Sarah Marusek
Sarah Marusek (PhD Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst 2008) is Full, Tenured Professor in the Department of Political Science with subfield expertise in Public Law. Dr. Marusek is an active and engaged scholar with an extensive record of publication and scholarly engagement in law and society, everyday jurisprudence, material legalities, legal semiotics, and automobility. She has been invited as visiting faculty to universities in Italy, France, Sweden, and Australia and has conducted grant-funded research in Iceland, California, Oregon, and locally on Hawaiʻi Island. Professor Marusek is the 2011 Recipient of the University of Hawaiʻi Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
My research examines how law happens in everyday life through the positionalities of place, representation, and culture. My first book, Politics of Parking: Rights, Identity, and Property (2012), examines the parking space as an enlivened site of legal tension and informal governance. My second book, Law and the Kinetic Environment: Regulating Dynamic Landscapes (2021), considers the socio-legal complexity of regulating volcanically active terrains. My third book, Law, Space, and the Vehicular Environment: Pavement and Asphalt (2023), studies asphalted pavement as the infrastructural medium for generating vehicular-specific understandings of place, culture and law. I've edited and co-edited several volumes. Articles that I’ve written appear in Law Text Culture; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Land Use Policy; Space and Polity; Semiotica; Journal of Civil Law Studies; Lo Squadarno: Explorations in Space and Society; Non-Liquet: The Westminster Online Working Papers Law & the Senses Series; Gender, Place and Culture; Social Semiotics; and International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. I am Co-Editor for two law book series with Springer: Law and Visual Jurisprudence and Living Signs of Law.
My teaching includes courses in the Public Law subfield: Visual Politics; Law and Culture; Law, Politics & Society; Environments of Law/Legal Geography; and Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, and in the political theory subfield: Politics of the Ordinary; Politics of Power. I serve as Advisor & Coordinator for the interdisciplinary Pre-Law Certificate.
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