Call for Streams: Critical Legal Conference 2026

by Admin | 22 Apr 2026

CLC2026 invites stream proposals exploring the theme of PROTOCOLS, via three distinct modes, each with its own dedicated call (below) – WORKS OF TEXT, PERFORMING BODIES and PROOF OF CONCEPT.

For logistical reasons, we ask that each session is defined as a particular mode, though streams can incorporate sessions in multiple modes. Sessions will be conducted in 2-hour slots: one or more performances per 2h slot (even in the form of workshops and discursive gatherings), one proof of concept exploration per 2h slot, or ~four texts per 2h slot. It may exceptionally be possible for sessions to span 2x2h slots, depending on timetabling constraints. Streams may present a brief glimpse of their discussions, prototypes, performances, and texts to the conference, if they wish (more details to follow).

Stream proposals should be sent to CLC2026@westminster.ac.uk by 27th April 2026.

Conference: 9–11 September; University of Westminster, London

Proof of Concept

Digital technologies – AI systems, blockchain infrastructures, platforms, standards, automated decision-making systems, and contractual architectures – are actively producing new protocols of governance and bespoke jurisdictions. These protocols do not simply implement existing rules. They organise interaction, distribute authority, pre-structure decisions, and shape collective outcomes. They increasingly determine who can act, who decides, who bears risk, and how responsibility and legitimacy are assigned.

Technology is not treated here as a separate object of regulation. Instead, these systems are understood as practical arrangements through which governance is now built. Protocols make visible how authority is delegated, how decisions are automated or constrained, and how governance operates without stable sovereign centres – often through private ordering, hybrid public–private frameworks, and infrastructure-led rule-making.

In this context, protocol refers not only to technical standards or rulebooks, but to the conditions under which coordination happens. Protocols set thresholds, triggers, roles, permissions, incentives, and exit options. They are operational, provisional, scalable, and often opaque. They increasingly function as the backbone of economic, social, and political life – whether through markets, platforms, data systems, or community-led infrastructures.

The conference approaches normativity not as something imposed only by formal law, but as something that emerges through systems, practices, technologies, institutions, and collective arrangements. Protocols stabilise certain ways of acting and relating, while excluding others. They make some futures easier to reach – and others harder or impossible.

As traditional legal forms lose their monopoly, normativity becomes a shared design space: something that can be built, automated, outsourced, captured, contested, or reimagined. The question is no longer only how law reacts to technological change, but how protocols are already doing the work of law – often faster than legal institutions can respond, and frequently without established safeguards or accountability mechanisms.

The conference understands panels, sessions, and workshops themselves as protocols of encounter: not just spaces for presentation, but environments for collaboration, disagreement, experimentation, and joint problem-solving.

Protocols asks not whether law will survive current transformations, but how governance is already being built – and who gets to participate in shaping the protocols that increasingly organise collective life.

Why participate?
This conference is for people who are not only analysing governance, but actively shaping it. It brings together academics, technologists, policymakers, lawyers, designers, founders, artists, and community organisers who want to think – and build – together. Participants will have the opportunity to test ideas, work across disciplines, contribute to shared outputs, and engage with others facing similar challenges in building fair, workable, and accountable governance infrastructures.

PROOF OF CONCEPT (PoC) is a format in which participants come together around a problem or an initial idea, and work with others to develop a tangible concept, structure, or prototype that can be tested or further developed.

Every stream can include any mode of participation (proof of concept, performing bodies, works of text). For PoC sessions, we invite:

Problem-driven, practice-oriented contributions that begin from a concrete social, legal, technological, or ecological problem (e.g. gender injustice, environmental harm, failures of governance, data extractivism).
Collaborative, workshop-style formats in which participants collectively develop responses across disciplines and practices.
Conceptual, technical, or institutional prototypes, including governance models, legal or quasi-legal frameworks, financial or incentive structures, or technological architectures.
Iterative and open-ended processes that move beyond critique towards creative construction, even if outcomes remain speculative or in-progress.

Proposals can be submitted by individuals or groups: you may propose a problem or idea without having a full team and use the PoC stream to attract collaborators across fields; equally, you may join an existing stream to contribute your expertise.

PoC streams are intended as open, interdisciplinary spaces of co-creation, welcoming participants across backgrounds and practices – including those working in or beyond law, the humanities, sciences, technology, design, and activism – where participants bring and combine their different skills, forms of knowledge, and experiences to create alternatives to the status quo.

Stream proposals should be sent to CLC2026@westminster.ac.uk by 27th April 2026.

Performing Bodies

The 2026 Critical Legal Conference takes place at a moment of institutional unravelling and re-composition. Humanities at large, including the arts and most attempts at novel interdisciplinarity, are at heightened risk from the neoliberal and increasingly totalitarian state machine, with creative production increasingly bypassed as irrelevant, controlled or simply banished.

We invite you to think of embodied and emplaced ways of resisting such a tendency, actively employing the conference bodies in performance art, spatialised workshops, movement sessions and any other form of embodiment that can help create new and much-needed protocols for being and becoming.

All bodies are, in some way or another, performing. We understand performing bodies as embodied and spatialised encounters that both defy and construct protocols; bodies that challenge normativities and generate new ones. We understand performing bodies as the main way in which protocols can be construed in an inclusive and necessary way, thereby redistributing power, responsibility, value and legitimacy in fairer ways.

