Thomas on Crime as an Assemblage @crowdedmouth

Phil Crockett Thomas, University of Glasgow, is publishing Crime as an Assemblage in the Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Criminology for 2020. Here is the abstract.

This article seeks to make an original contribution to criminology and the sociology of crime and punishment by elaborating the ‘assemblage’, a concept which originates in the collaborative poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and discussing its ontological implications for researching crime. I will first introduce the concept and its application. I then discuss the relationship between the assemblage and Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif. I demonstrate how the assemblage could be used to analyze crime events and discuss questions of change and scale within the assemblage. I conclude by outlining some implications for how adopting this concept would change the way we practice and research crime and punishment.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book on Law's "Spatial Turn": Spaces of Justice, Edited by Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir

Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir, both of the Griffith Law School, are editing Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations (Routledge, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

This collection is inspired by the transdisciplinary possibilities posed by the connections between space and justice. Drawing on a variety of theoretical influences that include Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Antonio Negri and Yan Thomas, the contributors to this book conduct a series of jurisprudential, aesthetic and political inquiries into ‘just’ modes of occupying space, and the ways in which space comes under the signs of law and justice. Bringing together leading critical legal scholars with theorists and practitioners from other disciplines within the humanities, Spaces of Justice investigates unexplored associations between law and architectural theory, the visual arts, geography and cultural studies. The book contributes to the ongoing destabilisation of the boundaries between law and the broader humanities and will be of considerable interest to scholars and students with an interest in the normative dimensions of law’s ‘spatial turn’.

Bruncevic @doctorbruncevic Publishing Book With Routledge on Law, Art, and the Commons

Forthcoming from Routledge:

Merima Bruncevic, Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, is publishing Law, Art and the Commons (November 30, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The concept of the cultural commons has become increasingly important for legal studies. Within this field, however, it is a contested concept: at once presented as a sphere for creativity, democratic access and freedom of speech, and as one that denies property rights and misappropriates the public domain. In this book, Merima Bruncevic takes up the cultural commons not merely as an abstract notion, but in its connection to physical spaces such as museums and libraries. A legal cultural commons can, she argues, be envisioned as a lawscape that can quite literally be entered and engaged with. Focusing largely on artin the context of the copyright regime, but also addressing a number of cultural heritage issues, the book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine the realm of the commons as a potential space for overcoming the dichotomy between the owner and the consumer of culture. Challenging this dichotomy, it is the productive and creative potential of law itself that is elicited through the book’s approach to the commons as the empirical basis for a new legal framework, which is able to accommodate a multitude of interests and values.

Galic, Timan, and Koops on Bentham, Deleuze, and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories From the Panopticon to Participation

Maša Galič, Tjerk Timan, and Bert-Jaap Koops, all of Tilburg University, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, have published Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation at Philos. Technol. (2016), DOI: 10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1. Here is the abstract.

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological-thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks, which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self-)disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines, or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance, and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance, and top-down with self-surveillance. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link.