Via James Martel:
CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Connal Parsley, Nick Piška
and the KLS CLC Committee
CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The
Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than
500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for
Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there
are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible
frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.”
bound to no crucial date or event.”
The
present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive
turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we
witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”?
The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on
precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global
context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of
Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking
a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and
political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality),
we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of
the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the
present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for
that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded,
recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and
migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or
disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and
experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law
forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and
governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare
provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets;
or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies,
and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical
legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces
inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to
question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might
be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is
the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in
relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we
post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core
critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True
to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general
provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and
interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed
Plenary Speakers:
The Call for Stream
Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along
with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk.
The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when
streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via
the webpage shortly*: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/index.html
We also invite
participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative
formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with
your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them.
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