Digital technologies – AI systems, blockchain infrastructures, platforms, NFTs, standards, and automated decision-making architectures – are actively introduced into arts and humanities. But this means the ontology of the performing body and its encounters are changing radically. The embodied technological posthumanism of performing bodies distribute authority, challenge established rules, create opportunities for diffused decision-making, and shape different futures.

In this context, protocols are not merely standardised procedures, fixed rulebooks or technical scripts. More fundamentally, protocols refer to distributed conditions of encounter, with or without stable institutional anchors. Protocols are formally minimal yet normatively dense: they establish the parameters and conditions of coordination – such as thresholds, triggers, endpoints, roles, and relations – through which distribution, automation, consensus, delegation, command and collaboration can take place. Protocols are operational, provisional, iterable, often opaque, and increasingly function as the infrastructure of social, economic and political life.

Performing bodies de-mystify protocols by going deep into protocol production, upsetting the usual techniques, or even adding a layer of mystification that is creative, experimental, risk-taking but ethical, fleeting yet impactful.

The conference approaches normativity as ontological: not simply as a set of rules imposed from above, but as something that emerges through relations between bodies, technologies, institutions, imaginaries, and material conditions. Protocols perform cuts into this wider field of normativity, temporarily stabilising particular ways of living together – while foreclosing others.

As law’s traditional formats lose their monopoly, normativity itself becomes a frontier space: something to be captured, automated, designed, contested, or collectively reimagined. We invite you to come up with ways in which your and our performing bodies are put to work to create new, fairer protocols of movement and pause for new, radical legal production.

Every stream can include any mode of participation (performing bodies, proof of concept, works of text). For sessions employing the performance mode, we invite:

Performance and embodied practices foregrounding materiality, space, movement, and sensorial engagement as sites where law and normativity are sensed, enacted, and unsettled.
Performance workshops where concepts are explored through movement and pause.
Performative interventions outside the regular slots
Art exhibits (visual, sound, etc) to be shown for the duration or part of the Conference.
Performance papers that follow the rules while subverting them.
Making of any sort that explores legal creativity, legal sensoriality, legal spatiality and corporeality, nonhuman legalities etc.

Stream proposals should be sent to CLC2026@westminster.ac.uk by 27th April 2026

Works of Text

The 2026 Critical Legal Conference takes place at a moment of institutional unravelling and re-composition. Law schools, universities, courts, nation states, and international legal orders are no longer the primary or exclusive sites through which normativity is articulated, stabilised, or enforced. Their authority is increasingly fragmented, contested, or bypassed – often displaced into supranational, global, private or hybrid forms – while new forms of law and governance are being assembled elsewhere. Digital technologies – AI systems, blockchain infrastructures, platforms, standards, and automated decision-making architectures – are actively producing protocols of governance and bespoke jurisdictions. These protocols do not merely implement rules: they organise encounters, distribute authority, pre-structure decision-making, and shape collective futures. They operate as formats through which power, responsibility, value and legitimacy are newly arranged. Yet technology is not treated here as a discrete object. Rather, these systems are understood as crystallisations of a broader transformation in what law is, how it operates, and where its institutional force now resides – making visible the redistribution of authority, the delegation of judgment, and the emergence of normative infrastructures without stable sovereign centres.

In this context, protocol names not only a standardised procedure, a fixed rulebook or technical script. More fundamentally, the protocol refers to distributed conditions of encounter, with or without stable institutional anchors. Protocols are formally minimal yet normatively dense: they establish the parameters and conditions of coordination – such as thresholds, triggers, endpoints, roles, and relations – through which distribution, automation, consensus, delegation, command and collaboration can take place. Protocols are operational, provisional, iterable, often opaque, and increasingly function as the infrastructure of social, economic and political life.

The conference approaches normativity as ontological: not simply as a set of rules imposed from above, but as something that emerges through relations between bodies, technologies, institutions, imaginaries, and material conditions. Protocols perform cuts into this wider field of normativity, temporarily stabilising particular ways of living together – while foreclosing others.

As law’s traditional formats lose their monopoly, normativity itself becomes a frontier space: something to be captured, automated, designed, contested, or collectively reimagined. The question is no longer only how law responds to technological change, but how new protocols are already doing the work of law – frequently through private ordering, contractual infrastructures, and delegated authority – often without law’s grammars, safeguards, or modes of accountability.

The conference understands panels, streams, and sessions themselves as protocols of encounter: not merely sites of presentation, but settings designed to generate events – moments where methods collide, assumptions fail, and new alliances form.

Protocols asks not whether law will survive these transformations, but how normativity is being reformatted – and who gets to participate in composing the protocols that increasingly govern collective life.

Every stream can include any mode of participation (works of text, performing bodies, proof of concept). For sessions employing the textual mode, we invite:

Textual work broadly conceived.
Writing that experiments with form (fiction, poetry, personal essay, code).
Audio papers, prerecorded (if made and presented there and then, consider Performance mode).
Collaborative papers including work in progress and open discussions on themes.

Stream proposals should be sent to CLC2026@westminster.ac.uk by 27th April 2026

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