Cultures of Legality in Weimar Germany: Next Series of Lectures at the University of Lucerne

From Dr. Stephen Howe, Senior Research and Lecturer, Associate Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, Iucernaiuris, University of Lucerne

The next series of lectures in Cultures of Legality in Weimar Germany

Wednesday 12 November, 10.00-11.00

Visualising ‘Through Science to Justice’? Sexological Photographs during the Weimar Republic

Xiaojue Michelle Zhu (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

 

Tuesday 25 November, 16.00-17.00

Visualizing the Legal Subject in Weimar Film

Hannes Charen (Pratt Institute, Brooklyn)

 

Wednesday 10 December, 09.00-10.00

The Paragraph Film: Genre, Emotions and the Struggle for Law

Steven Howe (University of Lucerne)

 

All sessions are free and open to all, and we warmly invite you to join us. Further details, including registration info, available via the links.

 

Please note that listed start times are CET. Time zone converter here.

Call For Applications, Visiting Fellows 2026, for the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne

Call For Applications: Visiting Fellows 2026

The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the University of Lucerne invites applications for our Visiting Fellows Programme 2026.

 

The fellowship programme supports junior scholars who wish to spend a period of time in Lucerne pursuing work that overlaps with or otherwise complements scholarly activities currently being pursued at the institute. During their stay, fellows enjoy access to our specialist resources, and are invited to share and develop their ideas with our community of faculty, researchers and students.  

 

Tailored to PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, the programme is open to all working on interdisciplinary topics at the intersections between law, the humanities and the social sciences. Focusing on critical and theoretical approaches, the institute aims to bring together a diverse group of scholars who read and think widely across fields, contexts and disciplines.

 

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 30 September 2025.

 

Further details here.

 

For a full list of funding opportunities at the institute, please see here.

Call for Applications: Critical Times Summer School, University of Lucerne, 30 June to 4 July 2025

From Steven Howe, University of Lucerne: Call For Applications, Disruptions: Summer School, University of Lucerne

Critical Times 2025

Disruptions

Summer School

University of Lucerne, 30 June to 4 July 2025

 

Ours is a time of disruption; a “disruptive age” as Bernard Stiegler terms it. Rapid technological change, the accelerating scarcity of biospheric resources, heightened political and economic volatility, social unrest and discontent – these are just some of the pressures that are radically (re-)shaping the modern condition, and which are making the experience of disruptiveness an “epochal signature” (Erich Hörl) of the twenty-first century.

 

The language of disruption is pervasive. At root, the term derives from the Latin disrumpere, meaning to break apart or to shatter; it refers to the action of “rending or bursting asunder”. But it also carries the sense of interrupting or jamming; of “breaking between” and “preventing something […] from continuing as usual or as expected”. To disrupt is to unsettle conventional frames and norms, flows and continuities – it is, in essence, a destructive act. And yet equally, it holds force as a generative move – one that not only calls into question what is entrenched and naturalized but which conjures the possibility of thinking and making things anew. 

 

For this year’s Critical Times summer school, we invite postdocs, ECRs and graduate students from across disciplines to join us for a week of intensive exchange on the meanings, forms and effects of disruption – as event, as process, as mode, as gesture. Our aim is to open a space for thinking – deeply, critically and creatively – about how disruptive forces upset existing notions of law and justice, tradition and community, and about the possibilities they open for transforming our legal, political and cultural imaginaries. Topics for consideration might include:

 

• How does the experience of disruptiveness impact the means and ways of ordering legal and political life?
• To what extent are rising “anti-democratic forces” engendering a “nihilistic disintegration of the social compact” (Wendy Brown)? What strategies are available to challenge these forces and to help re-knit the social and/or democratic fabric?
• How are shifting political dynamics – local, national and international – contributing to a dislocation of shared cultural values and dispositions? How might these effects be countered or mitigated? 
• What is the work of media forms and practices in cultivating or resisting disruptive energies? 
• How does the recent (re-)thinking of human and non-human agencies disrupt conventional notions of normativity and subjectivity – in law, politics and culture?
• What kinds of lawful relations are necessary to make our disrupted worlds newly livable and habitable?
• Which imaginative practices and resources have the power to disrupt entrenched narratives and deconstruct mythical understandings of the past?
• How might such practices and resources interrupt and transform our experience of time and space and with what artistic, political and legal implications?
• What aesthetic forms and representations might be enlisted to disrupt the “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière) and offer new ways of seeing and understanding? 
• How might contestatory aesthetic and political practices catalyze change and produce a shift in hegemonic articulations of the im/possible? 
  

