The call for papers is now open! Please submit your abstract (max 350 words) responding to the call of one of the individual streams listed below, or alternatively to the general stream if your paper does not fall within the thematic scope of any of the streams.
Papers will typically consist of 15/20 minute presentations, which will be arranged into 90 minute panels of 3/4 papers each, plus discussion time. However, we are open to alternative formats, so some sessions may vary from this within the 90 minute blocks of the programme - and some streams call precisely for alternative formats, so refer for that to the list of streams below.
For any question please contact vito.delucia@uit.no
DEADELINE EXTENDED! The dealine for submitting an abstract is 15 30 June 2022.
This stream has no overarching theme, and is open for all submissions that may not fit under or within any of the streams listed below. If you are unsure where your paper fits, it may fit here—but please feel free to email to discuss.
Convener: Vito De Lucia and Mazyar Ahmad (UiT The Arctic University of Norway).
Please send submissions to: mazyar.ahmad@uit.no
Taking que from Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (eds) Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent this stream asks about the figuration of law and fascism embedded in the posthuman condition: What, where, how, and why do we need to attend to fascism in our everyday lives as living with the law? (1) Why look to present iterations of fascism in emerging technologies which we, as already more-than-human, or humans +, are entangled with when state fascism from the past and present still haunts present democratic forms of governance?
Specifically, the stream invites critical assessments of the relations between AI, law and (anti) fascism. How is fascism part of the posthuman legal condition and, conversely, how does anti-fascism take form as part of it? The stream takes as its starting position an understanding of (micro-) fascism in the posthuman condition as follows:
Fascism is immanent to desiring-production: fascism "seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone's desire." (Guattari 1995: 245). Fascism is everywhere and to desire is to activate it in some measure at different scales within a microphysics of power relations. Fascism is not merely a historical phenomenon (with German, Italian and Spanish varieties) that has passed away and will never happen again; it is not outside, that is, retrievable and renewable like a complete artifact, in that respect. (2)
This is one of many ways in which to consider fascism in the posthuman condition. The invitation is open for other forms and ways of thinking about and considering fascism, including antifascist and AI activism, new propositions for non-fascist living with AI and law, inter-alliance activism, artistic expressions, more-than-legal thinking, and experimental life.
(1) Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (eds) Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent (BAK / MIT Press 2019).
(2) Genosko 'Black Holes of Politics' 59, citing Guattari 'Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist,' in Chaosophy, ed. S. Lotringer, New York: Semiotexts, 1995, pp. 225-50. See also Guattari 'The Micro-Politics of Fascism,' ”in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. R. Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin / Peregrine, 1984, pp. 217-32.
Convener: Dr. Matilda Arvidsson (University of Gothenburg).
Please send submissions to: Matilda.Arvidsson@law.gu.se
Liminalities speak of spatial and temporal occupation; something that is lived through where the qualities of anxiety, discomfort, unfamiliarity, excitement, curiosity, discovery are felt and experienced. Conceptual anchors and engrained habits find themselves being unravelled and rewoven in response to the daily realities of who and what we encounter. As a state of transition, it may not be recognized as a space of liminality until well after one passes through; the ability to grasp the space as a liminality requiring a form of fixed conceptualizing which extinguishes the sense of flux that characterized the being-in-liminality.
This year's CLC theme of liminality gives recognition to how these moments of movement, transition, flux underscore our critical process and outputs. However, the standard conference format involves unilateral delivery of knowledge / performances relies on, and pre-supposes, a degree of antithetical fixity to the experience of being in liminality. In fact, it is often in the liminal spaces of coffee breaks, social events, and fleeting end-of-session encounters that we are able to sink into our curiosity, be pushed into places of important discomfort, and to engage in fluid discussions which (looking back) play an important part in our critical work. As such, this stream calls specifically for proposals which create the opportunity for other participants to be in a state of flux, chaos and unfamiliarity.
