[Reader-list] Fwd: Deadline Extended: LASSnet Conference- December 2016 -Call for Papers

Sun Jan 31 05:55:33 CST 2016

Apologies for Cross Posting

Dear Everyone

Following several requests, the deadline for submitting panels and
individual abstracts for the LASS2016 conference has been extended to
* 1 March 2016.* Please do meet this deadline. And do circulate the CfP.
Thanks so very much.
We look forward to hearing from you very soon,
Warmly,
Pratiksha
on behalf of the
Steering Committee, LASS2016

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LASSnet Conference :

‘Thinking with Evidence: Seeking Certainty, Making Truth -2016’.

The indeterminacy in law could be read both as a problem of truth and also
as one that plagues disciplines. The question of evidence has been central
to the formation of disciplines and the claims that they make upon
knowledge. For initiatives such as LASSnet, the imperative of thinking with
evidence — in these times of virtual virality, forensic imaginaries and
ephemeral archives — serves as a fertile ground on which we can stage
discussions of the perils, pleasures, meanings and methods of
inter-disciplinarity. While disciplines are defined partially by the
evidentiary protocols that they follow, the very nature of
inter-disciplinary enquiry calls into crisis the idea of a single protocol.
The methodological concerns with the seeking and making of certainty and
truth implicate a whole range of disciplines: anthropology, art, history,
law, religion, philosophy, politics, economics, literature, theatre, and
science, to name just a few. The stakes in thinking with evidence are very
high since doing so raises the core epistemological claims, regarding not
just of what, but also how we know. This is rendered all the more difficult
because the very grounds of evidence are themselves shifting terrain,
subject not only to developments in science and technology but also to
forms of historical consciousness and social knowledge.

Thinking with evidence in engaging the encounters and intimacies between
the imaginations of the legal and the social can provoke interdisciplinary
conversations, in the affective and corporeal works and worlds of making,
seeking and living with truth. Such an engagement offers an invitation to
re-invigorate discussions around the dialectic of the abstract and the
concrete of jurisdiction, procedure and techné.

How does evidence index intelligibility and illegibility simultaneously on
bodies and things? How are questions of inheritance and memory mediated
through a claim to the evidentiary? How may one think of ways of doing
politics and living with law? Or address questions of responsibility and
conduct, particularly as these arise in the context of experience, acting
as evidence of legitimate speech?

The English word ‘evidence’ is associated with Latin verb, vidier, to see.
The relationship between seeing, believing and knowing, when mediated by
visual technologies, transforms ways of seeking certainity and making
truth. Along with criminal law, procedural and constitutional law also
offer fertile grounds to think of evidence as an object of truth and power.
In our technologized regimes that are heavily invested in the forensic
fascination with truth detection, how do we think of the constitutional
implications of scientific evidence and the truth claims that they make?

Moreover, why is the ocular or aural privileged over the haptic or
olfactory? How do we furnish evidence of experiences of humiliation when
ocular or aural techniques of knowing and telling make suffering illegible
in the legal languages of evidence? Moving our gaze to the gamut of
categories that populate ‘evidence law’ we ask following William Twining:
“how to do things with evidence?” Is it a legal fiction that there are
evidentiary rules that determine probability, presumption, fact, proof and
certainty, classifying some artefacts as facts or truths and others as
exaggerations, falsehoods or myths? How is the process of making juridical
facts, legal certainties and presumptions embedded in continuities and
changes in social relations in history, economy, culture and politics? How
does the production and circulation of technologies of evidence in popular
culture create demands for scientific evidence in actual trials?

What kind of commodity is evidence? What kinds of technologies are deployed
to evidence the body in law? What kinds of knowledges congeal in the
category of expert evidence, from archealogy to forensics, to act upon
languages of social suffering? What is the nature of the testimony that
underlies expert evidence in law and literature? Do concepts of evidence in
visual arts and performing arts speak to juridical notions of evidence,
testimony and witnessing?

How may we understand what we do with evidence when we turn to religion, or
custom; or state and non-state law? Drawing on the vast critical literature
on Hindu or Islamic law; or customary and indigenous law in colonial,
post-colonial and settler-colonial contexts, how may one think of evidence
as it mediates between law and justice in relation to the claims of truth
to power? How are notions of evidence in these traditions, or in traditions
of aurality/orality, constituted by the theories of codified visuality in
common law traditions? Further, what kinds of evidence does the discourse
on plurality, secularism and rights rely upon?

Why do certain kinds of evidence of suffering falter, while other kinds of
evidence succeed in making suffering visible? How do we think of evidence
in a broad sense—as not just documents, facts, proof, or expert knowledge
but also as "aesthetics of protests'', as truths that counter the processes
by which evidence is constructed in the context of of displacement, gender
violence, caste humiliation, mass violence, disappearances and/or state
terror? When certain facts are banished from courts of law, how do the
politics and aesthetics of protests furnish evidence of truth to power? How
does the regime of evidence produce marginalities and exclusions from
collective memory and historical record? What kind of residue resides in
the legal archive that allows us to describe how law is haunted by
unwritten precedents of injustice? In other words, how does evidence
actualise the separation of law from justice?

