Announcing an extended deadline for the submission of abstracts for the forthcoming LASSnet conference in Sri Lanka: Deadline Extended to 31st July 2012

Socio-Legal Review

Call for Submissions

The Socio-Legal Review welcomes contributions for its ninth volume to be released in 2013.

About the Journal

The Socio-Legal Review (SLR) is a student-edited, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published by the Law and Society Committee of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. SLR aims to be a forum that involves, promotes and engages students and scholars to express and share their ideas and opinions on themes and methodologies relating to the interface of law and society. The Journal thus features guest articles by eminent scholars as well as student essays, providing an interface for the two communities to interact. From 2012, SLR has become a biannual publication from an annual publication.

The Journal subscribes to an expansive view on the interpretation of “law and society” thereby keeping its criteria for contributions simply that of high academic merit, as long as there is a perceivable link. This would include not just writing about the role played by law in social change, or the role played by social dynamics in the formulation and implementation of law, but also writing that simply takes cognizance of legal institutions/institutions of governance/administration, power structures in social commentary, and so on. Through this effort, the Journal also hopes to fill the lacunae relating to academic debate on socio-legal matters among law students.

SLR has been listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and has been uploaded on Westlaw and HeinOnline. It was supported by the Modern Law Review for three years since its inception.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION

1. All contributions submitted to the Journal should be original and should not be simultaneously considered for publication elsewhere.

2. The Editorial Board has refrained from imposing a theme. A submission is welcome as long as it fits within the general mandate of the Journal, as outlined above.
1. Contributions should be mailed only in a soft copy to slr@nls.ac.in, the subject of the mail being ‘Submission for 2013 Volume’. Biographical information is to be provided in a removable title page.
2. The Journal is accepting contributions for Articles and Short Articles. With reference to Articles, contributions should not ordinarily exceed 8000 words. With reference to Short Articles, contributions should not ordinarily exceed 5000 words. The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject without review manuscripts that exceed the word limit substantially.
3. The Journal also accepts Book Reviews and Notes from the Field. The latter includes shorter pieces designed to provide a glimpse into a new legal strategy, political initiative or advocacy technique applied in the field, a current problem or obstacle faced in, legal reform or development work, or a new issue that has not yet received much attention and needs to be brought to light. Contributions should not exceed 3000 words.
4. The last date for submission for the first issue is November 1^st, 2012, and the last date for submission for the second issue is March 1^st, 2013.  Submissions may, nevertheless, be made after these dates.  They will be considered for publication in the issue to follow.
5. All submissions are to be made via e-mail as .doc or .docx documents.
6. SLR follows the Harvard Blue Book – A Uniform System of Citation (19^th edn.) style of referencing. Contributors are requested to comply with the same.
3. For any clarifications, please mail us at slr@nls.ac.in.

*Call for Papers:*
*Intimate Partner Violence as a Global Problem*

The International Journal of Conflict and Violence invites submissions to a
Focus Section on “Intimate Partner Violence as a Global Problem:
International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. Intimate partner
violence, defined as the use or threat of physical or sexual violence,
psychological aggression, or emotional abuse by one partner in a
relationship against the other, is a serious problem worldwide. As the 2002
WHO Report on Violence and Health reports, intimate partner violence occurs
in all countries and all social, economic, religious, and cultural groups.
It places great burdens on individuals, communities, and social
institutions, such as health care systems and the employment sector.

The Focus Section seeks to bring together papers from different parts of the
world that address the social construction of intimate partner violence, the
prevalence and risk factors of intimate partner violence, and its impact on
victims as well as societies. A broad definition of “relationship” is
adopted to include both marital and long-term relationships as well as more
casual, short-term relationships. In addition to papers addressing violence
within heterosexual relationships, analyses of same-sex relationships are
also welcome. All papers should have a strong grounding in theory.

We welcome contributions from a range of scientific disciplines, including
(but not limited to) psychology, sociology, family studies, women’s
studies, psychiatry, and public health.

The focus section is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2013 and will be
guest-edited by Professor Barbara Krahé (University of
Potsdam/krahe@uni-potsdam.de) and Professor Antonia Abbey (Wayne State
University/ aabbey@wayne.edu).

The deadline for the submission of manuscripts is *September 1, 2012*.
We request all contributors to observe a limit of 55,000 characters
(including all references). Papers should be submitted online. For
submission/manuscript guidelines please visit http://www.ijcv.org.



