What is Law’s relationship to senses? In a sense, Law, the anaesthetic par excellence, is constantly engaged in numbing the senses into commonsense; manipulating, channelling and controlling the sensible; inserting properties and forbidding contacts; dissimulating violence, regulating sounds and defining taste. However, senses are not static. Rather, they are shifting and elusive qualities, constantly reshuffled by socio-cultural and technological changes, always dislocating Law’s normativity towards new potentialities. In this other sense, Law emerges from the senses, and whereas senses are a constant arena of legal machinations, they are also Law’s constant blind spot and inescapable excess.
Is there then a legal sensing, an illegal sensing, or even perhaps a sensing beyond the Law? How does Law sense? Can Law hear, taste, smell, touch, see? Can Law indulge in sensual pleasures, or is it confined to the anaesthetic arena of common sense? Can senses be a tool to use, know and study Law better? Would this make Law more ‘sensible’, or instead more suffocating?
The conference Law and the Senses proposes to reflect critically on how law deals with senses, how law senses, how law makes sense. We invite you to think, discuss and question the sound of law, the tactile encounter with its forms, its bitter/sweet taste, its pungent smell, its perspectival gaze. We encourage you to investigate the sensing of law, the capacity for law to (make) sense, and the possibility for Law to sense differently. We welcome trans- disciplinary contributions, from legal, geographical, sociological, psychological, philosophical, political and cultural areas, as well as from the arts (exhibition and performance space is provided).
This conference seeks to interfere with the standard conference format. We wish to shake such an often taken-for-granted scaffolding, not to propose ‘better’ models, but rather to produce interferences, noise and turbulence, out of which we hope creative encounters would emerge. This does not mean getting rid of the rules and internal regulations of conferencing altogether, but instead opening a fuzzier space for the conference to unfold, by making such constraints less rigid. There will be given no time for presentations, though the duty to prevent them from becoming infinite will remain with the moderator. We invite presentations conceived as a tool for stimulating a debate, rather than unilateral talks addressed to a passive audience. Therefore we kindly ask to refrain from merely reading out papers and rather trying to perform them through your voice and body, handing out material, using powerpoint, notes, other sensory stimulations and any other format you prefer.
The conference inaugurates the Non Liquet [The Westminster Online Working Papers] first online publication of the new series of papers on law and the senses, aiming to critically reflect on law and the senses. The series encompasses five issues dedicated to each sense: taste, smell, hearing, touch and vision.
PROGRAMME
Thursday, 18th April 2013
Awakening | |||
Beginning | 10.30 | ||
Screening | |||
Lunching | 12.30 – 1.15 | ||
Trans-sensing | |||
Coffee | 3.15 – 3.30 | ||
Echoes | |||
Inauguration | 5.30 | ||
Drinking |
Friday, 19th April 2013
Beginning | 10.30 | ||
Attuning | |||
Lunching | 12.30 – 1.15 | ||
Vulnerability | |||
Coffee | 3.15 – 3.30 | ||
Hearings | |||
Finish | 5.30 | ||
Any sense? |
Screening
‘The usual illusion’: the screen of aesthetics and its double function in law, Alessandra Asteriti (Glasgow)
Imag(in)ing Law: The British Raj and the Red Fort ! Kanika Sharma (Birkbeck)
Trans-sensing
And Law’s Sense of Time? A Modest Proposal to Recover the Dialogue between Law and History, Ricardo Baldissone
Hamlet and the thresholds of ‘sense’, Eric Heinze (Queen Mary)
Hope Sense: ‘Terrorist’ lives in Delhi’s Courts, Mayur Suresh (Birkbeck)
Echoes
Reverberation of ©, Danilo Mandic (Westminster)
OUR THEME IS ECHO: Sonorous Law I, Anne Bottomley (Kent Law School) & Nathan Moore (Birkbeck)
Atmospherics of conflict, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Andrea Pavoni (Westminster)
Attuning
The Smell of Law, Nicola Pozzani (S Sense)
The Art Piece: Unearthing the Sensuous Properties of Law, Daphne Bidstrup Hjorth
A Multi Sensory Approach to Criminal Justice, Amber Marks (Queen Mary)
Vulnerability
TBC Tanyel Oktar (Brunel)
A Dialogue on Vulnerable Encounters and Mutual Healing Nayeli Urquiza Haas (Kent Law School)
Eyeballing Alcock Bela Chatterjee (Lancaster)
Hearings
The feeling of Memory: An Anthropological Approach to the Senses in Criminal Courtroom, Ariane Monnier (Paris)
A Musical Trial, James Parker (Melbourne)
Karaoke court – exploring the aesthetics of dispute resolution, Jack Tan (RCA)
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