*Call For Papers| Conference Sub-Themes| Instructions for Submission
Conference Sub-Themes*

Histories of Evidence/ Evidence of History
Evidence and Affect
Evidence and Absence
The Art and Architecture of Evidence
Evidence in/ as the Archive
Evidence and its Corporealities
The Work of Evidence in State-building
Memory and Museums/ Curating Evidence
The Markets of Evidence
Rival Jurisprudences of Evidence
The Evidence of the Body/Body of Evidence
Jurisdictions of Evidence
Indicators, measurements and evidence
Evidence, governance and policy-making
Scientific Evidence and the Making of Juridical Truths
Identity (Political, Social and Juridical) and Evidence
Others

In keeping with the eclectic spirit of LASSnet, we welcome submissions that
address concerns of the LASSnet broadly in connection with the theme of the
conference, including papers, panels, and presentations on the sub-themes
detailed above. To mark the completion of 10 years of LASSnet in 2017, we
plan to bring out a series of edited volumes and/or special issues in
journals in 2017-2018. Book proposals or journal special-issues plans will
be a priority in this edition of LASSnet. We strongly encourage
participants to think of panels as potential volumes. The steering
committee will actively organise conversations around publication plans and
any one willing to organise pre-conference workshops is welcome to get in
touch with us.

*Instructions for submission of papers*

In keeping with the eclectic spirit of LASSnet, we welcome submissions that
address concerns of the LASSnet broadly in connection with the theme of the
conference, including papers, panels, and presentations on the sub-themes
detailed above. To mark the completion of 10 years of LASSnet in 2017, we
plan to bring out a series of edited volumes and/or special issues in
journals in 2017-2018. Book proposals or journal special-issues plans will
be a priority in this edition of LASSnet. We strongly encourage
participants to think of panels as potential volumes. The steering
committee will actively organise conversations around publication plans and
any one willing to organise pre-conference workshops is welcome to get in
touch with us.
We welcome proposals for panels as well as for individual paper
presentations.

Panel proposals: Panel coordinators should submit a panel description of
500 words as well as a proposed list of panelists (ideally no more than
four speakers per panel, including the chair-discussant) via online
submission link below (more details below). 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—discussant for the panel as a whole.

Individual papers: Paper abstracts (500 words maximum) should be submitted
via online submission link below. Please note that abstract/papers should
not be sent through email.
Online Submission Link: To submit Individual abstract you will have to :
i) Register as Author on submission website. Please refer to this document
for step by step procedure
ii) Login to submission website using credentials received during step i,
and upload an abstract in '.doc' or '.pdf' format along with additional
information. Please refer to this document for detailed guidelines

You can directly go to Abstract Submission Website if you have registered
yourself as an Author (step i. above), and read the guidelines for abstract
submission detailed in step ii above.

In case of Panel submissions:
iii) Panel coordinator must first submit the panel details through abstract
submission link (see step ii) with the difference that - instead of
uploading abstract you will upload a '.doc' or '.pdf' file containing panel
description and the list of panelists; and click on 'Panel abstract' box
instead of 'Individial abstract' checkbox in the additional questions
section (question number 1) of the abstract submission link.
iv) All panel authors will also submit their paper abstracts through
abstract submission link (see step ii) with the difference that - they will
click on 'Panel abstract' checkbox and provide name of the panel
coordinator (question number 6) in the additional questions section of the
abstract submission link.

Abstracts (Individual/Panel) should be submitted no later than 1st March
2016

We will get back to you within eight weeks of receiving the abstract or
paper proposal. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft
paper should be submitted to the conference secretariat by 30 October 2016
(using Online Paper Submission Link to be made available) and distributed
to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 15 November 2016.
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.

Contact the LASSnet 2016 Steering Committee at lassnetconf2016 [at] gmail
[dot] com

To join LASSnet please write to lassnet [at] gmail [dot] com

Other information will be announced in due course at LASSnet blog and
www.lassnet.org.
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lassnet.org%2F&h=RAQHUQQUzAQHfeHudfbdJQUh0nOLCi_ZxRf4vBGk5Rb_7WQ&enc=AZN92JWH-a26398C18iE7l8xa6wn7IjV4agUsxpDxOBqda2dw7at8se2ILBL7s53OEgHrhokmYMduaGnS3GYz29dimkhB2FE8m-jzGaiU6LZjYjore8g0yy1rc7UurS1oYBqxj77yA5_Qc32LNU6FjSCKj7nOFsStLCxEdNPfCfLCHklR4S2MIiZ8XInBn23qh9orrDPnMtJ-Hwcd6j6qayj&s=1>
You can also join our Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/Law-and-Social-Science-Research-Network-LASSnet-830404140410934/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel>page
for updates and notifications.

Thank You.
-- 
*Swastee Ranjan*

*Student Co-ordinator, Law and Social Sciences Research Network,*

*Anchored @ the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi-110067*

*Email: lassnet at gmail.com <lassnet at gmail.com>Web:
http://lassnet.blogspot.com/ <http://lassnet.blogspot.com/> and
www.lassnet.org <http://www.lassnet.org>*

*Dr Pratiksha Baxi, Anchor, LASSnetAssociate Professor, Centre for the
Study of Law and GovernanceJawaharlal Nehru University, DelhiEmail:
Pratiksha.Baxi at gmail.com <Pratiksha.Baxi at gmail.com>*

-- 

*Siddharth Narrain,*

*Research Associate,*

*Sarai - Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS),*
*29 Rajpura Road,** Civil Lines,** Delhi - 110 054. *