Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 11/01/2012

11/26/12

2012 LASSnet conference in Srilanka - Program DRAFT ONLY – SUBJECT TO AMENDMENT

Day 1, Friday, December 14th, 2012

Friday, Dec 14th, 9.30am – 10.30am	Registration and Tea
10.30 – 11	Welcome and Introduction to LASSNET and the Conference

Friday, Dec 14th, 11.00am – 1.00pm

Session 1

Panel 1

Left, Liberal and the Radical

Chair: TBC

Arvind Narrain

“My experiments with law”: Gandhi’s exploration of laws potential

Nishan De Mel

Left Politics and Liberalism in Sri Lanka: unpicking the antagonisms in relation to State Formation

Dr Kiran Grewal

From Civil Society to Political Society: Reimagining Rights Discourses in Sri Lanka

Tamara Relis, Untitled

Panel 2

The Violence of Law: Publics, Impunity and the Rhetoric of Justice

Chair: TBC

Deepak Mehta

The Ayodhya Dispute: The Absent Mosque, Emergency and the Jural Idol

Moyukh Chatterjee

The Impunity Effect: Tracing the FIR in the Gujarat Pogrom

Pratiksha Baxi

“Mock Trial”: Reading the Best Bakery Case

Panel 3

Land and Resources I

Chair: TBC

Rose Wijeyesekera

Democratising post-armed conflict reconciliation: A feminist perspective on the IDP’s right to leave, to return and the right not to return to their property

Raju KD, Roopa KL, and KD Raju

The Sociological Effect of Land Acquisition Laws in India

Girija Godbole

Understanding the changing relationship between land and rural women in western Maharashtra, India

Bhavani Fonseka

A Critique of the Legal Framework Governing Land Issues in Post War Sri Lanka

Panel 4

State and Development I - On Technology, Resources and Expert Knowledge

Chair: TBC

Naveen Thayyil

Law, Public participation and Normativity: Contestations about Techno-science.

W.A.D.J. Sumanadasa

Achieving (in)Justice in Law Making: An Appraisal of Revival of Underperforming Enterprises or Underutilized Assets Act, No. 43 of 2011

Friday, Dec 14th, 1.00pm – 2.00pm

Lunch

Friday, Dec 14th, 2.00pm – 4.00pm

Session 2

Panel 5

Rethinking Resistance : Subalternity and the State in contemporary India - Part 1

Chair: TBC

Uday Chandra

Beyond Subalternity: Land, Community, and the State in Contemporary Jharkhand

Lipika Kamra

Non-Sovereign Agency and the Maoist Movement in India

Samrat Sengupta

Strategic Outsiderism: Performances of Resistance by ‘Multitudes’ after ‘Empire’

Minati Dash

The ‘Moral Collective’ in the Moral Economy

Panel 6

Trauma, Memory, Witnessing I

Chair: TBC

Cayathri Divakalala

Understanding Psychosocial Wellbeing in Post-War Sri Lanka: A Call For Change Based on Women’s Experiences of Grievance and Hope

Vijayalakshmi Balakrishnan

The Child-State Relationship Revisited: Some Notes from India

Lakmini Seneviratne

The Truth Behind a Right to the Truth

Debaditya Bhattacharya

Testifying to the Limits of the ‘event’: Witness-accounts as literature

Panel 7

Law and the Social

Chair: TBC

Rohini Chaturvedi

Researching public policy: a methodological reflection on ‘studying up’ in India

Zoe Rathus

The Role and Risks of Using Social Science in Family Law Decision-Making

Malavika Kasturi

Law, Caste and Religious Conversion: The Arya Samaj Marriage Validation Bill of 1930

Anindita Mukherjee Aymen Mohammed

Cows. Holy, don’t eat (?)

Panel 8

The Left and Social Justice

Chair: TBC

Buddhima Padmasiri

Untitled

§ Anisa Rahim

Foregrounding Agency: Law, Poverty and Sex Work in India

§ shayak sircar

Beyond Labour Law: A Case Study of the Maruti Workers' Struggle in IMT Manesar

§ Durgambini Patel

Quasi Legal Determinants of Labour Unrest in Developing Economies-

Friday, Dec 14th, 4:00pm – 4.30pm

Tea


Friday, Dec 14th, 4.30 pm – 6.30pm	Plenary 1 Law and the Social Chair: Savitri Goonesekera § Radhika Coomaraswamy § Kalpana Kannabiran § Tobias Kelley § Stewart Motha

Day 2, Saturday, December 15th, 2012

Saturday, Dec 15th, 8.30am – 10.30am

Session 3

Panel 9

Rethinking Resistance : Subalternity and the State in contemporary India - Part 2

Chair: TBC

Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Subaltern Resistance and the Law

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Deepening Democracy in Rural India? Adivasi Struggles in Madhya Pradesh

Swagato Sarkar

History, Capitalism and Resistance: Deconstructing Democratic Power

Jhuma Sen

Siting Insurrectionary Jurisprudence: Law as the ‘State’s Emissary’?

