EU Anti-Discrimination Law through the Lens of Critical Theory: CELS Lunchtime Seminar

Cambridge Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) Podcast

Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Business, Education, Society & Culture

0 • 0 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Speaker: Dr Raphaële Xenidis, Sciences Po Law School, France

Abstract: EU anti-discrimination law has been a subject of choice for critiques from various disciplines. One influential motif that has durably structured the critical analysis of EU anti-discrimination law is the distinction between formal and substantive equality. Substantive approaches seek to diagnose and remedy the disjunctions between formal equality frameworks and social realities. Yet, such critiques often remain implicit in their engagement with social theory, leaving the very notion and construction of ’social realities’ largely unexamined. This paper thus asks: How does the principle of non-discrimination mediate and produce specific forms of individual subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, institutional arrangements, material and spatial organisation and ultimately social order? How does it authorise the existence of certain subjects and groups while excluding and rendering others invisible? What 'forms of life' does EU anti-discrimination and its jurisprudential construction by the Court enable or preclude?

For more information see:

https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone. Thank you for coming today. We have a special guest, Dr. Rafael Zinidis.
0:07.0	She is an assistant professor, Cianz Poe. Before this, she was a lecturer in Edinburgh,
0:14.0	and she held multiple fellowships in multiple European universities, including me and I was a full writer at Columbia Law School in New York.
0:25.9	Rafael is also trained as both political scientist and a lawyer. And it's my first time to meet
0:33.1	her in person, but I met her scholarship, and was struck by the exceptional depth of her work.
0:41.2	I have a chapter coming. I think she is the most cited paper in the chapter. Her explanation of
0:46.5	CSRL was very exceptional and amazing. But not only the only thing that matches the depth of her scholarship is the width.
0:57.1	So she writes about European fundamental rights, she writes about discrimination law,
1:02.9	oaths in traditional sense and algorithmic bias as well in digital and law and technology.
1:07.7	She writes on sociology of law,
1:14.9	as well as critical theory, which she will be discussing today.
1:17.9	So I'll leave the floor with Raphael.
1:18.8	Thank you so much.
1:20.7	Thank you so much, Mohamed.
1:22.5	This is such a kind introduction.
1:24.9	It's my first time in Cambridge,
1:27.4	and I'm very, very happy to be here with you and also to discover your wonderful intellectual community.
1:31.3	So thank you so much for having me.
1:33.3	I have chosen to present a paper that is still work in progress.
1:38.3	Shouldn't be actually because it's very late, but it is.
1:41.3	And so I'd be very happy to hear your comments on this work.
1:47.9	The paper is entitled Anti-Discrimination in Europe
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.