Guest Lecture: What are We Talking About When We Talk About ‘Transformation’?
01. Dec
01 December 2025
16:00 to 18:00
Room C40.154
On this occasion, Dr Laura Mai (Tilburg University) will give a guest lecture on the topic of 'What are we talking about when we talk about "Transformation"?'. She outlines the lecture's topic as follows:
We are living in a state of change. From the unfolding climate crisis, accelerating pollution, and biodiversity loss to technological disruptions, new geopolitical constellations, and challenges to democratic institutions across various levels of governance. To make sense of these processes of change, and to envision modalities for responding to them, the notion of ‘transformation’ has gained traction in both science and policy discourse. Yet, we lack a holistic conceptual framing for making sense of what transformative change entails, how it unfolds, and who and what it involves. Moreover, there has been little critical engagement with the question of what is at stake when invoking the notion of transformation: Which sensibilities does it invite? And which does it evacuate? Contributing to the broader debate about what the current state of change demands of law and legal institutions, this lecture offers an ontology of transformative change, critically appraises the concept of transformation, and reflects on what engagement with the transformation trope might mean for legal scholarship.
Laura Mai is an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar whose expertise cuts across international and transnational law and governance. Laura’s work engages with questions of climate change, digital technologies, justice, and what is commonly referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’. She has published in the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Environmental Law, Global Policy, and Global Environmental Politics (amongst others). Her forthcoming monograph In A State of Change will be published with Cambridge University Press (2026).
Laura currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Tilburg and holds a PhD in Law from King’s College London as well as an LLM from the University of Cambridge. Outside of academia, Laura has worked in legal practice in London, Brussels, and Hong Kong, and she was appointed as a consultant for the UN Climate Change Secretariat. Laura has advised NGOs in the UK and Germany and provided expert evidence to the British Parliament. She will begin her new research project entitled Legal Geographies of Climate Change at the University of Amsterdam in 2026.