Confirmed speakers: Shane Chalmers (University of Hong Kong), Başak Ertür (Goldsmiths), Julen Etxabe (University of British Columbia), Mónica López Lerma (Reed College), Desmond Manderson (The Australian National University), Greta Olson (University of Giessen).

 

Full programme details will be constantly updated here as more information becomes available.

 

Application details here. Deadline: 14 March 2025

 

Contact: steven.howe@unilu.ch

Howe on For a Justice-To-Come: Milo Rau's Utopian Realism

Steven Howe, University of Lucerne, has published For a Justice-to-Come: Milo Rau’s Utopian Realism at 60 Seminar 108 (May 2024). Here is the abstract.

One of the most prolific political theatre makers in Europe today, Milo Rau is known for his commitment to a realist art of possibility—a "Möglichkeitsrealismus," as he defines it, devoted to opening space for envisioning possible alternatives to the status quo. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's writings on utopia, this article argues for an understanding of Rau's artistic practice as a kind of "concrete utopianism" that materially engages the world so as to imagine—and enact—new possibilities for improvement and transformation. Via a reading of Rau's Kongo Tribunal (2015), an attempt is made to show how, by staging the tribunal in the here and now of performance, the artist seeks to disclose the real but not yet realized possibilities available in the present, giving form to an alternative institutionality—and an alternative practice of justice—that is made fully graspable in the imagination and in reality. As a material act of imagining otherwise, the Kongo Tribunal refuses the closure of the present, inviting spectators to step back and recognize the institutionalized forms of law and justice not as fixed but variable—and thus (still) open to change.

CFP (Updated): In the Thick of Images: Law, History, and the Visual

From Laura Petersen, University of Lucerne, co-sponsor of the conference In the Thick of Images: Law, History, and the Visual, here is an updated version of the CFP and a list of the keynote speakers.

CALL FOR PAPERS
In the Thick of Images: Law, History, and the Visual 
Conference

Monday 10 + Tuesday 11 June 2024 
University of Lucerne 

“Suppose that whatever we’ve done, felt, and thought has always happened in the thick of images.” (Anand Pandian, Reel Word: An Anthropology of Creation) 

The ‘visual turn’ has long been turning in critical and cultural studies of law (see Douzinas & Nead 1999). In the past twenty-five years, a growing body of scholarship has evolved that emphasises law’s “constitutive imbrication” (Crawley 2020) with an array of visual forms, and elaborates on the ways in which images “shape and transform legal life” (Sarat et al. 2005). Weaving together an eclectic set of theories, concepts, methods and materials, such studies refuse thin readings of images as merely illustrative of law, and invite us to think more deeply about their ideological and visual operations – about the meanings they carry and make available, about their material presence and affective effects, and about the cultural-political and cultural-legal work they perform across their multiple contexts of production, circulation and reception.

Much of this scholarship focuses on the contemporary conjuncture of law and visuality. Yet law’s imbrication with the visual is not exclusive to the present; law has always lived, happened and mattered “in the thick of images”. This is the starting point for our two-day conference, which seeks to explicitly foreground historical and historicist work on law and the visual. Situated at the disciplinary crossroads of law, history, visual cultural studies, art history, film and photography studies, In the Thick of Images invites multiple viewpoints and approaches to converge on ways of negotiating the entanglements of law, history and the visual – in various contexts, scales and timeframes.

Link to the full Call for Papers and other information

Proposals due by 19 January 2024 to laura.petersen@unilu.ch 

Convenors

Steven Howe (steven.howe@unilu.ch)
Laura Petersen (laura.petersen@unilu.ch)
Nicole Schraner (nicole.schraner@unilu.ch)

 

The conference forms part of the SNSF research project: Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany

 

Keynote speakers:

• Valérie Hayaert (University of Warwick)
• Desmond Manderson (Australian National University)
• Jolene Rickard (Cornell University)
• Frederic J. Schwartz (University College London)

 

Call For Papers: University of Lucerne: In the Thick of Images: Law, History, and the Visual

From Steven Howe, University of Lucerne:

In the Thick of Images: Law, History, and the Visual 

Monday 10 & Tuesday 11 June 2024 
University of Lucerne 

CALL FOR PAPERS 

“Suppose that whatever we’ve done, felt, and thought has always happened in the thick of images.” (Anand Pandian, Reel Word: An Anthropology of Creation) 

The ‘visual turn’ has long been turning in critical and cultural studies of law (see Douzinas & Nead 1999). In the past twenty-five years, a growing body of scholarship has evolved that emphasises law’s “constitutive imbrication” (Crawley 2020) with an array of visual forms, and elaborates on the ways in which images “shape and transform legal life” (Sarat et al. 2005). Weaving together an eclectic set of theories, concepts, methods and materials, such studies refuse thin readings of images as merely illustrative of law, and invite us to think more deeply about their ideological and visual operations – about the meanings they carry and make available, about their material presence and affective effects, and about the cultural-political and cultural-legal work they perform across their multiple contexts of production, circulation and reception.

