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Call for Papers – for Law and Geography session at the 2014 RGS Annual Conference, London 26-29 August 2014

 

Session title: Legal Geography: Moving Forward with Methods & Materialities

 

“Our relationships, social bonds, would be airy as clouds were there only contracts between subjects… the object… stabilizes our relationships… makes our history slow.” (Michel Serres, 1995: 87)

 

This legal geography stream proceeds from the assumption (which appears to be widely accepted, though critiques are always welcome) that space, society and law are at a nexus, that they are co-constituted. Legal geography has, in other words, been ‘born’. Given this assumption, the stream aims to consider how the cross-discipline is being applied and extended, presenting papers that identify new and ongoing lines of spatio-legal inquiry, research and theory.

 

In particular we are interested in the following questions:

 

• Engaging with the RGS IBG 2014 Conference theme, how does legal geography engage with practices and theories of co-production? How are places and spaces legally and socio-spatially co-produced?

 

• What is the role here for imagination? Can spatio-legal imaginations underpin decision-making, even if they are often out of view? How do ‘imaginative geographies’ mesh with legal provisions and practices? How does ‘space talk’ work in legal decision-making?

 

• What are the relationships between legal understandings of representation and geographical theories of non-representation? How do legal orderings depend on affective attitudes (Weber) or embodiment? How can non-representative understandings operate in legal processes, which have their own formulations of ‘representation’?

 

• How is the spatio-legal implicated in processes of managing objects – of ‘how matter is made to matter’ (Barad 2003)? How does it frame and marshal the arrangement of things in space? How is the spatio-materiality of law experienced by human (and other) subjects? How is law translated (Latour, 2005) into flows of matter and the resulting assemblages of materials that form buildings, streets and the urban landscape?

 

• How do legal discourse and practices contribute to the making and controlling of spaces at multiple scales? What are the relationships between scale and jurisdiction or between territory, jurisdiction and sovereignty?

 

• How do legal discourses or practices operate to create ‘geographies of (in)justice’? How can legal processes of place-making be critiqued through the lenses of critical geography and progressive urbanism or rurality?

 

• Are gender, heteronormativity or race embedded in legal geographical processes? How do relationships of power take legal geographical form?

In each of the above we welcome analyses that consider prospective, contemporary and/or historical experiences of legal geography, bringing hybrid law/geography tools and techniques to bear on past, present or future events or understandings.

 

We hope these questions stimulate debate but they are not intended to be exclusionary in any way. Any paper that engages, critiques or dismisses legal geography would be very welcome.

 

Please send a proposed abstract of 200-300 words, together with a title to the paper to Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam University,[log in to unmask]) or Antonia Layard (University of Bristol, from 1st January 2014, [log in to unmask]) by 20th February, 2014.