The Synesthesia of Law conference, a collaboration between Princeton University and Sciences Po Law School, will take place from Sept 29 to Oct 1 at Princeton.

We understand the term synaesthesia as a crossing of boundaries, a sensual saturnalia and mixture of the unmixable. Hearing colors, smelling music, sensing law. Synesthesia, we propose, is colorful and unruly, neither subsumable nor legible by means of common procedures. We thus invoke the term not only to denote translatability, simultaneity and perceptibility, but also to suggest a possibility of mixture, manipulation, movement, and change. It can be understood as pointing to the moments of interaction between various perceptible – that is visual, audible, haptic, olfactory, palpable dimensions of law – thereby producing a multi-dimensional and multi-sensuous space of rhizomatic interrelation.

Law, we therefore insist, is to be found not only in the judicial decision, the act of legislation, or the wording of a contract, but also in the assured crossing of a bustling road when the light turns green, in the docile step into a dark and cold classroom at the alarming sound of a ringing bell, in the thick scent of a burning tree in the Amazon, in the feelings of anxiety, anger and fear with which we are engulfed each time the government ‘color-codes’ our sense of security, and in the blended taste of the genetically-modified tomato we nevertheless devour with gusto.

The shift in focus to these long-ignored but important facets of the juridical is an important political statement about not only the presence of law in the seemingly most intimate moments and areas of life but also of law’s role in shaping and structuring the way we experience, sense, and make ‘sense’ of these.

By challenging the underpinnings and limits of our longstanding notions of the juridical, and by drawing attention to the existence of many unrecognized ‘fora’ of law-making –the street, the classroom, and the rainforest– the conference aims to suggest not only an alternative way of knowing, thinking, and ‘practicing’ law, but also the availability of a multiplicity of undertheorized channels for legal/political action. In so doing, we hope to open new ways to respond to current political, juridical and socio-cultural conflicts – conflicts that, much like law, transcend and transgress social, cultural, institutional, geographical, material and sensorial boundaries.

The 3-day event will be live-streamed and we will take questions after every panel via twitter, in order to let as many people as possible participate in this event.

The event is, in general, free and open to everyone.

For more information, please see:  http://synesthesia.princeton.edu