Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 08/01/2008

8/30/08

Invitation to the 12th International Consumer Law Conference, 25th to 27th February, 2009

We cordially invite you to participate in the "12TH INTERNATIONAL
CONSUMER LAW CONFERENCE jointly organized by International Association
of Consumer Law and NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. The
conference will be held from 25th -27th February 2008 at NALSAR
University of Law, Hyderabad.

About the Conference:

The theme of the conference is 'CONSUMER LAW - GLOBALIZATION, POVERTY
AND DEVELOPMENT' and consumer law scholars from all parts of the world
are invited to participate. The general theme of the conference
includes numerous sub-themes. In the following some of the sub themes
are mentioned.

 Creating a Legal Infrastructure to Protect Consumers in a Global Economy
 Green and Ethical Consumerism in the Global Economy
 Vulnerable Consumers and Poverty as an Issue of Consumer Law
 Rights and Responsibilities of Service Providers, including Financial Services
 Adjudicating Bodies and Consumer Redress in a Global Economy

The description is not meant to be exhaustive, and other perspectives
to the issue at hand are welcome as well. The structure and programme
of the conference will be finalized after the deadline of the call for
papers.

This conference is organized once in every two years. Previous
conferences were held in various parts of the world including Brazil,
Malta, South Africa and various other European countries. This
conference is of international acclaim and has had participation from
the policy makers and renowned academicians around the world.

Interested participants can send in a short summary (½ page) of their
paper to the organizing committee in Hyderabad. Papers are to be sent
to Dr. Vidyullatha Reddy, (e-mail 12consumerconference@gmail.com/
vidyullathareddy@gmail.com ), as well as to the President of the IACL,
Professor Thomas Wilhelmsson (thomas.wilhelmsson@helsinki.fi ).

Final deadline for abstracts is September 30, 2008. Those selected
will be informed as soon as possible after submission of their
proposals. Finalized papers should be provided before December 31,
2008. The registration fee, that includes the conference material,
lunches during the conference and a dinner, is 250 USD for
participants from abroad and 5000 Indian rupees for participants from
India. Details of the conference venue and reasonable accommodation
facilities are provided at www.nalsar.ac.in.

About Hyderabad:

Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh consists of twin cities of
Hyderabad and Secundrabad and is a bustling 400 year old metropolis
which is famous as the former seat of the fabulously wealthy Nizams of
Hyderabad. Major attractions include the following:

 Charminar:
It consists of four graceful minarets, forty four prayer spaces and a
mosque. Charminar was built around 1591 at the centre of the original
city layout. It is as much the signature of Hyderabad as Taj Mahal is
of Agra and Eiffel Tower is of Paris.
 Golconda Fort:
It is one of the famous forts in India. It is famous for its
acoustics, palaces, ingenious water supply system and the famous
fatheh rahben gun, one of the canons used in the last siege of
Golconda by Aurangzeb, to whom the fort finally fell. Its past is
narrated effectively with the unique Sound and Light Show which shows
the past of Golconda.
 Mecca Masjid:
A two hundred yards south west of Charminar it is so named because the
bricks were brought from mecca to build the central arch. Mecca Masjid
is poetry in stone with a magnificent wall and 15 graceful arches.
Towards the southern end of the mosque lie the marble grave of the
members of the Azam Jahi Dynasty
 Birla Mandir:
This white marble temple of Lord Venkateswara floats on the city
skyline, on Kala Pahad. The idol in the temple is the replica of one
at Trirupati.
 Hussain Sagar Lake:
Excavated in 1562 by Hussain Shah Wali, the lake has one of the
world's tallest monolith statutes of the Buddha standing on the rock
of Gibraltar in the middle of the lake.
 Salarjung Museum:
This museum houses one of the biggest one-man collections of antiques
of the world by Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salarjung III. The objects
include Persian Carpets, Mughal miniatures, Chinese porcelain,
Japanese lacquerware, famous statutes including Veiled Rebecca and
Marguerite and Mephistopheles, a superb collection of jade, daggers
belonging to Queen Noor Jahan and Emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan,
Aurangzeb's sword and many other fabulous items.
 Shiparamam Arts and Crafts village:
Situated at Madhapur is this 30 acre village which showcases arts and
crafts of the country. It hosts annual bazaars, artists and artisans
from all over the country exhibit their talent.
 Ramoji Film City:
A dream world created for the celluloid on a sprawling 1000 acres with
every imaginable set and location. Visitors can go around in conducted
tours.
 Other major destinations include Qutb -Shahi Tombs, Archeological
Museum, Nizam's Silver Jubilee Museum, Chow – Mohalla Complex, and
Lumbini Park

Hyderabadi Cuisine

Hyderabad was known for the spectacular way its aristocracy
entertained. The cuisine owes its origin to the Mughali style of
cooking of the Asaf Jahi Period. There is a variety of Biryani's (rice
and meat preparation seasoned with spices and flavoring) kababs in
many different styles such as Boti, Jhammi, Kalmi, Shikampur, Sheek
and Legan- ke kababs, Dum- ke- kababs, Kurmas and Lukhmi (pastry).

Soliciting your participation at this Conference

Yours Sincerely

Dr. Vidyulatha Reddy

For, Organizing and Co-ordinating Team
12th International Consumer Law Conference
NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India

8/22/08

Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya

Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya is a Fellow in Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He works on issues related to democracy, governance, and the politics of the Left in India. His fieldwork primarily takes shape in rural West Bengal. At present, he is also working on a study that compares Kerala and West Bengal on various aspects including social mobilization, political participation and institutional performance especially in relation to the population below the poverty line.

