Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 12/12/12

12/12/12

LASSnet Conference Revised Program

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Day 1, Friday, December 14th, 2012

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

Friday, Dec 14th, 11.00am – 1.00pm

Session 1

Panel 1

(Seminar Room)

Left, Liberal and the Radical

Chair: Stewart Motha

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

Contextual Realism and International Human Rights Law Paradigms

Panel 2

(Audio Visual Room)

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

Chair: Pratiksha Baxi

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

Jurispathic Governance in the Times of Mass Sexual Violence

Panel 3

(Room B)

Land and Resources I

Chair: TBC

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

Gautam Bhan

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

Panel 4

(Room 33)

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

Aviram Sharma

The framing of drinking water quality in India’s water law

Friday, Dec 14th, 1.00pm – 2.00pm

Lunch

(Post-Graduate Unit)

Friday, Dec 14th, 2.00pm – 4.00pm

Session 2

Panel 5

(Seminar Room)

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

(Audio Visual Room)

Trauma, Memory, Witnessing I

Chair: Arvind Narrain

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

Arvind Narrain
Nicolas Grandi

Fighting disappearances in Argentina: Memory and Remembering as a Living Force”

Panel 7

(Room B)

Law and the Social

Chair: TBC

Rohini Chaturvedi

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

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

(Room 33)

The Left and Social Justice

Chair: TBC

Buddhima Padmasiri

Untitled

§ Anisa Rahim

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

§ Durgambini Patel

Quasi Legal Determinants of Labour Unrest in Developing Economies-

Ranjan Anno Helan Menaka

A Need to Strengthen the Laws Relating to Migrant Women Workers: A Sri Lankan Perspective

Friday, Dec 14th, 4:00pm – 4.30pm

Tea

(Pillared Area)


Friday, Dec 14th, 4.30 pm – 6.30pm	Plenary 1 Law and the Social Venue: The Arts Theatre Chair: Gananath Obeyesekere § 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

(Seminar Room)

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

(Audio Visual Room)

Feminism I

Chair: TBC

Chulani Kodikara

Only until the Rice is Cooked: The Discourse around Domestic Violence in Sri Lanka

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

Anisur Rahman

Possessing Women: Interpretation of Islamic Family Law in Colonial India

Panel 11

(Room B)

Land and Resources II

Chair: TBC

Rohini Chaturvedi

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

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

Panel 12

(Room 33)

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

(Pillared Area)

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

Session 4

Panel 13

(Seminar Room)

Regulating Sex Work in South Asia

Chair: Radhika Coomaraswamy

Rohit De

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

(Audio Visual Room)

Land and Resources III

Chair: TBC

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

Anusha Hariharan

Encroachment as access: questions raised by the Jan Adhikar Andolan

Kabir Bavikatte

Untitled

Panel 15

(Room B)

Governance I

Chair: Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne

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

Panel 16

(Room 33)

Antidiscrimination law: A common point of struggle?

Chair: Kalpana Kannabiran

Farrah Ahmed

The Personal Law System, Discrimination and Religious Autonomy

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

( Post-Graduate Unit)

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

Session 5

Panel 17

(Seminar Room)

The Legal Complex and Political Liberalism in South Asia

Discussant:
Osama Siddique

Terence Halliday

Lucien Karpik

Political Liberalism in the British Post-Colony: A Theme with Three
Variations

Deepika Udagama

The Sri Lankan Legal Complex and the Liberal Project: Only Thus Far and No More.

Rohit De

Emasculating the Executive: The Federal Court and Civil Liberties in Late
Colonial India: 1942-1944

Maryam S. Khan

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

Panel 18

(Audio Visual Room)

Roundtable on Caste in South Asia

Moderator: Ahilan Kadirgamar

With A. Marx, C. Rajeshkumar, Sumathy Sivamohan and Others

Panel 19

(Room B)

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

(Room 33)

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

Harini Amarasuriya

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

(Pillared Area)

Saturday, Dec 15th, 5.00pm – 7.00pm

Plenary 2

Law, Neoliberalism, and Development

Venue: The Arts Theatre

Chair: Babu Mathew

§ Abdul Paliwala

§ Aditya Nigam

§ Ahilan Kadirgamar

Day 3, Sunday, December 16th, 2012

Sunday, Dec 16th, 10.00am – 12.00pm

Session 7

Panel 21

(Seminar Room)

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

(Audio Visual Room)

State and Development III - On Rule of Law, Governmentality

Chair: TBC

Osama Siddique

Approaches to Legal and Judicial Reform in Pakistan: Post Colonial Inertia and the Paucity of Imagination in Times of Turmoil and Change

Imran Amin

Social Justice and the Governmentality of Participation in India

Nick Robinson

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

Dinesha Samararatne

Post-war Sri Lanka - ‘Rule by Law’ or ‘Rule of Law’?

Mario Gomez

Lifting the Veil of Secrecy: Right to Information Regimes in Emerging and Existing Democracies

Panel 23

(Room B)

Nationalism and Diaspora Politics

Chair: TBC

Mrinalini Shinde

Rabindranath Tagore and Nationalism

Kalana Senaratne

Tamil Nationalism and the Politics of 'Internal Self-Determination'

Brendan O’Duffy

Comparative Theories of Diaspora Involvement in Post-Conflict Politics

Panel 24

(Room 33)

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.

Latika Vashist

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

Rakesh Mehar

Crisis in Democracy as the Crisis of Democracy

Ridwanul Hoque

Judicial intervention with politics in Bangladesh: Preserving or perturbing the basic constitutional structures

Philippe Cullet

The Right to Sanitation as a Self-Standing Right

Sunday, Dec 16th,

12.00pm – 1.00pm

Lunch

(Post-Graduate Unit)

Sunday, Dec 16th, 1.00pm – 3.00pm

Plenary 3

Law and the Politics of Resistance

Venue: The Arts Theatre

Chair: Neloufer de Mel

§ Uma Chakravarti

§ A. Marx

§ Sumathy Sivamohan

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/