A Forthcoming Conference On the Semiotics of Law (2015)

From Anne Wagner, Faculté de droit, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, announcement of a conference:

Synesthetic Legalities: Sensory Dimensions of Law and Jurisprudence The 16th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2015) April 29-May 2, 2015 Hosted by the University of Hawai‘i Hilo Synesthesia is the phenomenon where sensual perceptions are joined together as a combined experience, i.e. the ability to feel color, hear the visual, or even smell emotion. These types of unions expand the normativity of our legal thinking, as the abilities to represent the tethering of emotion, place, and concept to law are magnified. Such sensory hybridity stimulates a potentially otherwise linear consciousness through the multilayered approach to planes, scopes, and atmospheres. When we synesthestically conceptualize various realms of law, such amalgamation offers creative insight into the complexities of how law works through our bodies, our hands, our ears, our eyes, our noses and tongues, and even in the places we inhabit. In this way, legal interpretation contributes to our understanding of how law works according to sensory input, sensory output, and the tethering that happens within these sensory unions. Particulars located in the layers of legal synesthesia semiotically generate a notion of law that challenges and transforms the legal semiotic beyond the visual to include the spatial, the temporal, the aural, the tangible, the culinary, and the olfactory. Drawing upon the Hawaiian cycle of A‘o that emphasizes a continual process of learning through teaching and teaching while learning, this roundtable will explore the richly complex manifestations of synesthesia and law in the following ways: • How does law stimulate our senses? • Constitutively, how do our senses stimulate law and jurisprudence? • How do we feel law? • How do we taste law? • How do we smell law? • How do we see law? • How do we hear law? • What sorts of combinations happens when we synesthetically and creatively approachperceptions of law, legal interpretation, legal consciousness, and legal culture?  The 16th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law invites further discussion into these and related questions and welcomes a plurality of approaches, including those of legal studies, philosophy, social science, linguistics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities.  Abstracts of 300 words (max.) can be submitted by December 1, 2014 to Sarah Marusek (Organizer)(marusek@hawaii.edu) and Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) with participation decisions made by January 1, 2015.  Selected papers will be invited for publication in a special issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer: http://www.springer.com/lawjournal11196) or edited volume.