Much of this scholarship focuses on the contemporary conjuncture of law and visuality. Yet law’s imbrication with the visual is not exclusive to the present; law has always lived, happened and mattered “in the thick of images”. This is the starting point for our two-day conference, which seeks to explicitly foreground historical and historicist work on law and the visual. Situated at the disciplinary crossroads of law, history, visual cultural studies, art history, film and photography studies, In the Thick of Images invites multiple viewpoints and approaches to converge on ways of negotiating the entanglements of law, history and the visual – in various contexts, scales and timeframes.

Link to the full Call for Papers and other information

* Keynote speakers to be announced shortly

Proposals due by 19 January 2024 to laura.petersen@unilu.ch 

Convenors

Steven Howe (steven.howe@unilu.ch)
Laura Petersen (laura.petersen@unilu.ch)
Nicole Schraner (nicole.schraner@unilu.ch)

 

The conference forms part of the SNSF research project: Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany

 

Call For Applications: Critical Times Workshops: Movement(s): June 5-9, 2023, University of Lucerne

From Steven Howe, University of Lucerne:

Call for Applications

Critical Times Workshop: MOVEMENT(S)

5-9 June 2023

University of Lucerne

 

We are pleased to announce the next in our annual series of Critical Times workshops.

 

The theme of this year’s programme is Movement(s), and you can find out more via the link. The programme has been designed with post-graduate students and early career researchers in mind, and features a series of tailor-made workshops, lectures, and seminars from leading scholars around the world, including:

 

• Radha D’Souza (What’s Wrong with Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations)
• Debjani Ganguly (This Thing Called World: The Contemporary Novel in Global Form)
• Desmond Manderson (Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts)
• Fiona Macmillan (Intellectual and Cultural Property: Between Market and Community)

 

Movement(s) will appeal particularly to those researching in interdisciplinary approaches to law and critical theory. Organised by a global consortium of partner institutions, the workshop offers a unique opportunity to learn and think together, and to meet like-minded students and scholars working in this unique research space, from different disciplines and from different places around the world.

 

The full programme of activities will be published soon. If you would like to receive the programme as soon as it is released, please sign up via email to lucernaiuris@unilu.ch.

 

The deadline for applications is 10 March 2023. Further details here.

 

All enquiries to steven.howe@unilu.ch.

 

 

Organised by

• Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne
• Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, The Australian National University

 

in association with

• Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia
• Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand
• Faculty of Law, University of Roma Tre
• Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide
• Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong

 

Law and Humanities Workshop: Futurity Now? September 6-8, 2022

 From Professor Steven Howe, University of Lucerne:

Law and Humanities Workshop: Futurity Now?

6-8 September 2022

Online via Zoom

Convened by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne & the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, The Australian National University

 

It is not so long ago that Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of My Life (2013), pronounced the “slow cancellation of the future.” Riffing on a phrase of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Fisher identifies a cultural inertia that resides in a collective inability to “grasp and articulate the present.” The ubiquity of capitalism – and of a capitalist realism that presumes there is no alternative to the neoliberal global order – has, Fisher argues, given rise to a condition in which “life continues, but time has stopped.” The “slow cancellation of the future” thus becomes, in Fisher’s hands, a critical expression of this insidious creep that gradually but relentlessly corrodes the social imagination – and with it, the radical potential of the future. As Wendy Brown describes it, this loss of futurity and of forward momentum “makes the weight of the present very heavy: all mass, no velocity.” Or “in the terms of late modern speediness … all speed, no direction.”

 

Is, then, the future over? Not quite. Indeed, there is no greater critical concern in the contemporary moment than the future, and recent years have seen a marked resurgence of thinking about futurity. Fired by the urgency of our current condition, writers, theorists, artists and activists have turned anew to consider the possibilities of the future, both as a subject of theorization and as an orientation for practice in the world.

 

Against this background, the law and humanities workshop proposes a multi- and interdisciplinary discussion around the topic of “Futurity Now?” A joint venture of a global network of partner institutions, the workshop will offer a creative and stimulating space for exploring critical and theoretical perspectives on the future “as time, as event, as condition, as an orientation to the oncoming” (Saint-Amour).