---
Julia Marth
(Dipl.-Soziologin)

Institute of interdisciplinary research on conflict and violence
University of Bielefeld

Universitaetsstr. 25
33615 Bielefeld
Germany

+49 (0) 521 106 3113

julia.marth@ijcv.org
______________________________

__________________________________________
International Journal of Conflict and Violence (IJCV)
http://www.ijcv.org/

 

Law and Social Sciences

Research Network Conference

2012

December 14 to 16

Department of Law,

University of Peradeniya

Sri Lanka

in collaboration with

Law & Society Trust, Colombo

 

Call for Papers

The inaugural Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet) conference was held at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi in 2009. A subsequent conference was held at the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education in Pune in 2010.  These conferences identified a number of priorities for the research, study and practice of law in South Asia. A key concern was to interrogate how law is conventionally taught, practiced, and researched as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon.  Those who regard law as autonomous believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. Law teachers, legal scholars, practitioners, and judges tend to treat the law as a discipline that can furnish principles to decide 'hard cases' by drawing on internal logics of consistency and coherence, with inbuilt protocols for determining legislative intent, fair procedures, and natural justice ensuring access to courts.   What is 'law', properly so called, 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. Broadly conceived, these scholars draw on epistemologies and pedagogies from the social sciences in order to explain that law is a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artifact which should be understood and studied as such.  In South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins. 

LASS was constituted to consolidate the work done so far, to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia, and to build scholarly bridges between disciplines across the region. Its objective is to begin conversations, develop research, and create an archive of legal praxis that draws on the social sciences.  In doing this, LASS seeks to be innovative in its deployment of social science methodologies, challenging existing socio-legal approaches that have almost exclusively focused on revealing hidden social determinants of the legal.  LASS calls into question this social constructivist approach. It promotes research that examines how specific practices and relations of knowledge and power are constituted. If law a site where power/knowledge is constituted or exercised, how do we know this? If law is not the only site, then what sustains economic and political connections as seemingly disparate as the splicing of a gene and the growing of rice in a rural village?  What research methods can be drawn from the social sciences to identify and explain the link between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming multiple ways of being in the world?

Alongside these general priorities and questions which LASS has grappled with – we also recognise that Sri Lankan law, society, and economy gives rise to specific questions and problems. These are not unique to Sri Lanka, and are of wider significance to South Asia, and regions beyond in what is an increasingly globalised world. The conference in Sri Lanka seeks to promote research and discussion on a broad list of themes. The panels will be developed by focusing on a particular theme below including comparative discussions across South Asia, or through a combination of themes oriented by the following:

 1.        Development – Development is seen as the solution to most woes in Sri Lanka, and in other postcolonial, post-war, and newly industrializing economies. Most critiques of development have merely stated that the process is one-sided, and that it enables yet more incipient forms of imperialism to emerge. Others have done discourse analyses focused on how development has become discursively and ideologically prominent. We encourage papers that are specifically focused on the particular processes through which 'development' unfolds and the forms of accumulation and dispossession characteristic of neoliberal capitalism.

2.         Land – In addition to rights based approaches, we encourage papers that draw from recent debates in Sri Lanka and other South Asian settings about how 'land grabs' for special economic zones, tourism, or major infrastructure projects have impacted on local populations. What are the economic and social formations that promote and resist these patterns of appropriation?

3.         Natural Resources and Mining – A key frontier of contemporary conflict is the extraction of natural resources, and the impact on local communities, economies, the environment, and political cultures. As the Indian Supreme Court put it recently in Nandini Sundar & Ors v Chhattisgarh (July, 2011), the extraction of natural resources by local and multinational corporations and the state deploys violence that mirrors the horrors of European colonialism and plunder that Joseph Conrad described in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. How do social movements, and existing juridical structures resist or facilitate resource extraction? How do we break down the modern binary between the 'natural' and the 'social' to re-conceive and democratise the relation between community and the material world?

4.         Trauma, Memory, Witnessing – Sri Lanka and numerous other countries grapple with the problem of the 'truths' of the past when seeking to attend to legacies of state and non-state violence, exile, dispossession, and displacement. Commissions of inquiry challenge the limits of conventional judicial approaches. But all acts of bearing witness grapple with the problem of re-presentation. What forms of witnessing and memory attend to trauma and conscious and unconscious legacies of the past? What are the memory practices of the law itself? Beyond juridical measures, what aesthetic and archival practices of writing, cinema, theatre, and visual arts attend to and breach memorial practices?

5.         The State – While many discussions around globalisation marginalised the contemporary role of the state and its sovereignty – Sri Lanka, like many other countries, exemplifies the persistence and expansion of sovereign power. How does the state proliferate and mutate in the context of development economics, war, and conflict? What are the limits of liberal democratic constitutionalist approaches to the state? What are the limits of liberal democracy? How do the political theologies of sovereignty intersect with religious formations in the postcolonial state?

6.         Struggles for Social Justice – How has law engaged with struggles of trade unions, student movements and other constituencies challenging state policies? How does trade union action in contemporary times relate to ideas of the working class and class formation? How do struggles around education relate to broader conceptions of democracy and social welfare?

7.         Nationalism – Both Tamil and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism have been the midwives of social and economic disasters in Sri Lanka. Simplistic claims of rights to self-determination or federalism do not grapple with the underlying crisis of plural political existence. Nonetheless, sub-national self-determination, and national sovereignty continue to be asserted by progressive and reactionary political movements as a bulwark against social and political marginalization at the nation-state level - and the hegemony of capital, or the power of regional and international powers beyond the level of the nation-state. What are the underlying conditions and reasons for the persistence of nationalism over other forms of political mobilisation?

