Law and Social Sciences Research Network

6/14/08

Geetanjali Srikantan

Geetanjali Srikantan is a doctoral student at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. Her research interests lie in the area of law and religion. Her present research which draws from jurisprudence and legal history revolves around the site of the religious place.

6/13/08

Gauri Nanayakkara

Gauri Nanayakkara, an Attorney-at-Law from Sri Lanka, is currently researching on performers’ rights in Sri Lanka for the doctoral thesis at the University of Kent, UK. She possesses a Master of Laws from the Queen Mary University of London, UK on Communications and Computer Law. She has been working as a private practitioner and subsequently as a State Counsel at the Attorney General’s Department of Sri Lanka prior to joining the University of Kent. In addition to her research work she also teaches at the University.

Saptarshi Mandal

Saptarshi Mandal is a student of law at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata. His primary interest is in understanding the relationship between law and marginality. He seeks to do this by bringing together perspectives from Dalit, Queer, Disability and Feminist studies and the way law interacts with each of these. He has been working on the idea of jurisprudence of caste, and has published on Dalit conceptions of justice and the legal discourse around manual scavenging. At present, he is working on the theme of disability and citizenship, of which the present effort is a part.

Renu Addlakha

Renu Addlakha, Ph.D. is senior fellow at the Centre for Women's Development studies, New Delhi. Her areas of specialisation include the sociology of medicine, mental illness and the psychiatric profession, public health, anthropology of infectious diseases, bioethics, gender and the family, disability and society. She has published in peer reviewed national and international journals. She is the author of 'Deconstructing mental illness: An ethnography of psychiatry, women and the family (2008).

6/8/08

Rajshree Chandra Ahuja

Rajshree Chandra Ahuja, doctoral researcher at JNU, has been teaching at LSR and Janki Devi Memorial College for a number of years in the Department of Political Science, Delhi University. She was awarded her Masters and M.Phil degrees from CPS, JNU. Rajshree recently submitted her doctoral thesis entitled "Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Knowledge" at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU. The thesis examines IP rights as a rights claim examining both the ontological criterion as well as the consequentialist premises of IP rights.

6/5/08

Ahilan Kadirgamar

Ahilan Kadirgamar is an activist with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum. He has written about the international dimension of the conflict and peace process in Sri Lanka and worked on human rights concerns related to the conflict. His current interests include the political economy of state-society relations and attempts at constitutional reform in Sri Lanka.

6/1/08

Proposed Panel on Labour, Livelihoods and the State

This panel for the forthcoming LASSNET conference on Law and Social
Sciences in South Asia aims to explore the conception of a 'worker'
who is the object of legal protection. How have the state and law
imagined the 'worker'; what have been the shifts and continuity in the
law; why have certain categories of work and livelihoods been
privileged over others, and in what manner; what are the implications
of legal protection/ exclusion; and what are the costs the 'worker'
and organizations/collectivities have to bear for inclusion in such
legal coverage.

Papers from plural perspectives are welcomed.

Please email: Prabhu Mohapatra (prabhuayan@gmail.com) and Kamala
Sankaran (kamala.sankaran@gmail.com)

5/27/08

MANAS RAY

Manas Ray is a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He has written on cultural and film theory, ethics, governmentality, the Indian diaspora, and post-partition Calcutta and has been published in collections like Global Television: views from the periphery (OUP, London, 1998), Floating Lives: negotiating cultural identity through media (Rowman and Littlefield, New York, 2002), Media of the Diaspora (Routledge, New York, 2003), City Flicks (Seagull, Calcutta 2004), Partitioned Lives (Pearson Longman, Delhi, 2007) and Penguin Anthology of Writings on Calcutta (New Delhi, 2008). At present, he is working towards a monograph entitled, Theorizing the Illiberal: essays on sovereignty and (neo)liberal technologies of governance.

5/26/08

Tarunabh Khaitan

Tarunabh completed his undergraduate law degree from National Law School, Bangalore in 2004 and the BCL and M.Phil. from Oxford thereafter. He is currently finishing his doctorate on comparative aspects of anti-discrimination law and teaches constitutional law to Oxford undergraduates. His past research activities include a conference paper on the use of litigation as a political tool by social interest groups; and another on the characterisation of the crimes committed in Gujarat 2002 under international criminal law. A forthcoming article deals with the equality jurisprudence under the Indian constitution and the extremely deferential standards of review evolved by the Supreme Court, which has ensured that Article 15(1) remains a non-starter. More broadly, his research interests include studying constitutional, criminal and family law from socio-legal and comparative perspectives.

5/25/08

Priya Thangarajah

Priya Thangarajah is currently a Law student at the National Law School of India University. She is Sri Lankan and has worked on a range of Human Rights issues related to conflict for the past three years and continues to do so intermittently from India and when she visits Sri Lanka. In India, she works consistently with a number of independent collectives with a focus on issues of gender and sexuality. More recently she has been involved in research and writing around issues of queer women and the law in India. Her primary areas of focus are gender, sexuality and conflict related issues.

