[Reader-list] LASSnet Conference 2: Call for Papers, December 27-30, 2010, at FLAME, Pune, India, please forward

[Lawrence Liang]

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*LASSnet 2010: Siting Law*

*Second Conference of the Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet)
*

*DECEMBER 27-30, 2010*

*Venue: Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME), Pune, India
*



The Law and Social Science Research Network (*LASSnet*) was established in
2008 to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in
the research and teaching of issues connected with the law in different
social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. The idea was to create
a common forum for the exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and
aspirations from a range of different institutional locations and
theoretical frameworks. Given how much of our understanding of the law in
South Asia has been shaped by the experience of social movements, we also
hoped to provide a space in which activists, legal practitioners, and
academics of all stripes could get together to share experiences and
reflections. The creative tensions that emerged from such conversations, we
felt, might lead to new agendas for both research and practice in the
future.

The inaugural LASS conference was held at the Centre for the Study of Law
and Governance, Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in January 2009. In
the inaugural conference of *LASSnet*, we saw a number of conversations
across disciplines among legal scholars, practitioners, activists,
anthropologists, historians, philosophers, social theorists, political
scientists, economists and science and technology scholars. For the second
edition of the *LASSnet *conference we have chosen to continue with such
inter-disciplinary excavations, and to venture further afield.

By focussing on the multiple sites of law we seek to open out ways of
thinking about the social life of law and legality and its relation to
questions of violence and injustice in South Asia. We recognize that the
project of modern law emerged through the universalizing of a particular
form of rationality and established itself in a large part of the world
through the violent history of colonialism. The project of law and the
project of modernity often became synonymous, and legal scholarship also
tended to reproduce this relationship.

We are therefore interested in enquiries that critique monolithic forms of
legal rationality. If the project of critiquing is to have any relevance, it
is in its ability to conjure possibilities and alternatives that have
remained unimagined. Thus another way of thinking about the relationship
between law and the social sciences would be through the metaphor of
‘sighting law’, which invites us to look at a range of social practices
which have either been marginalized as custom or dismissed as affect and
hence deemed irrelevant to legal theory.

To be attentive to the multiple sites of law is also to be attentive to the
role played by the social sciences - particularly anthropology and history-
in opening out the way we think of law as a cultural and not merely as a
legal process. *LASSnet* seeks to extend the ways in which the law can be
‘cited’ in other disciplines, and we hope that the sub themes of this
edition of the conference  allows us to collectively explore the diversity
of forms that may exist, both within the formal legal structure as well as
outside it.

The routes which social scientists and legal scholars took to the sites of
law, and  the methodologies that they developed have traditionally been
accounted for in terms of their differences. We wish to see this difference
as being precisely the common ground on which we stand, and as the basis on
which we can cite scholarship about legal experience differently.



*CONFERENCE SUB-THEMES*

While the Steering Committee will make its selection from as wide a basis as
possible, we would particularly welcome presentations that address the
following themes, which we see as especially interesting to consider in the
contemporary South Asian context. Please note that the sub-themes are merely
illustrative of the goals of the conference and are not exhaustive.



*1. Law’s Publics: Counter legalities and Counter Publics *

The law often claims to have an unmediated access to the public, for
instance in Public Interest Litigation or in the determination of what
counts as legitimate public purpose. Struggles for the recognition of
socio-economic rights and dignity have often been premised on the claimants
being recognized as legitimate public actors. What role is played by the law
in the constitution of a public, and what role is played by the notion of a
public in thinking about the legitimacy of the law? Conversely, what role is
played by the law in the constitution of the hybrid realm of public-private
entities which facilitate the flows of a globalised capital? Is the
valorized language of illegality the only means of expressing resistance to
law, or can political struggles, marked by their inability to be properly
constituted in the sphere of liberal legality, resurface as counter publics
who nevertheless stake a claim to legitimacy? In a time of ever more
inventive forms of neo-liberal violence, how can counter-publics avoid
capture by a legal apparatus intent on re-territorialising the terrain of
the political?

