Symposium: ‘Law and Image: Picturing a theory’, Birkbeck 5 June 2015

by Admin | 27 May 2015

Friday, 5 June 2015

9:30 to 19:00
43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, Room B04

This one-day symposium will take place at Birkbeck, University of London. A limited number of seats are still available. Attendance is free of charge, but registration is necessary.

The symposium will focus on the relation of law to images. Work on law and images usually centres around how law acts on images or how it categorises and censors them; we want to focus instead on how images can be used to understand law. Today, the category of image is broader than ever, we include in its ambit photographs, moving images, graphic illustrations, sketches, paintings and graffiti. This symposium seeks to create an interdisciplinary space, and invite scholars from the fields of legal theory, history, art history, visual culture, film studies,anthropology and psychoanalysis to explore the relation between law and images.
The symposium will centre on questions such as: How do images produce truths and articulate law? As law struggles to cope with the new world order and regain its lost majesty, what role do images of law play in constituting the subjectivity of the citizens? What implications does this relation of law to images have for legal theory? How does a visual approach to law help us to readdress and reformulate the issues of justice, democracy, sovereignty and rule of law?
In addition, we would like to explore images from a non-European tradition. Much of the existing scholarship on law and images has been rooted in historical accounts that have been developed within the Western academy. Whether materialist, psychoanalytical or deconstructive such accounts cannot be assumed to have global purchase. We would like to pay special emphasis to the relation between law and images in the global south and post-colonial cultures. What are the limits of this practice? Should image theory develop its own set of parameters based on geography? What is the role of colonialism in this picture?

Legal phenomenology of images

Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck

What does law ‘really’ want? Towards a legal theory of the image

Marcus De Matos, Birkbeck

The own image: Constituting new media 1890/1900

Fabian Steinhauer, University of Frankfurt

Discussant: Adam Gearey

Crime and crisis in contemporary anti-detective films

Ahmet Gürata, Bilkent University, Ankara

Encountering the myths of Human Rights and new aesthetics of justice

Ozan Kamiloglu, Birkbeck

Regimes of the visual in the Gran Chaco region: Picturing the Kadiwéu