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Dear all,

Following the success of the 2013 Law and the Senses
<https://nonliquetlaw.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/law-and-the-senses_booklet.pdf>conference
and the ensuing Non Liquet
<https://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminster-law-and-theory-lab/publications>
online
publications, please see below the call for papers for the conference:


*Law and the Senses II  *
*human, posthuman, inhuman sensings*

Westminster Law & Theory Lab, London

November 17-18, 2016



What (who) is sensing? Do senses belong to the realm of the subjective and
thus non sunt disputandum? Or are they objective, as the truth-validating
paradigm of vision indicates? Can we touch without being touched? What
remains of the subject/object dualism when we are immersed in the
impersonal materiality of a soundscape? Are neurological phenomenologies of
pheromones sufficient to account for the role played by odour in life?



And beyond the human: are senses trapped within the phenomenological or can
they be thought and indeed sensed in a non-phenomenological sense, namely
as institutional rather than just personal affects? What about the promise
of new technologies to rewrite the frontiers of the sensible into inhuman
scales and temporalities? What does sensing become in the Anthropocene, and
what will the sense of sensing be ‘after’ the human?



Law has been slow to recognise and engage with the sensorial. Despite a
recent turn, as demonstrated by a wave of publications and conferences, the
full relevance of the sensorial vis-à-vis the law is yet to be fully
unfolded. Legal thought insists on oscillating between the two sides (law
vs. the senses) of an unquestioned opposition. However, whereas law is an
anaesthetic engaged in numbing the senses into common sense, it is also
intrinsically dependent on, and indeed emerging from, the sensorial. How to
understand the way the law-senses assemblage unfolds then, if not by
looking closer into the paradox between the de-sensitising project of law
and the multi-sensorial process of legal emergence? The epistemological and
ethical significance of this endeavour has never been more evident:
dramatic environmental changes, technological advancement, pervasive
mediation, new material and post-human direction of thinking, capitalist
hyperaesthesia and innovative art practices, all gesturing towards novel
ways, subjects and objects of sensing, whose impact on questions of agency,
responsibility and politics cannot  be underestimated. Before this grand
rearticulation of the sensorial takes full hold of the human, it is time
for law to engage fully with this complex and promising realm.



Law and the Senses II: human, posthuman, inhuman sensings encourages you to
investigate the sensing of law, the capacity for law to (make) sense, and
the possibility for law to sense differently. We welcome trans-disciplinary
contributions, from legal, geographical, sociological, psychological,
philosophical, political and cultural areas, as well as from the arts
(space for exhibitions and performances will be provided).



This conference seeks to interfere with the standard conference format. We
wish to shake such an often taken for granted scaffolding, not to propose
‘better’ models, but rather to produce interferences, noise and turbulence,
out of which we hope creative encounters would emerge. This does not mean
to get rid of the rules and internal regulations of conferencing
altogether, but instead to open a fuzzier space for the conference to
unfold, by making such constraints less rigid and suffocating. There will
be given no time for presentations, though remains for the moderator the
duty to prevent them becoming infinite. We invite to propose presentations
conceived as a tool for stimulating a debate, rather than unilateral talks
addressed to a passive audience. Therefore we kindly ask to refrain from
merely reading out papers and rather trying to perform them through your
voice and body, handing out material, using power points, notes, or any
other format you prefer.



Please send your abstracts by *2nd May *2016 to [log in to unmask]



The organising team: *Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta,  Andrea Pavoni with
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos*.

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