Rajendra Pradhan

Rajendra Pradhan is currently the Chair of Social Science Baha, an NGO dedicated to promoting social sciences in Nepal. He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Delhi but prefers to call himself an anthropologist. A researcher with varied research interests, he has studied religion among the Hindu Newars of Kathmandu, the care of the elderly in a Dutch village, food beliefs and practices in the Nepal Tarai, (irrigation) water rights and history and culture of water in Nepal, traditional dispute resolution processes, social exclusion and inclusion and more recently an ethnography of the state.

Over the past 12 odd years, he has developed an interest in and used legal anthropological and especially legal pluralism perspectives for his research search on water rights, dispute process and ethnography of the state.

He has published numerous articles and edited several books including Water Rights, Conflict and Policy (1997), Water, Land and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal (2000), Law, History and Culture of Water in Nepal (2003), Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law in Social, Economic and Political Development (2003). He is currently working on several books, including on Legal Anthropology and Traditional Disputing Processes in Nepal and on an ethnography of the state-citizen interaction at the local level.

Email address rpradhan@soscbaha.org

May 29 South Asia Lunch at Montreal LSA Meeting

Please join us
for the annual
South Asia CRN Lunch
at this year's Law and Society Meeting
in Montreal, Canada.

The lunch will take place on
Thursday, May 29, from 12.30-2pm
at
the Brasserie Brunoise,
1012 de la Montagne:
http://www.brunoise.ca/brasserie/index.html

Please RSVP Mitra Sharafi (mitrasharafi@ yahoo.com)
by Tuesday, May 27
if you plan to attend (partners welcome).

Directions from conference area: walk west from the Place Bonaventure approximately five blocks along boulevard Rene Levesque Ouest, rue de la Gauchetiere, or boulevard St. Antoine Ouest. Early on, you will pass Marie Reine du Monde cathedral. The restaurant is on a cross-street,
rue de la Montagne, between Rene Levesque and de la Gauchetiere. If you reach the campus of Concordia University, you have gone 1-2 blocks too far.

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&q=brasserie+brunoise&near=Montreal,+QC,+Canada&fb=1&cid=0,0,1368105787806840336&sa=X&oi=local_result&resnum=1&ct=image)

We look forward to seeing you there.

-Mitra Sharafi & Marc Galanter
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Meeting at Law and Society, Montreal

Dear All,

As this fascinating network grows …and plans get into place for the first inaugural conference at JNU – there is much to talk and engage about. I imagine there are some of us here who are heading to the L&S meeting in Montreal? With that round the corner – I thought it would be a great idea (possibly highly ambitious given diaries?!) to try and convene a meeting there – nothing more serious that food and drinks. Though, with plans to scheme something for LASS/JNU?

Any takers – please drop me a line at dwijenr@gmail.com

Best,

Dwijen

Dr Dwijen Rangnekar

CSGR/Law

University of Warwick, UK

Email: d.rangnekar@warwick.ac.uk

Ph: +44 +24 7652 8906

Fax: +44 + 24 7657 2548

http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/drangnekar

ESRC Project on Geographical Indications http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/feni

5/22/08

Navita Mahajan

Navita Mahajan is an independent researcher and a teacher educator. She teaches the pedagogical courses in Counseling & Guidance, training /initiating the students in deeper realms of mind particularly in Personal Counseling at the Faculty of Education, Dev Samaj College of Education, Panjab University. She works and writes in the areas of Partition of South Asia, conflict transformation and role of education in Peacebuilding through track II. She is currently working on a book project based on the narratives of the third generation of Post Partitioned Punjab and is also working on exploring the South East Asian concept of Peace.

5/18/08

Ashok Agrwaal

After graduating from law school in 1982 Ashok joined the bar in Delhi, India and have been practicing law since then. He started off as an independent lawyer, not affiliated to any firm and continues to be so even today.

Over the last 20 years his focus has been on issues of accountability and State impunity. In 1995 he filed a petition in the Indian Supreme Court seeking a comprehensive enquiry into allegations of enforced disappearances in the north-western Indian State of Punjab during the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, when the state was wracked by an armed insurrection. The final order, in October 2006, fell woefully short of expectations but it did result in the grant of minimal compensation to the families of over 1200 persons who had been disappeared (and then killed) by the Punjab police and other security forces. This is a first in independent Indian history.

Between 2002 and 2005 Ashok conducted a study of the effectiveness of the writ of habeas corpus in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which has also been in the throes of a violent insurrection since 1990. An abridged version of his report is to be published shortly, in the form of a monograph, by South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), the Kathmandu based regional NGO, in collaboration with which the research was done.

Currently Ashok balances his time between practice and research/ writing. A paper, titled 'Law's Autonomy: A Paradigm of State Power' was recently published in a volume titled ‘Autonomy - Beyond Hermeneutics and Kant’, Paula Banerjee and Samir K. Das (eds.), (Delhi: Anthem, 2007). It explores the ambivalence of law in the context of individual and social autonomy. This paper, as well as the report on habeas corpus in Kashmir, can be downloaded from http://works.bepress.com/ashokagrwaal/

Another paper, tentatively titled Trivialising Justice: Reservations and the Rule of Law, will be published by Sage, as part of a volume on Law and Social Justice (part of a 4 volume status report on social justice in India), towards the end of this year or early next year.

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/