8.         Feminist debates – While feminist interventions need to continue to tackle violence against women – LASS has consistently promoted approaches beyond analytics of victimisation. Papers considering questions of women's labour in special economic zones and as migrant labour; women in war and in a militarised setting; and explorations of forms of women's resistance are especially welcome.

9.         Sexuality – what is the impact of religious nationalism on LGBT people? What lessons might Sri Lanka draw from the Indian experience and the advances made through debates on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code or the Nepal Supreme Court decision on recognition of same sex orientation? What are the links between neoliberal capital and emergent forms of sexual citizenship in South Asia?

10.       Subaltern – How can we begin a discussion on the ways in which the dominant theories/narratives of the law, the state and capitalism excludes discussion and access to subaltern classes? What has been the varying impact of law on caste structures in South Asia and what processes have over determined law's engagement on caste issues?

11.       Rethinking Civil Society – What constitutes civil society and what kind of role is there for civil society in relation to post-war reconciliation in Sri Lanka? What is civil society's relationship to social movements, grass roots networks and public intellectuals? What are the local discourses of reconciliation, how do they engage questions of gender, class, caste and ethnicity, and how do they understand processes of reconciliation elsewhere in the world. How do approaches and critiques of human rights relate to the process of reconciliation? And what impact do interventionist international discourses such as Responsibility to Protect (R2P) have on the local political process?

12.       Rule of Law – The rule of law in Sri Lanka was undermined by the armed conflict, militarization, Emergency and the Prevention of Terrorism Act. While there have been calls for a return to the rule of law in the post-war context, what are the challenges as well as limitations of constitutional propriety and rule of law with respect to social change and post-war transformation?

Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to reach lassnetsri@gmail.com by 31 July 2012

The Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet) is anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)

Organising Committee

Deepika Udagama – School of Law, University of Peradeniya, http://www.pdn.ac.lk/

 Mala Liyanage - Chair/Anchor, Law, and Society Trust, Sri Lanka, www.lawandsocietytrust.org/

Pratiksha Baxi – Anchor, LASSnet, CSLG, JNU, Delhi, http://www.jnu.ac.in/cslg/Faculty.html

Ahilan Kadirgamar – Graduate Center, City University of New York

Stewart Motha – School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/law/our-staff/ft-academic/stewart-motha

Gehan Gunatilleke - Centre for the Study of Human Rights, University of Colombo

T. Shanaathanan – Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna

Sumathy Sivamohan – Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya

Liyanage Amarekeerthi – Faculty of Arts,Univesity of Peradeniya

Priya Thangaraja – Independent Researcher

Kamala Sankaran – Faculty of Law, Delhi University

Siddharth Narrain – Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore

Neloufer de Mel – Department of English, University of Colombo

Jagath Weerasinghe - Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology, Colombo

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH NETWORK, DELHI CHAPTER FIFTH SYMPOSIUM Law and Life in India	Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU 4 FEBRUARY, 2012
Conference Room, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

PROGRAMME

Saturday, 4 February, 2012

Session 1: The Uses of History for Law

10.00 a.m.- 11:30 a.m.

Chair/Discussant: Lawrence Liang, ALF, Bangalore

1. The National Consensus and Legal Exception in the Constituent Assembly Debates by Rakesh Mehar, MPhil, Centre for Political Studies, JNU.
2. Paramount State and ‘ruler- citizen’:  Privy Purses Abolition and its aftermath by Garima Dhabhai, M.Phil, Centre for Political Studies, JNU

11:30-11:45 am: Tea

11:45-1:15 pm

Session 2: Feminist Critique of Law: Challenges and Limits

Chair/Discussant: Rachel Wahl, PhD Scholar, New York University

3. Commercial Surrogacy and the Law in India: A Feminist Critique by Sneha Banerjee CIPOD, SIS, JNU
4. The Burden of Intelligibility: Disabled Women's Testimonial Evidence in Rape Trials by Saptarshi Mandal, Visiting Fellow, CSLG

1:15 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.: Lunch

Session 3: Documents, Rituals and the Violence of Law

2:15 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Chair & Discussant: Ruchi Chaturvedi, Visiting Fellow, CSSS, JNU & Hunter College, CUNY

5. “Feeling the rules”: Cultural affects, documentary practices of rationing post-independence and the ‘signature’ of the official by Tarangini Sriraman, PhD Scholar, Political Science, Delhi University
6. Petty Sovereigns, Rituals of Violence and Implications for State Legitimacy: A Study of Police Violence in Delhi by Santana Khanikar, PhD Scholar, Political Science, Delhi University

4:00-4:15 pm: Tea

Session 4: Law, Labour and Social Movements

4:15-5.00 pm

Chair & Discussant: Anuj Bhuwania, Assistant Professor, OP Jindal Global Law School

7. Vinivesh Ki Niti, Nyayalay Evam Shramik: Balco Ke Sandarbh Me Ek Adhyayan by Indrajeet Kumar Jha, PhD Scholar, Political Science, Delhi University.