Dear All,
Please find below a call for papers for a workshop "Infrastructures of
Injustice: Law & Conflict” to take place at St Edmund’s College,
University of Cambridge, on 26-27th Oct. 2018.
This Cambridge workshop is part of the Cambridge-Singapore-Princeton
Network workshop series. The workshop series interrogates the
interrelationships between infrastructures and injustice; alert to the
manner in which law threads through the material, the conceptual, the
ethical, and the affective. We seek work at the junctions of
infrastructure and injustice to provoke a reconceptualization of
injustice across multiple empirical settings, but particularly within
regimes of conflict in the Global South. We intend to achieve this
through delving into key ways in which the interactions of human and
(in)tangible infrastructure materializes injustice today. Recognizing
accelerating trends of securitization, financialization, and
calculability, means that interrogating the complicity of infrastructure
in the moralities and ethics of contemporary social life is urgent and
imperative.
In keeping with the workshop’s push to excavate law’s sometimes
subterranean presence, the Cambridge workshop will focus on
infrastructures of conflict. The second workshop in Singapore in January
2019 will examine migration infrastructures, and the final workshop in
Princeton in April 2019 will draw these two themes together.
The Cambridge workshop operates from the premise that accounts of armed
conflict can be productively unpacked through the analytic frameworks of
infrastructure, and notions of injustice. Ferguson (2008, 36) rightly
says that human, social and material “infrastructure define how war is
fought and what is fought over”. The framework of infrastructure is
usefully enhanced through grappling with notions of injustice because
war is often prompted by actual or perceived injustices. In addition to
affecting human, cultural, and social infrastructure, armed conflict
also disrupts the functioning of built infrastructure. Armed conflict
leads to the unequal provision of multiple forms of infrastructure, or
infrastructure deficiency. The space of conflict zones is also the space
of “pirate” and “fugitive” infrastructures and territorialities (Simone
2006); elusive infrastructures that are more likely to develop in
complex and alternative forms. More broadly, the workshop’s concern will
be with the loss of infrastructure in the context of armed conflict and
the dehumanization of social capital in the process.
The Cambridge workshop seeks to explore a set of concerns that are
framed by but not limited to these questions:
- How are infrastructures of
injustice temporally and contextually formed and how do they morph and
change dynamically in relation to shifting circumstances of war and
conflict? If lawyers simultaneously make law and non-law (Johns 2014,
1), what role does legal infrastructure play in this context?
- What are the infrastructures that
sustain, perpetuate and reify injustice(s)? Here we are looking for
empirically grounded analyses that deconstruct the ways in which
injustice continues to work. We are interested, for example, in
intersections of social capital and public infrastructures in cases of
armed conflict (eg. hospitals and militaries).
- How are infrastructures of
injustice countered, including in situations of conflict? What are the
discursive, material and performative strategies of structural
subversion and individual resistance? How, for instance, does collective
organisation depend on technologies of communication? (eg. underground
railroad, safehouses)
- How does infrastructure cope with changing
notions of injustice, across time and across place in conflict zones?
When do forms of infrastructure become obsolete? Do new or reconfigured
infrastructures become necessary to maintain injustice and perpetuate
the subjugation of the subjects of injustice?
John Comaroff (Harvard) has confirmed his participation in the Cambridge
workshop. Selected speakers will be asked to produce a first draft of
their paper three weeks before the event in Cambridge for
pre-circulation. Interested participants are expected to cover their own
expenses but limited funding may be available to scholars with no
funding available to them. There is limited funding available for
scholars based in the Global South.
Please note, a selection of presenters from the Cambridge (and
Singapore) workshops will be invited to present their revised papers at
Princeton University (workshop hosted by Carol Greenhouse) on 26-27
April 2019; travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by
Princeton University.
Please send an abstract of 250-300 words and a short biographical
statement by May 11th 2018 to Sandra Brunnegger ([log in to unmask]) and
Laavanya Kathiravelu ([log in to unmask]) and also state if you will
be available for the Princeton meeting in April 2019 if selected.
—— Sandra Brunnegger
University of Cambridge | St Edmund’s College | CB3 0BN Cambridge
American Bar Foundation | 750 N Lake Shore Dr | Chicago, IL 60611
University of Chicago | 5801 S Ellis Ave | Chicago, IL 60637
609.933.1529
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