 

The workshop programme will comprise the following three sessions (all online):

 

• Tuesday 6 September, 15.00 (CEST): Can Law Control the Future? (or it is just a Part of the Past?) (hosted by the Faculty of Law, University of Roma Tre)
• Wednesday 7 September, 10.00 (CEST) / 18.00 (AEDT): Colonial Legal Imaginaries / Southern Literary Futures (hosted by the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, ANU & the University of Adelaide)
• Thursday 8 September, 10.00 (CEST): Organizing the Future (Or: How to Demand a Million More Years?) (hosted by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies - lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne)

 

Please follow the links for workshop descriptions and registration details.

 

All enquiries to lucernaiuris@unilu.ch.

Law and Humanities Summer School: Law, Art, Politics, University of Lucerne, June 15-19, 2020

Law and Humanities Summer School: Law, Art, Politics

(15-19 June 2020, University of Lucerne)

The Law and Humanities Summer School is an intensive one-week study programme, to be held at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, from 15 to 19 June 2020. The school is co-organised by the following partners:

• Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne
• Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, The Australian National University
• Law Department, University of Roma Tre
• Institute for Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Bringing together leading scholars, researchers and postgraduate students, the school will showcase cutting-edge work at the intersections of law and the humanities, and serve as a laboratory for exploring a range of contemporary methods, approaches and issues.

Focus: Law, Art, Politics

The 2020 Summer School will focus on the entanglements of law, art and politics. From statues of the Roman Emperors to Picasso’s Guernica, some of the world’s most celebrated works of art have been explicitly political. But in the twenty-first century everything has been disrupted – including law, including art, including politics. We live in a world obsessed by images and distrustful of politics; a world in which the public sphere is collapsing and private interests seem more powerful than ever. What, then, is the role of art in making and unmaking, representing and challenging the language of law and the power of politics? Can art disrupt the disruptors?

Starting from this contemporary perspective, the school will offer a panorama of the dynamic intercourse between law, art and politics across a variety of sites, contexts and periods. The programme will draw on the expertise of scholars working in different research fields and across multiple critical traditions to address such questions as:

•        How do images and aesthetics shape the character of law?

•        What role does art play in transmitting legal and political ideology, or in fostering critique or social change?

•        How might we understand the relations between forms of artistic cultural expression and legal identities?

•        What are the effects of art’s material manifestations on the law?

•        How does art participate in, activate, or reflect upon the imagining of legal futures?

Further information here.

Law and Humanities Summer School: Law, Art, Politics, University of Lucerne, June 15-19, 2020

Law and Humanities Summer School: Law, Art, Politics

(15-19 June 2020, University of Lucerne)

The Law and Humanities Summer School is an intensive one-week study programme, to be held at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, from 15 to 19 June 2020. The school is co-organised by the following partners:

• Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne
• Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, The Australian National University
• Law Department, University of Roma Tre
• Institute for Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Bringing together leading scholars, researchers and postgraduate students, the school will showcase cutting-edge work at the intersections of law and the humanities, and serve as a laboratory for exploring a range of contemporary methods, approaches and issues.

Focus: Law, Art, Politics

The 2020 Summer School will focus on the entanglements of law, art and politics. From statues of the Roman Emperors to Picasso’s Guernica, some of the world’s most celebrated works of art have been explicitly political. But in the twenty-first century everything has been disrupted – including law, including art, including politics. We live in a world obsessed by images and distrustful of politics; a world in which the public sphere is collapsing and private interests seem more powerful than ever. What, then, is the role of art in making and unmaking, representing and challenging the language of law and the power of politics? Can art disrupt the disruptors?

Starting from this contemporary perspective, the school will offer a panorama of the dynamic intercourse between law, art and politics across a variety of sites, contexts and periods. The programme will draw on the expertise of scholars working in different research fields and across multiple critical traditions to address such questions as:

• How do images and aesthetics shape the character of law?
• What role does art play in transmitting legal and political ideology, or in fostering critique or social change?
• How might we understand the relations between forms of artistic cultural expression and legal identities?
• What are the effects of art’s material manifestations on the law?
• How does art participate in, activate, or reflect upon the imagining of legal futures?

Further information here.

Call For Applications, Fellowships: Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne

From the mailbox:

The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the University of Lucerne is pleased to announce the call for applications for its Young Scholar Visiting Fellowship scheme for 2018.  

The fellowship programme is part of our mission to promote international and interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. Fellows are invited to spend an extended period at the institute, during which they can share and develop research and teaching ideas with our members.

Full details can be found here. The deadline for submission of applications is Thursday 30 November 2017.

Informal enquiries can be directed to Dr. Steven Howe (steven.howe@unilu.ch).