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.
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