16 September at 10.00 am.
WELCOME!
We kindly invite you to a lecture by Dr. Daniela Alaattinoğlu entitled “Volatile Boundaries: Legal Inclusion and Exclusion of the Indigenous Sámi People”, which will take place as part of Tuesday Meetings on Tuesday, 16 September 2025, at 10 am in the library of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana.
Legal systems categorise and include some groups and individuals, whose rights and existences are respected and recognised, while simultaneously excluding others and degrading their identities, cultures and rights. Critical approaches — including race studies, feminist studies, disability studies, and Indigenous studies — have long mapped and challenged such legal exclusion. Yet, inclusion and exclusion are often treated as static conditions. This overlooks their volatility, as well as the ways individuals and groups mobilise to change laws, improve their positions and transform structures of exclusion.
Focusing on the case of the Indigenous Sámi people and the recently established Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Norway, Sweden and Finland, this talk bridges social movement studies and legal studies. Doing so, it explores the mechanisms through which legal inclusion and exclusion are produced, contested and reshaped.
Daniela Alaattinoğlu is an Assistant Professor (tenure track) of Law at the University of Turku. Her research investigates the interdependent evolution of laws and societies, legal mobilisation and legal inclusion and exclusion. In the past, she has investigated involuntary sterilisation and castration practices, intersex interventions and bodily autonomy, consent and intimate data, sexual offences and femicide. She is the Principal Investigator of the project From the Margin to the Centre: Rights Development, Transitional Justice and Indigeneity in the Nordics (MARCEN), funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant, 2025–2029). Alaattinoğlu is the 2025 Nils Klim Laurate.
