollond Fund Travelling Studentship, I studied at the National University of Singapore for my LLM (Asian Legal Studies). I concentrated there on socio-legal approaches to East and Southeast Asian law, and law and development.

During my studies, I have worked as a research assistant at the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden University, looking particularly at Indonesian law, and have assisted in socio-legal research and publishing at NUS. I have contributed to law and development projects in Cambridge, and volunteered in providing legal advice at the Citizens Advice Bureau. I regularly deliver short lectures to school children from non-traditional backgrounds aspiring to come to Oxford, under the Pathways scheme.