Giancarlo Panagia

Although my career started in the legal field working for a law firm on product liability, I went back to graduate school to study environmental crimes and their effects in the form of environmental justice. Eventually I developed my research around the use of law and economics to explain environmental crimes within the nation state. But only the use of decolonial theory has allowed me presently to connect Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and his use of divine violence to legitimize the claims of the indigenous others to their lands and knowledge. I believe that alternative models illustrated by ANT and La Via Campesina can coexist under a cosmopolitan ethics. My interdisciplinary and critical study of criminal justice uses a framework of decolonial perspectives both in domestic and global contexts. Using applied semiotics, my approach challenges power and injustice within the nation state and advocates global transformation. I critically question injustices due to isms and obias, by embedding a decolonial lens to the global, and historical plight of the universal other.