This stream intentionally seeks proposals for activities that rely on the dynamic engagement of everyone in the room. We want to allow for lived experiences of liminalities at CLC; for attendees to be curious, excited, and maybe a little anxious with each other. As we are primarily concerned with brining about spaces which may feel unfamiliar at an academic conference, we welcome proposals spanning across any thematic area of critical legal studies. Examples of proposal format could include, but are not limited to:
Proposals for participatory workshops / games / artwork / co-creative activities, etc. should be developed keeping in mind:
Convener: Joy Twemlow and Dr. Catherine Turner (Durham University).
Please send submissions to: joy.twemlow@durham.ac.uk
Law's primary materials tend to be understood to be judgments and statutes. These 'primary' sources enable access to the immaterial forms of law's normative structures. Equally, or perhaps more important, though, are the liminal forms of law that surround or encompass its primary ones. Such liminal forms may include the visual aesthetics of the institution, the affective design of courtrooms and documents, the theater of judgment, the literary style of judicial genres of text, the rhetorical or medial appearances of power and sovereignty across politics and society, or the spatial and other forms in the 'background' that govern our movements, inculcate obedience, or give law its particular atmospheres. As the envelope that carries the letters of the law,limitlessness of law's material scope, if we go so far as understanding law to inhere not only in its primary sources but in all the things surrounding them as well. Operating and reflecting within this field of legal sensitivity, this stream seeks proposals for papers, performances, and provocations engaging with legal aesthetics, spatial justice, institutional hermeneutics, visual or material apparatus, legal inscription, archive, immateriality, or any other 'liminal' forms of legality that we might find clinging to, supporting, or destabilizing the towering hegemony of law's supposed 'primary sources'.
Convener: Thomas Giddens (University of Dundee).
Please send submissions to: t.giddens@dundee.ac.uk
Lately some jurisprudents and sociolegal scholars have revived interest in the human body's 'recalcitrance' (Mykitiuk 1994), or how law 'smuggles in' the body (Ahmed 1995), theorising how the body contributes to the formation of law. For example, a recent collection of essays edited by Chris Dietz, Mitchell Travis and Michael Thomson (2020) proposed a 'jurisprudence of the body,' taking inspiration from corporeal feminists like Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Moira Gatens (1996) in the social study of medical and public health law, albeit with attention to a larger range of bodily differences implicated in law's expression (also see Sharpe 2002). In different contexts yet relatedly, Sean Mulcahy (2021) has written on a jurisprudence staging the dancing body as a method for describing, analyzing and imagining law, and Danardo Jones (2020) has conceptualized the imbrication of Black bodies and space through the notion of 'darkscapes,' noting how the bodily differences of Black men, in particular, are distorted in racist legal regimes (also see Jones and Sheehy 2021). In these works, the limits of understanding law as discourse, posited or convention are laid bare: a material residue accretes in law's reduction, averring to ontologies that canmatter(Barad 2007; Pottage 2012) to the genesis of law's forms and their consequence in life. But these jurisprudences tend to prioritize a complete, individualized human body (Shaw 2022), neglecting those bodily parts, fragments or substances that also act on and mediate the lawful (Shaw 2020; Shaw and Mykitiuk 2022), evincing the transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010; Scott 2016) that, like with other social forms, regularizes legal relations, meanings and institutions. Drawing on the spatio-legal theories of Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2015), Margaret Davies (2018), Illan rua Wall (2021), Anna Grear (2017) among others — as well as insights from new materialist and post-human scholarship— it might be possible to locate a formative 'recalcitrance' in the affections of bodily parts or other materials that are simultaneously part of and apart from the human.
The proposed stream is hoping to gather papers that consider the following:
Indicative References:
Ahmed, Sara. 1995. Deconstruction and Law's Other: Towards a Feminist Theory of Embodied Legal Rights. Social and Legal Studies 4 (1): 55-74.
