Turning Points

“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier, bound to no crucial date or event.”

The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context – an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.

Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?

Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?

True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.

The Call for Papers and Panels is NOW OPEN. Streams include:

— After Christian Law? Contesting Law’s Christianity, Contemplating Alternatives
— Biopolitics and Deconstruction
— Blockchain Law
— The Crisis of Democracy in an Antipolitical Age
— A Crisis of the Liberal Vision of the Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights? Turning Points in the East and West
— From Crisis to Resilience: Spatial Justice in an Age of Austerity
— Critical Perspectives on Culture and Preservation: Precarity in our Past, Present and Future Cultural Heritages
— Critical Psycholawgy: Dialogue at Modern Times Between Legal and Psychological Sciences
— Feminist Turning Points
— Islamic Law: Contemporary Reconfigurations
— Occupation & The Day After: Prefiguration, Representation, Organisation
— On the Legal Production of the (New) Commons: Law as a Living Practice
— Pauline Interventions in Law
— Parrhêsia and the Law
— Re-sistance, Re-Expropriation, Re-Enclosure
— Responses to the Loss of the Political: Intellectuals, Humanitarians and the Revolutionaries
— Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Law
— The Time and Temporality of Vulnerability
— Urbanity, Control and the Commons: Realising Possible Urban Futures

For detailed Stream synopses please visit:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/papers.html

Please send your Paper and Panel Proposal directly to Stream organisers at the email address given following the Stream blurb (in a *.doc file format). If your Paper or Panel does not ‘fit’ any of the Streams please send it to the General Stream at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk.

Paper Proposals should include an abstract of no longer than 300 words and a brief author biography. Panel Proposals should include the panel title and rationale (of no more than 300 words) and abstracts and biographies for all participants in the panel. The Call Closes on 1 July 2016.

We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).

Registration for the conference is also open:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/registration.html

Finally, we’ve unearthed a number of early CLC documents in the KLS archive – please visit the archive to find out more:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/archive.html

For more information visit:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/index.html

Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee