DR DANISH SHEIKH

ABSTRACT

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Reparative Writing and the Practice of Hope in Legal Scholarship

What would it mean to write with hope? What form would this writing take? What forms would it need to break? If reparative reading asks how we might read texts differently with an orientation towards hope and possibility, then reparative writing asks how we might write differently in order to practice hope. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's account of hope as an energy that attempts to gather and repair what is broken, I explore hope as a method for legal scholarship: a set of practices through which scholars assemble fragments, sustain attachments, and make room for forms of life that law does not yet know how to recognise. Whether it is the fictional text that gives expression to what we do not yet consciously know; the play that allows for multiplicity; or the exhibition that orients us spatially and sensorially around a problem, each of these can function as a mode of reparative writing, exceeding what conventional scholarly genres make possible. If hope is a practice, it requires us to break open the forms of legal scholarship. Reparative writing, I suggest, is one way of doing that work.

BIO

Danish Sheikh is a Senior Lecturer at Monash Law School. His work examines how law shapes queerness, and how queer communities, in turn, creatively reshape law through resistance. He approaches these questions by developing performance as a method of legal inquiry, drawing on queer theory, theatre and performance studies, and law and humanities scholarship. A central concern of his work is how queer creativity unsettles inherited assumptions about legal pedagogy and legal method.

Danish is the author of Love and Reparation, which restages the litigation challenging India’s sodomy law through a hybrid form combining courtroom transcripts, archival research, and personal memoir. His research on the legal regulation of sexuality has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in its decision to decriminalise homosexuality. His forthcoming monograph, Lawful Repair: Reimagining Law through Queer Dissent, to be published by Duke University Press, advances an account of repair as a method of queer legal dissent. His work has received several awards, including the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia’s Early Career Researcher Article Prize (2023) and Postgraduate Paper Prize (2021).

Alongside his scholarly work, Danish is a theatre practitioner who approaches performance as a site of jurisprudential and pedagogical experimentation. His lecture-performance Much to Do With Law, But More to Do With Love, won the 2025 Queer Playwriting Award and was presented at Gasworks Arts Park as part of Midsumma Festival 2026. His plays have also been nominated for the Bruntwood Prize and the Hindu Playwriting Award.