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Duke University Press.
Davies, Margaret. 2018. Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism and Legal Theory. Routledge.
From De Lucia, Vito. 2020. Rethinking the Encounter Between Law and Nature in the Anthropocene: From Biopolitical Sovereignty to Wonder. Law and Critique 31: 329-349.
Dietz, Chris, Mitchell Travis and Michael Thomson, eds. 2020. A Jurisprudence of the Body . Palgrave.
Gatens, Moira. 1996. Imaginary bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality . Routledge.
Grear, Anna. 2017. Foregrounding Vulnerability: Materiality's Porous Affectability as a Methodological Platform. In Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Victoria Brooks, eds, Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook . Elgar, pp. 3-28.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward and Corporeal Feminism . Indiana University Press.
Jones, Danardo. 2020. Journeys Through the Darkscape: Exploring the Spatial Dimensions of Racial Profiling. Presentation at the Osgoode Hall Law School's Graduate Law Students Association annual conference.
Jones, Danardo and Elizabeth Sheehy. 2021. R v Desjourdy: A Narrative of White Innocence and Black Danger. Canadian Bar Review 99 (3): 611-644.
Mulcahy, Sean. 2021. Dances with Laws: From Metaphor to Methodology. Law and Humanities 15 (1): 106-133.
Mykitiuk, Roxanne. 1994. Fragmenting the Body. Australian Feminist Law Journal 2: 63-98.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2015. Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere . Routledge.
Pottage, Alain. 2012. The Materiality of What? Journal of Law and Society 39 (1): 167-183.
Scott, Dayna Nadine. 2016. 'We Are the Monitors Now': Experiential Knowledge, Transcorporeality and Environmental Justice. Social and Legal Studies 25 (3): 261-287.
Sharpe, A. 2002. Transgender Jurisprudence: Dysphoric Bodies of Law . Routledge.
Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2020. Confronting Jurisdiction with Antinomian Bodies. Law, Culture and the Humanities, online first: https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872120942770.
Shaw, Joshua. 2022. Book Review: A Jurisprudence of the Body. Social and Legal Studies 31 (1): 165-169.
Shaw, Joshua DM and Roxanne Mykitiuk. 2022. Jurisgenerative Tissues: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Legal Secretions of 3D Bioprinting. Law and Critique , online first: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-022-09319-0.
Wall, Illan rua. 2021. Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere . Routledge
Convener: Joshua DM Shaw (York University; Dalhousie University).
Please send submissions to: JoshuaShaw@osgoode.yorku.ca
The state of transition and becoming implicit in thinking about liminality as well as the latter's use to capture rites of passage seems to draw a natural bridge between liminality, performativity, and performance. Indeed, overcoming the fixity and rigidity of dichotomies, stable knowledge, and statuses seems to require scholars to embrace different forms of thought and practice. This session invites submissions exploring and testing such links in the field of law theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically.
Questions of interest include:
Convener: Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça (ITAM Law).
Please send submissions to: Guilherme.vasconcelos@itam.mx
Two years of worldwide Pandemic and a full-scale unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state reminded us that the state of exception in its multifarious forms is something that those involved in reading critically our global scenario cannot refrain from questioning. We assisted the return of the exceptionin its grand version, the one that pertains to round-the-clock curfews, lockdowns, strong limitations to the freedom of movement, warfare and resistance against visible and invisible enemies. But here “return” must be intended also in its psychoanalytic meaning. Much like the repressed that lives in a state of latency before eventually returning to inform consciousness and reshape behavior, the state of exception is an element that remains nested in the law's text - as an ever-present possibility - before reappearing in specific moments with forms and intensity that are not fully predictable, simply because they are rooted in the contingency of human events.