Panel 10

Feminism I

Chair: TBC

Chulani Kodikara

Untitled

Sanghamitra Choudhury Shailendra Kumar Singh

Women at crossroads: A study of conflict and trauma in NE India focusing Assam, INDIA.

Zoe Rathus

The Role and Risks of Using Social Science in Family Law Decision-Making

Panel 11

Land and Resources II

Chair: TBC

Namita A. Malhotra

National Resources for Public, Public as National Resource: conspiracies and legalities

Rohini Chaturvedi

Are we missing something?: Federalism as an analytic variable in natural resource governance

K. S Dhanya

Rights and resources of indigenous people: A study among the adivasis in Kerala

Deepa Kansra

Untitled

Panel 12

State and Development II - On Neoliberalism, Conflict, South Asia

Chair: TBC

Rajya Laxmi Gurung

Neoliberal economic reforms in Post-conflict context: A Peace Dividend or Peace Penalty?

Manasa Sundarraman

Tarun Krishnakumar

Blooming Threats to Existential Rights: Response and Tactics of the Indian State

Rasika Mendis

Restitution in post conflict Vanni – a legal framework for post-conflict policy formulation

Saturday, Dec 15th, 10.30am – 11.00am

Tea

Saturday, Dec 15th, 11:00am - 1:00pm

Session 4

Panel 13

Regulating Sex Work in South Asia

Chair: TBC

Rohit De, Mellon

Husna Bai's Profession: Sex, Work and Freedom in the Indian Constitution

Prabha Kotiswaran

Sword or Shield? The Role of the Law in the Indian Sex Workers’ Movement

Vibhuti Ramachandran

Responding to ‘sex trafficking’ in India: affect, morality and efficiency in law enforcement discourses

Panel 14

Land and Resources III

Chair: TBC

Arpitha Upendra Kodiveri

Biocultural Community Protocols and affirmation of Biocultural Rights

Sankar Pani

Indian Forest Rights Act 2006 as a case study for the Emergence of Biocultural Rights

Namita Wahi

The Evolution of the Right to Property in the Indian Constitution

Satyadeep Kumar Singh

Socio-legal dynamics of Land-acquisition and Land grabs in name of Development: Tale of two Nations (India and Sri Lanka)

Panel 15

Governance I

Chair: TBC

Aditi Surie

Placing Women in Local Governance: Reflections from Fieldwork

Rasika Mendis

Restitution in post conflict Vanni – a legal framework for post-conflict policy formulation

Kshetrimayum Subarta Singh

When Sublime Shifts to Profane

Amit Bindal

Stanley Kubrick in Law School Curriculum: Bringing Humanities back through Popular Culture

Mario Gomez

Sport, Rights, and Transformation

Panel 16

Antidiscrimination law: A common point of struggle?

Chair: Kalpana Kannabiran

Fatima Hassan

Step by step…Race, HIV, Sexual Orientation in South Africa: Challenging unfair discrimination using the law and by necessity, other tools

Tarunabh Khaitan

‘Will it help the poor?’: Antidiscrimination Laws in Developing Countries

Jayna Kothari

Disability Discrimination – Understanding Equality in the context of Disability

Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Gowthaman Ranganathan

Anti-discrimination Laws Addressing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities in India

Saturday, Dec 15th, 1:00pm – 2.00pm

Lunch

Saturday, Dec 15th, 2.00pm - 4:00pm

Session 5

Panel 17

Law and Freedom

Chair: TBC

Ratna Kapur,

The Politics of Feminism Lite and Re-imagining Freedom.