8/20/08

POSITIONS AVAILABLE

The Cultural and Material life of Media Piracy is a three year project carried out by the Sarai programme of the CSDS in collaboration with the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. We begin with the premise that piracy is widespread in places where a media-saturated modernity meets severe inequalities of purchasing power for books, software, recordings, videos and other knowledge products. One of the key aims of this research project will be to understand this media environment as it unfolds itself in diverse contexts. The main research node is in India with comparative work in China and Pakistan. The Sarai-ALF teams of researchers work in tandem with an international project on media piracy with fellow researchers in Brazil, South Africa and Russia. The larger study is coordinated by the SSRC (New York).

The project seeks to open different debates on piracy other than simply that of enforcement and criminality. Through research, we hope to generate discussions of cultural needs, community practices of sharing and circulation in societies of high inequality. We will also look at media industry approaches to piracy and enforcement strategies. In addition, there will be ethnographic and quantitative work on media use in neighbourhoods. The study of piracy offers a unique vantage point to study the media environment, through the sites of media and its movement across limits set by law, the complexity of user-bases, and the diversity of cultural delivery platforms.

We are looking for bright, energetic and qualified researchers who can work in collaboration with a regional and international team. Applicants must demonstrate abilities to research and write on the subject. A familiarity with the debate on piracy and the creative commons is preferable. Social science and Humanities applicants should have completed post graduate degrees and law students a four year programme.

Researcher One: Delhi
The researcher will be looking at fieldwork material on media piracy in the Sarai archive, as well as conduct neighbourhood surveys slate to begin in 2009. Work will include research papers presentations and collaborative work with the team.

Researcher Two: Mumbai
The researcher will be looking at the range of piracy strategies pursued by media industries in the film and music sectors. Research will span the larger media companies as well as the smaller companies. Work will include research papers presentations and collaborative work with the team. Applicants from outside Mumbai are also welcome to apply for this position, although Mumbai based work will be significant.

Remuneration will be Rs 28000/ a month. Interested applicants may send their CV and a written research sample to researchjobs@sarai.net by September 20, 2008.
Applications without a written research sample will not be entertained.

Links
SSRC piracy project: http://programs.ssrc.org/ccit/ip/
Sarai, CSDS : http://www.sarai.net/research/knowledge-culture/knowledge-and-culture
ALF: www.altlawforum.org
_____________________________________
The Newsletter of the Sarai Programme,
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054, www.sarai.net
Info: dak@sarai.net.To subscribe: send a blank email to
newsletter-request@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
Directions to Sarai: We are 10 minutes from Delhi University, and 5 mins. from the Civil Lines Metro Station.

See Calendar and Newsletter online:
http://www.sarai.net/about-us/newsletter

8/8/08

From the Indian Express: Visas to Visiting Scholars

Indian missions to bypass MHA, provide visas to visiting scholars
Anubhuti Vishnoi
Posted online: Thursday, August 07, 2008 at 0132 hrs IST
New Delhi, August 6
The Indian missions will now be the interface point for foreign research scholars applying at Indian educational institutes instead of the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry. As per directions by the Government, the visa rules for foreign researchers have been revised to enable them to apply directly to Indian missions abroad instead of applying to the HRD Ministry, as has been the case so far. While the move does not mean the application process will be overhauled, it is expected to cut down the waiting time for researchers by 3-4 months with the HRD ministry unable to add to the red tape.
The Indian Express had earlier reported how delays on part of the HRD ministry were keeping foreign scholars waiting for months together. Now, foreigners who desire to undertake research in India should apply to the Indian missions (concerned) abroad with the brief synopsis of the research project to be undertaken in India, the details of places to be visited, previous visits, whether the scholar has secured admission into a recognised or reputed institution and evidence of financial resources, the HRD Ministry has communicated to institutes in the country late last month. So far, universities keen to get any visiting faculty from other nations had to apply atleast three months beforehand with the HRD ministry.
Indian missions abroad will also issue visas to foreigners to attend conferences and workshops that are being organised in India “by a ministry or department of the Government of India, state governments, public sector undertakings, central educational institutions, public funded universities or an organisation owned and controlled by the Government of India or state governments, United Nations or its specialised agencies or a reputed non governmental organisation”.
The step comes as a series of measures co-ordinated by the Ministry of External Affairs with the Home Ministry and the HRD Ministry have been initiated of late to liberalise and simplify the current system for granting visas to international students.
As of now, the HRD Ministry is the nodal ministry in these matters. For instance, in case of US scholars, the ministry gets the visa applications through the United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). It then sends each scholar’s file to Ministry of External Affairs and Home Ministry which, in turn, asks the Intelligence Bureau for clearance. Sometimes, even the Ministry concerned is asked to vet the subject.

THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law across social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations and enhance these into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years to collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia. So far we have organised 4 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. Here at LASSnet, we hope to take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings. We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

Since 2021, LASSnet anchored at CSLG, JNU, in collaboration with the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, and Centre for Law and Humanities, JGLS has been organizing a regular webinar series involving book discussions, panel discussions and guest lectures. We hope to continue our interactions and engagements as we work to bring together ideas and activities for the future.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, ideas or relevant announcements, if any, on the network. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

Watch this space for more!

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/