But is the present grand return of the exception just an instance of law's indeterminacy or is it a signal of a premortal convulsion of liberal legality as such? What lessons can be drawn from the return of the exception in relation to the capacity of liberal legality to contain power at the national and international levels? What lines of continuity can be drawn between the normal status quo and the disruptions of the present? Historically, what has brought about this limit-form of liberal legality? The stream here proposed aimed at gathering contributions engaging with such questions.
Potential themes:
Convener: Nomos Center- Krakow Poland
Please send submissions to: exceptions731@gmail.com
Data is both input and output for our coming ecologies. In feeding automated decision-making (ADM), advertising, spatial planning and digital art sales through NFT alike, data plays a fundamental role. In envisioning critical legal ways of thinking with and against data, and data-driven capitalism, much focus has been placed on the (re) creation of human / ist privacy, through eg legislations such as the GDPR. This stream seeks to expand such perspectives towards ahuman, nonhuman, posthuman, metahuman and more-than-human speculative ecologies. We invite contributions on the possibility to consider both critical use of data for alternative societies, as well as legal concepts to mirror such speculative data ecologies. Such perspective involves considering the many materialities in play under data-driven governance.
The concept of data is here open for interpretation and speculation, just like the concept of ecologies. Examples of what could be considered data includes: image data sets; environmental data such as weather data, data concerning the composition of natural resources; operational images as data; metadata for NFTs; genetic data etc. Speculative ecologies based on data can include for example NFT's of different kinds; blockchain-based phenomena enabling the creation of alternative ways of being together; forms of AI as a means to plan a less human-centric world; terraforming etc.
We welcome participants from all disciplines.
Conveners: Jannice Käll (Lund University), Swastee Ranjan and Robert Herian (University of Exeter)
Please send submissions to: jannice.kall@soclaw.lu.se ; r.herian@exeter.ac.uk and swastee.ranjan@gmail.com
As an anthropological concept, liminality has been related to an intermediate condition between fixed states such as order and chaos, health and sickness, citizen and alien, human and non-human, true and false, right and wrong, good and evil. This proposal wishes to extend analysis in both law and fiction, to include the gray area of liminality before the law of persons who have limited or uncertain legal status as a result of their stranded condition between civil legality and civil disenfranchisement (civil death).
This gray area may include refugees, immigrants, missing persons, the disabled, the mentally incapacitated, nonpersons, or even the practice of “ghosting”. It may also be extended to include the condition of bare life (homo sacer) and / or the (un) dead.
Convener: Theodora Tsimpouki (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).
Please send submissions to: tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr
Postmodernism, post-structuralist, post-colonial, feminist and queer scholars have addressed the questions of boundaries and / or frontiers, such as exteriority and interiority, language and reality, and of difference as the Other. Such approaches cover inter alia performativity of space, the obfuscation of public and private, and division between conscious / unconscious as presented by feminist psychoanalysis as well as the embeddedness of dualist thinking within Western cultural and scientific practices. What kinds of probabilities of possibility might emerge from intersections and in-between liminalities of the existing approaches?
We encourage novel readings of existing accounts by reading them through one another and by radically rethinking them as entanglements. In this panel we are interested to discuss feminist and queer diffractions on “lines of fixities” way too often understood through dualisms. We invite submissions relating to, but not limited to, sex / gender, sexualities, economic disparities, contemporary colonialism, posthumanism and environmental issues for radical and multifaceted re-thinking of the futures emerging to us. Maybe categories are just limitations for phenomena to emerge?
We are interested in hearing practical and approachable readings and presentations on the topics outlined, everything from early stage “think pieces” to concrete case-examples are highly appreciated for bases of discussions led by curiosity.
Convener: Juho Aalto (University of Turku) and Iiris Kestilä (University of Lapland).