Maryam S. Khan,

The law of defamation in Pakistan: a normative window into the freedom of the press

Mathew John

Hate, Hurt and the Law: Courts and the Constitution of ‘Hate Speech’ in India

Panel 18

Feminism II

Chair: TBC

Srimati Basu

Coercing Harmony?: Marriage, Violence and Mediation

Anusha Hariharan

Encroachment as access: questions raised by the Jan Adhikar Andolan

Poongkhulali B. and Deepika Murali

The case of the helpless minor and habeas corpus remedies

Panel 19

Sexuality

Chair: TBC

Arpita Das

Understanding intersexuality through discourses of law using Foucault’s biopolitical framework

Ritu Gupta

LGBTI rights in Sri Lanka; Now it’s time for change

Urmila Pullat

Transgendered in Sri Lanka : Gender Identity and the Law in Sri Lanka and India

Panel 20

The social life of documents

Chair: TBC

Andi Schubert

The Biography of a Form: Interrogating Choice in Sri Lanka’s First Post-War Census

Dileepa Witharana

An Analysis of the different flexibilities for patents and copyrights in Sri Lanka’s Intellectual Property Act

Andi Schubert

The Tale of Two Documents: Social Inquiry Report vs. the Social Care Plan

Beverley Brown

The Challenge of Indian Oaths

Saturday, Dec 15th, 4:00pm - 5:00pm

Tea and Break

Saturday, Dec 15th, 5.00pm – 7.00pm

Plenary 2

Law, Neoliberalism and Development

Chair: Babu Mathew

§ Abdul Paliwala

§ Aditya Nigam

§ Ahilan Kadirgamar

Day 3, Sunday, December 16th, 2012

Sunday, Dec 16th, 10.30am – 12.30pm

Session 7

Panel 21

Roundtable/Book Panel on Reviving Comparative Constitutional Discourse in South Asia

Moderator:

Arun Thiruvengadam

Panelists:

· Sara Hossain

· Jayampathy Wickramaratne,

· Rohit De

· Ridwanul Hoque

· Deepika Udagama

Panel 22

State and Development III - On Rule of Law, Governmentality

Chair: TBC

Osama Siddique

Untitled

Imran Amin

Social Justice and the Governmentality of Participation in India

Nick Robinson

South Asia’s Separation of Powers: Towards a New Model

John Sebastian and Anshuman Singh

Forgotten Words in the Constitution: Contextualising citizenship, ‘common good’ and the right to ‘fraternity’

Panel 23

Im/Possibilities of Caste and Casteism in South Asia

Panel Chair: A. Marx

C. Rajeshkumar

The Dynamics of Caste in Jaffna Society

Balmurli Natarajan

The Cultural Foundations of Neo-Casteism: Heterophobic and Heterophilic Casteism

Jayadeva Uyangoda

Caste in Sinhala Society

Panel 24

Making Sense of the Right to Sanitation: Social Justice, Environmental, Water and Labour Dimensions

Chair: TBC

Philippe Cullet

The Right to Sanitation as a Self-Standing Right

Mathew John

Legal and Policy Traps in the Urban Sanitation Debate

Sujith Koonan

Policy and institutional framework in Rural Areas

Lovleen Bhullar

Realisation of the Right to Sanitation: Legal Framework for Human Waste Disposal in Urban India

Sunday, Dec 16th,

12.30pm – 1.15pm

Lunch

Sunday, Dec 16th, 1.15pm – 3.15pm

Session 8

Panel 25

Law and the Urban : Exploring ‘Juridicial Urbanism’

Chair: TBC

Diya Mehra

Campaigning Against its Eviction: Local Trade in New ‘world-class’ Delhi

Gautam Bhan

Planned Development and/as Crisis: Evictions and the Politics of Governance in Contemporary Delhi

Neha Sami

From farming to development: An alternative approach to real estate development in Pune, India

Amlan Goswami

Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement: Law and Politics

Panel 26

State, Law and Violence

Chair: TBC

Shomi Brian

PTNL Kalangshim: The Judicial System of the Tangkhul Nagas

Chubatila Ozukum

State law and violence: a study of the AFSPA in Nagaland, India.

Umesh,O

Communities Imagination of Justice and State Law in the Murder Trials

Anu Choudhury

Of Love, Court and Media

Panel 27

State and Development 4 - On Institutions

Chair: TBC

Yasodara Kathirgamathamby

Role of State Administration in respect of plantation Community in Sri Lanka - with special reference to district secretariat, divisional secretariat and Grama Nildhari Divisions.

Sidharth Chauhan

India’s constitutional commitment to quotas in representative institutions and questions about the legitimacy of democratic authority

Latika Vashist

Vulnerability, Death & Solidarity: Imagining New Forms of Resistance to Violence

Panel 28

The Legal Complex and Political Liberalism in South Asia

Chair: TBC

Terence Halliday

Sunday, Dec 16th, 3.15pm – 5.00pm

Plenary 3

Law and the Politics of Resistance  

Chair: Neloufer de Mel

§ Uma Chakravarti

§ Sara Hossain

§ A. Marx

§ Sumathy Sivamohan

* Sunday sessions include a ‘working tea’

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/