*2. Law like Love: Law and Affect*

The ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences is beginning to speak to legal
debates. How do we begin to undertake a genealogy of the affective life of
law in which reason and unreason intermingle? To explore the affective life
of law is to understand the ‘body of law’ not merely as an archive of legal
judgments, but to engage seriously with ideas of corporeality in law, and to
acknowledge that the power of law emanates as much from its affective force
as its symbolic power. How does the law deal with this messy world of affect
and emotion, and what are the ways through which inter disciplinary
scholarship can redress the historic disavowal of affect in legal
scholarship?



* *

*3. The Careers of Constitutionalism in South Asia*

Constitutions as a genre have deep roots within the histories of European
universalism. The emergence and experience of postcolonial transformative
constitutions, marked by a different relation to questions of justice, time
and memory, have significantly altered this universal narrative. How do we
account for the various histories of this transformative, and even insurgent
constitutionalism? At the same time there seems to be a tension between the
constitution as a text of governance and text of rights. How do we
critically uncover other histories and sites through which we can understand
the careers of constitutionalism in South Asia? Finally, how does
contemporary constitutional theory respond to the challenges posed by the
emergence of the new global economic constitutionalism?

*4. Theatres of Justice*

Living as we do in an age saturated by hyper-science and hyper-media, we
have a plurality of places in which legal norms are produced. The blurring
of the lines between media, science and culture makes it imperative for us
to explore the new and emerging sites of legal meaning. There is sometimes
even a blurring of these spaces, as evidenced in various reality TV shows
that mimic the structure of the courts. How for instance do ideas of
expertise move from the laboratory to the court and back? How do images of
legality produced in a studio serve as the basis of a new legal imagination?
How are we to understand these multiple scenes of the law, in which the
formal judicial process appears as one of the many competing actors in the
theatres of justice?



*INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION*

In keeping with the eclectic spirit of LASSnet, we welcome submissions that
address concerns of the *LASSnet* broadly, including papers, panels, and
presentations on the four sub-themes detailed above. *We welcome proposals
for panels as well as for individual paper presentations.*

*Panel proposals*: Panel coordinators should submit a panel description of
300 words as well as a proposed list of panelists (ideally no more than four
per panel). The panel description should be accompanied by individual paper
proposals for each panelist, following the instructions below.  Coordinators
may also choose to propose a chair or discussant for the panel as a whole.

*Individual papers*: Paper abstracts (300 words) should be submitted to
Siddharth Narrain and Sruti Chaganti at lassnet2010 at gmail.com. Abstracts may
be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s),
affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. Abstracts
should be submitted no later than July 1, 2010.

We will get back to you within eight weeks of receiving an abstract. If an
abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted to the conference secretariat by November 15, 2010 and distributed
to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than December 01, 2010.
In the case of pre-formed panels, this will be the responsibility of the
Panel Coordinator.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel will be
20 minutes.

Further announcements about registration, funding and venue related details
will be made available at www.lassnet.blogspot.com and (in due course)
www.lassnet.org. Please contact Siddharth Narrain or Sruti Chaganti (
lassnet2010 at gmail.com) for additional information.

* *

*STEERING COMMITTEE FOR LASSnet 2010:*

Lawrence Liang (lawrence at altlawforum.org), Alternative Law Forum (ALF) (
www.altlawforum.org)

Siddharth Narrain (siddharth.narrain at gmail.com),  ALF

Sitharamam Kakarala (ram at cscs.res.in), Centre for the Study of Culture and
Society (CSCS) (www.cscsarchive.org <http://www.cscsarchive.org/>)

Sruti Chaganti (sruti at cscs.res.in), CSCS

Maya Dodd (mayadodd at gmail.com), Foundation for Liberal and Management
Education (FLAME), Pune (www.flame.edu.in)

Pratiksha Baxi *[LASSnet anchor]* (Pratiksha.Baxi at gmail.com), Centre for the
Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)

Shrimoyee Ghosh (shrimoyee at gmail.com), CSLG, JNU

Stewart Motha (S.Motha at kent.ac.uk), Kent Law School, UK

Arudra Burra (arudraburra at yahoo.co.in), Princeton University, US

Brenna Bhandar (brenna.bhandar at gmail.com), Kent Law School, UK

Anuj Bhuwania (anujbhuwania at gmail.com), Columbia University, US








-- 
Law and Social Sciences Research Network,
Anchored by the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi
lassnet at gmail.com
http://lassnet.blogspot.com/
www.lassnet.org