Please send submissions to: juho.j.aalto@utu.fi ; iiris.kestila@ulapland.fi
Renaissance narratives once imagined the Hyperborea , a place beyond the North Wind, an amalgam of beauty, exoticism and vast remoteness. The Hyperborea, that meant to blossom as the Arctic region, has nowadays become a multifarious social, legal, and environmental space with complex and overlapping legal regimes. The Arctic oscillates between pristine wilderness and industrial development in global governance imaginaries. Neither an empty peripheral space nor a parable of future climate collapse (1) the Arctic disorients and pushes the boundaries of dominant legal architectures. A model of environmental governance for some, yet a place in need of environmental and decolonial justice.
In this conjuncture, the Hyperborean Legalities stream comes to summon dreamy visions of an alternative legal imaginary for the world's northernmost region. It seeks to explore the Arctic as a liminal space and to look beyond legal dogmatic approaches and deconstruct existing legal realities such as the premise of conceptual superiority of state sovereignty and its role as the moulder of law and life in the region.
This stream invites an array of contributions from the wider field of critical legal scholarship that think about the Arctic beyond the boundaries of current legal hegemonies. It comes to reconcile with the more-than-human elements of the Arctic, unfold suppressed non-human narratives, and revisit the legal architecture of the circumpolar north. Rethinking the Arctic as an assembly of life, law and wet matter may be consistent with a critical reimagination of law in the Arctic.
Potential topics-This panel seeks contributions from early-career, Indigenous, and non-doctrinal legal scholars on topics such as (but not limited to):
(1) Here we borrow from Cait Storr's recent argument about Nauru. See Cait Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law (CUP 2020).
Convener: Romain Chuffart (Durham University), Thaissa Almeida Meira (University of Basel), Mana Tugend and Apostolos Tsiouvalas (UiT The Arctic University of Norway).
Please send submissions to: apostolos.tsiouvalas@uit.no
International law is a discipline of doors. It is a network of gateways, passages, thresholds, ladders and perpetual transitions- cyclically leading in and out of one another. It stands at the brink of law and not-law, softness and hardness, birth and death. It is always at the crossroads, a restless space of disorientation, nostalgia, and yet-to-be-fulfilled promises.
The dominant narratives of international law have been anxious about liminality. Struggling to establish international law as concrete and legitimate, they sought to shed liminality or to couch it in seemingly legal metaphors- crystallization of custom, fork-in-the-road clauses and twilight zones in investment arbitration, or the crucibleof treaty interpretation. On the other hand, critical discourses have deconstructed legal texts to expose these metaphors as smokescreens that benefit powerful actors. They have channeled international law's hybridity and indeterminacy into a powerful arsenal of epistemological strategies. This has enabled the discipline to open doorways for narratives that include, among others, the intersections of the colonial encounter, race, imperialism, gender, and capitalism in the histories of international law.
The liminality of international law can thus be envisioned as a space for the subversion of power relations. This space is inhabited by liminal beings , indeterminate concepts that control and facilitate the movement from one doorway to another.
Cultures across the world have folklore replete with doorways, crossroads, and cyclical births and deaths. These doorways are often accorded a liminal being who inhabits and controls them. In rivers and seas (and streams), we may find Proteus, shifting his shape to avoid sharing his knowledge. At the threshold of the pyramid, we encounter the sphinx, standing guard between the inside and the outside. At beginnings and endings, we have the two-headed Janus, god of dualities, facing both the past and the future.
This stream proposes to reimagine the landscape of international law as one populated with infinite doorways, and identify the liminal beings that inhabit its doorways: the metaphorical Proteus, sphinx, tutelary god and boundary-bending messenger in its histories, who govern its crossroads and offer tools to widen and deepen international legal discourse.
Papers in this panel could feature (non-exhaustively):
Convener: Rashmi Dharia (Sciences Po Law School).
