Law, Culture, and Humanities Conference 2024: Senses of Law

Event Description

Law is heard, seen, experienced, felt, and understood in many ways. This year’s theme invites submissions on legal senses, sensibilities, and sensations. What satisfies “the sense of justice”? What makes for a legal sensation? How does law depend on, appeal to, or defy common sense(s)? What are the different sensibilities that law creates, cultivates, challenges, and ignores? How do the meanings that law takes for granted, or brings into being, fall differently on different ears?

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities is an organization of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistically oriented legal scholarship. The Association brings together a wide range of people engaged in scholarship on legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence, law and cultural studies, law and literature, law and the performing arts, and legal hermeneutics. We encourage dialogue across and among these fields about issues of interpretation, identity, and values, about authority, obligation, and justice, and about law’s place in culture.

Graduate Student Workshop - Thursday, May 16 at Green College
Law, Culture and Humanities Conference - Friday, May 17 & Saturday, May 18 at Allard Hall

Events co-sponsored by UBC Public Humanities Hub; UBC Department of History; UBC Green College; UBC Department of Philosophy; Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice; UBC Department of Anthropology. 

Keynote Speaker

Renisa Mawani's research is organized along two trajectories.

The first meets at the interface of critical theory and legal history. To date, her work has aimed to write histories of colonial dispossession aimed at Indigenous peoples and restrictions imposed on “Asiatic” migration (from China and India, in particular) as conjoined and entangled colonial legal processes that are central to the politics of settler colonialism, historically and in the contemporary moment. 

Renisa's second set of interests, “legalities of nature,” coalesce at the juncture of science, law and history. She has written a series of articles on law and nature through parks and place. A central concern has been the ways in which colonial violence has been imposed and legitimized through racial, legal, civic, and state claims to nature, identity, and wilderness.

She has written a series of essays and articles exploring the legalities of nature the appropriation of holometabolous insects as labouring bodies in contemporary geopolitics. Focused on global food production, climate change and forms of war, this project draws from anticolonial writings and postcolonial theory and places them into conversation with the philosophy of time, movement and change in the work Henri Bergson.