Lunch seminar with Ronit Levine-Schnur
Echoes of the Past: A Voice-Centric Approach for Empirically Analyzing Indigenous Consultation Hearings
The paper employs a data-driven strategy to investigate indigenous consultation procedures. Using a “voice-centric approach,” a computational model developed specifically for this study, we analyze a corpus of testimonies obtained from two Israeli state-led consultation procedures involving the Bedouin community and their land rights. The article finds that Bedouin speakers were eight times more likely to discuss a theme of communal land possession which represents their historical group narrative, whereas non-Bedouin speakers are four times more likely to raise a theme concerned with legal land rights. Based on these findings we identify two distinct and conflicting modes for harnessing legal language with respect to the indigenous past as a source of entitlement. We suggest that our voice-centric approach can assist in improving future consultation processes, also beyond the specific context, by providing an empirical-computational framework for listening to a multitude of conflicting voices.
Speaker bio
Dr. Levine-Schnur is a senior lecturer at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, and the co-director of the university Center of Applied Research on Risks to Democracy.
Meeting ID: 618 0450 6925
Passcode: 587173