After her passing in late 2011, CCJ Vic inaugurated the Annual Sister Shirley Sedawie Oration, which was first delivered in 2013.
This year’s the oration, entitled “Recalibrating Citizenship in the 21st century”, was delivered by Professor Kim Rubenstein, University of Canberra, on 29 September 2024.
In the presentation, which is available on the CCJ Vic YouTube channel, Professor Rubenstein shares some of her work around citizenship as membership and participation, by examining democracies around the world where polarisation (and religious extremism) is impacting on the quality of citizenship.
Kim Rubenstein is a Professor in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra. A graduate of the University of Melbourne and Harvard University, she is Australia’s leading expert on citizenship, both around its formal legal status and in law’s intersection with broader normative notions of citizenship as membership and participation. This has led to her scholarship around gender and public law, which includes her legal work and her oral history work around women lawyers’ contributions in the public sphere.
She was the Director of the Centre for International and Public law at the Australian National University (ANU) from 2006-2015 and the Inaugural Convener of the ANU Gender Institute from 2011-2012. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and the Australia Academy of Social Sciences, and in 2024 she was awarded the Council of Australian Law Dean’s Lifetime Achievement Medal, in recognition of her significant and impactful contributions to legal research in Australia. She has appeared in media across Australia and is a sought-after speaker in her chosen areas of expertise.