Please send submissions to: rashmi.dharia@sciencespo.fr
What is the relationship between the average and the norm? Averages have probabilistic consequences, being extrapolated from a range of cases to show frequent regularities and marginal differences. For Francois Ewald, this is sufficient to explain processes of standardisation and normalisation – yet, by what techniques do frequencies become norms? The problem, addressed by Georges Canguilhem, is whether average and norm can be equated - by what means do variables become formulated as stable equilibriums? More recently, Lorraine Daston has pointed out how the construction of the 'average man' could not have taken place without the simultaneous construction of the 'enlightened man', underlining that numbers do not, necessarily, speak for themselves. The point is of more than historical interest because, if the average and the norm appear to coincide in disciplinary regimes, under societies of control they must be continually (re-)separated as the condition of control itself. This stream aims to investigate some of the relations, differences, and breakdowns between the normal, the abnormal, and the anomalous, with a particular focus on approaches informed by philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Submissions may address:
Conveners: Nathan Moore, Alper Ral, Leticia Paes, Luiz Artur Costa Do Valle Junior and Serene Richards (Birkbeck, University of London).
Please send submissions to: alper.ral.01@gmail.com; nathan.moore@bbk.ac.uk
This session will address the topic of psychiatric law as a control mechanism that touches on the most disadvantaged social groups. Research shows that the use of involuntary admission and treatment, seclusion, restraint, detention, etc. is particularly prevalent among people living in poverty, with low levels of education, racialized and Indigenous people.
Therapeutic jurisprudence theory claims that law and justice can be used to help people engage in a therapeutic process. This therapeutic objective seems to justify infringements of substantive and procedural rights such as the right to consent to treatment and the right to a fair trial, justice becoming the "gateway" to health services.
Mental health laws impact the everyday life of a large number of people. The rates of mental health detention and involuntary treatment have in most western countries increased significant over the last decade. In some cases, substantially more powers have been transferred to medical professionals. For example, in some Canadian provinces, physicians can detain without any involvement of legal system and its actors. In other cases, decisions of involuntary admission and treatment are judicialized, but clinical and risk considerations often take precedence over rights.
In a context of international increasing use of these measures, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) marked a “paradigm shift” from thinking about disability as matter of social welfare to matter of human rights matter. The CRPD requires detention to be delinked from disability, even if there are other reasons for their detention. Article 14 (“Liberty and Security of the Person”) provides that state parties shall ensure that persons with disabilities are not arbitrarily deprived of their liberty, that any deprivation of liberty is in conformity with the law, and that the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty.
Given law’s failure to address deep and longstanding problems with structures of power in these contexts, the prevention of violence against service users/ survivors calls for the abolition of institutions and institution-like settings.
We invite theorical and empirical propositions including on the following topics:
Conveners: Emmanuelle Bernheim (University of Ottawa), Tess Sheldon (University of Windsor), Marius Storvik ( UiT The Arctic University of Norway).
Please send submissions to: Emmanuelle.Bernheim@uottawa.ca; Tess.Sheldon@uwindsor.ca; marius.storvik@uit.no
This stream invites papers that engage with theories, concepts and practices of succession in the wide range of contexts in which succession occurs such as inheritance, politics and corporations. Succession might be thought of as a liminal concept par excellence: as the fact or right of ‘following on’, ‘coming after’, it denotes spaces and temporalities of transition – transitions of property, persons and offices. In the context of property and inheritance there is the movement between life and death of the person, but also from person-to-person of things; in the context of offices – whether corporate or political – between the empty chair and taking the thrown. The modes of succession, how the successor is determined, varies across jurisdictions and contexts, such as bloodlines, family, contract, custom and election, and the rites of passage – how the office becomes empty and successor installed – may vary from simple registration to bureaucratic probate practices to elaborate coronations. This stream invites papers that reflect on these themes, and the following questions: How are we to conceptualise these rites of passage? What are the discourses and meanings of these rites of passage? Is succession a form of subrogation, or should we distinguish regular and irregular rites of passage? How have the modes of succession been determined historically and politically? And how is transition experienced and legitimised?
Convener: Nick Piška (University of Kent).
Please send submissions to : n.piska@kent.ac.uk