Tom Nicholson, ‘Towards a Monument to Batman’s Treaty’ (2013)

Dissent and disposition are both relational. To dissent is to disagree and be at variance: to refuse an established order, to diverge from orthodoxy, to oppose, critique, quarrel and rearrange. If political dissent is commonly understood as speaking truth to power, how does this occur, or occur differently, now that power is increasingly dislocated from state forms, and the production of ‘truth’ by experts is itself subverted? How might law facilitate and energise, or suppress and silence such dissent? More than just political or legal dissent, how might these forms work alongside aesthetic, literary and artistic modes of dissent in reshaping the conduct of law, and of life?

Dispositions relate to the character, arrangements, tendencies and temperaments of conduct – arrangements of language and law, orderings of space and time, as well as proclivities and attitudes. Dispositions involve legal transfers, bestowals, and powers to dispose or control. What, then, of lawful or unlawful dispositions, as well as dispositions of literature, of images and imagination?

The Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia invites consideration of the arrangements and rearrangements of the conduct of law and life. How might dissents inform individual or collective dispositions of law and literature, of image or imagination, lawful or otherwise? Conversely, how might dissents manifest or incite dispositions, including dispositions towards and within law, whether hopeful, nervous, antagonistic or anarchic? How do law’s dispositions and predispositions relate to dissents in specific times and places?

We invite explorations of the dispositions of law and jurisprudence, and how these relate to dissents, resistance and transformation. We call for re-examinations of the dispositions of critique, and the conduct of dissent. Researchers and others working in any area of law or the humanities, broadly conceived, are called to share your own engagements with dissents and dispositions. As with previous conferences, we especially welcome scholarship into relationships with indigenous jurisprudences and the humanities, Asian and Australian humanities and jurisprudences and the regional elaboration of the South.

Conference of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia

City of Melbourne: La Trobe Law School and Melbourne Law School

12-14 December 2017 (Postgraduate Day on 11 December 2017)

Please submit proposals for papers, panels and streams to llhaaconference@gmail.com. Proposals should consist of a short abstract (max. 250 words) and a short author bio.

Deadline for stream proposals: 27 March 2017

Deadline for paper and panel proposals: 30 June 2017

Queries should be addressed to llhaaconference@gmail.com

Further details at the Association’s website.