CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The Utopia/Dystopia
Project: A Writing Workshop
February 13-14, 2020
William S. Boyd School of
Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas
There
is no end / To what a living world / Will demand of you.
Octavia
Butler, Parable of the Sower
In these days of hate politics and urgent need, there is a great need for
countervailing narratives and envisioning. The Utopia/Dystopia Project
seeks to engage the legal imagination with utopian and dystopian art forms to
decolonize mental space, reframe critical consciousness, and engender deep
resistance. Project organizers believe that this art has much to teach the legal
academy about understanding contemporary politics and re-organizing and
re-envisioning what comes next. Popular utopian and dystopian narratives
may illuminate truth and sharpen our vision. Indeed, the most critical articulations
of these genres struggle with basic questions while expressing alternative
visions of what could be. Speculative texts urge us to think from a different
perspective than the ones we normally occupy, to live differently than we are,
and to dissent from the status quo. They teach us to resist against what scares
or enrages us, and to build and engender what we hope for and love. They show
us that alternative possibilities for empathy, recognition, and joy may be as
near as the next frame or the turn of a page.
This Workshop follows the
powerful Utopia/Dystopia Project Conference held at Tulane University School of
Law in April 2019, and panels at critical legal conferences in 2018-19. Guiding questions addressed
at these events included: What is law? What is justice? What are our
obligations to one another? What is sacred? What is
profane? What is a person? What is gender? What is sex? What is race? Must our
answers be linear, inevitable, binary? Participants also engaged questions
about ethics, power, and the realm of the political: How should we treat one
another? What does it mean to live a good or just life? How does power
structure our interactions and inevitabilities in our lives? Could power
structures be other than they appear to be? How?
What institutions shape our life chances/choices? What does it mean to belong
or to exclude? What is self, community, nation, other?
Please join us for an intimate workshop to support the development of a rich,
interdisciplinary legal scholarship that engages these themes. This Workshop will continue
this vital dialogue with a focus on developing the participants’ ideas and
scholarship toward the goal of publication. Participants will share
working drafts before the Workshop and receive intensive feedback at the
Workshop, as well as participate in discussions of cross-cutting ideas and
issues, in a supportive environment.
We are seeking proposals
for participation.
Participation may include
academic and artistic written materials that engage socio-legal themes, storytelling
in the critical race theory tradition, and speculative, utopian and/or
dystopian materials, themes, or ideas. Proposals
of 250-500 words should be emailed to elizabeth.macdowell@unlv.edu by Dec. 19, 2019 and
include the author’s resume. Selected participants
will be notified by Dec. 27.
Working drafts will be due
Jan. 24, 2020.
Inquiries may be sent to Elizabeth MacDowell or another organizing committee member: Cyra Akila
Choudhury, FSU College of Law; Atiba R. Ellis, Marquette University Law School; Anthony Farley, Albany Law School; Marc-Tizoc González, St. Thomas University School of Law; Lucy Jewel, University of Tennessee College of Law; Brant Lee, University of Akron School of Law; Saru Matambanadzo, Tulane University Law School; Christian B. Sundquist, Albany Law School; and Matthew Titolo, West Virginia University College of Law.
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