Call for Papers
LASSnet Conference 2016, Fourth Edition
Dates: 10-12 December 2016
Venue: Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
The fourth edition of the LASSnet conference will be hosted by the Centre for the
Study of Law and Governance (JNU, Delhi) in collaboration with the National Law
University of Delhi (Dwarka), O.P. Jindal Global University (Sonepat) and IIT
(Delhi).
Thinking with Evidence: Seeking Certainty, Making Truth
The indeterminacy in law could be read both as a problem of truth and also as one
that plagues disciplines. The question of evidence has been central to the
formation of disciplines and the claims that they make upon knowledge. For
initiatives such as LASSnet, the imperative of thinking with evidence — in these
times of virtual virality, forensic imaginaries and ephemeral archives — serves as a
fertile ground on which we can stage discussions of the perils, pleasures, meanings
and methods of inter-disciplinarity. While disciplines are defined partially by the
evidentiary protocols that they follow, the very nature of inter-disciplinary enquiry
calls into crisis the idea of a single protocol. The methodological concerns with the
seeking and making of certainty and truth implicate a whole range of disciplines:
anthropology, art, history, law, religion, philosophy, politics, economics,
literature, theatre, and science, to name just a few. The stakes in thinking with
evidence are very high since doing so raises the core epistemological claims,
regarding not just of what, but also how we know. This is rendered all the more
difficult because the very grounds of evidence are themselves shifting terrain,
subject not only to developments in science and technology but also to forms of
historical consciousness and social knowledge.
Thinking with evidence in engaging the encounters and intimacies between the
imaginations of the legal and the social can provoke interdisciplinary
conversations, in the affective and corporeal works and worlds of making, seeking
and living with truth. Such an engagement offers an invitation to re-invigorate
discussions around the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete of jurisdiction,
procedure and techné.
How does evidence index intelligibility and illegibility simultaneously on bodies and
things? How are questions of inheritance and memory mediated through a claim to
the evidentiary? How may one think of ways of doing politics and living with law?
Or address questions of responsibility and conduct, particularly as these arise in
the context of experience, acting as evidence of legitimate speech?
The English word ‘evidence’ is associated with Latin verb, vidier, to see. The
relationship between seeing, believing and knowing, when mediated by visual
technologies, transforms ways of seeking certainity and making truth. Along with
criminal law, procedural and constitutional law also offer fertile grounds to think
of evidence as an object of truth and power. In our technologized regimes that are
heavily invested in the forensic fascination with truth detection, how do we think
of the constitutional implications of scientific evidence and the truth claims that
they make?
Moreover, why is the ocular or aural privileged over the haptic or olfactory? How
do we furnish evidence of experiences of humiliation when ocular or aural
techniques of knowing and telling make suffering illegible in the legal languages of
evidence?
Moving our gaze to the gamut of categories that populate ‘evidence law’ we ask
following William Twining: “how to do things with evidence?” Is it a legal fiction
that there are evidentiary rules that determine probability, presumption, fact,
proof and certainty, classifying some artefacts as facts or truths and others as
exaggerations, falsehoods or myths? How is the process of making juridical facts,
legal certainties and presumptions embedded in continuities and changes in social
relations in history, economy, culture and politics? How does the production and
circulation of technologies of evidence in popular culture create demands for
scientific evidence in actual trials?
What kind of commodity is evidence? What kinds of technologies are deployed to
evidence the body in law? What kinds of knowledges congeal in the category of
expert evidence, from archealogy to forensics, to act upon languages of social
suffering? What is the nature of the testimony that underlies expert evidence in
law and literature? Do concepts of evidence in visual arts and performing arts
speak to juridical notions of evidence, testimony and witnessing?
How may we understand what we do with evidence when we turn to religion, or
custom; or state and non-state law? Drawing on the vast critical literature on
Hindu or Islamic law; or customary and indigenous law in colonial, post-colonial
and settler-colonial contexts, how may one think of evidence as it mediates
between law and justice in relation to the claims of truth to power? How are
notions of evidence in these traditions, or in traditions of aurality/orality,
constituted by the theories of codified visuality in common law traditions? Further,
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what kinds of evidence does the discourse on plurality, secularism and rights rely
upon?
Why do certain kinds of evidence of suffering falter, while other kinds of evidence
succeed in making suffering visible? How do we think of evidence in a broad
sense—as not just documents, facts, proof, or expert knowledge but also as
"aesthetics of protests'', as truths that counter the processes by which evidence is
constructed in the context of of displacement, gender violence, caste humiliation,
mass violence, disappearances and/or state terror? When certain facts are
banished from courts of law, how do the politics and aesthetics of protests furnish
evidence of truth to power? How does the regime of evidence produce
marginalities and exclusions from collective memory and historical record? What
kind of residue resides in the legal archive that allows us to describe how law is
haunted by unwritten precedents of injustice? In other words, how does evidence
actualise the separation of law from justice?
Some indicative sub-themes are:
1. Histories of Evidence/ Evidence of History
2. Evidence and Affect
3. Evidence and Absence
4. The Art and Architecture of Evidence
5. Evidence in/ as the Archive
6. Evidence and its Corporealities
7. The Work of Evidence in State-building
8. Memory and Museums/ Curating Evidence
9. The Markets of Evidence
10. Rival Jurisprudences of Evidence
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
The Evidence of the Body/Body of Evidence
Jurisdictions of Evidence
Indicators, measurements and evidence
Evidence, governance and policy-making
Scientific Evidence and the Making of Juridical Truths
Identity (Political, Social and Juridical) and Evidence
Others
While the Steering Committee will make its selection from as wide a base as
possible, we would particularly welcome presentations that engage with the
broad questions above that animate the theme of the conference, which we
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see as especially interesting to consider in the contemporary South Asian
context.
Instructions for submission of papers
In keeping with the eclectic spirit of LASSnet, we welcome submissions that
address concerns of the LASSnet broadly in connection with the theme of the
conference, including papers, panels, and presentations on the sub-themes
detailed above.
To mark the completion of 10 years of LASSnet in 2017, we plan to bring out a
series of edited volumes and/or special issues in journals in 2017-2018. Book
proposals or journal special-issues plans will be a priority in this edition of
LASSnet. We strongly encourage participants to think of panels as potential
volumes. The steering committee will actively organise conversations around
publication plans and any one willing to organise pre-conference workshops is
welcome to get in touch with us.
We welcome proposals for panels as well as for individual paper presentations.
Panel proposals: Panel coordinators should submit a panel description of 300 words
as well as a proposed list of panelists (ideally no more than four speakers per
panel, including the chair-discussant). The panel description should be
accompanied by individual paper proposals for each panelist, following the
instructions below. Coordinators may also choose to propose a chair—discussant for
the panel as a whole.
Individual papers: Paper abstracts (300 words) should be submitted via online
submission link made available at http://www.lassnet.org/. Please note that
abstract/papers should not be sent through email. Guidelines for submission of
abstracts are available on conference website.
Abstracts should be submitted no later than 1 February March 2016
We will get back to you within eight weeks of receiving the abstract or paper
proposal. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should
be submitted to the conference secretariat by 30 October 2016 and distributed to
the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 15 November 2016. In the
case of pre–formed panels, this will be the responsibility of the Panel Coordinator.
The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel will be 20
minutes.
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Contact the LASSnet 2016 Steering Committee at lassnetconf2016@gmail.com
To join LASSnet please write to lassnet@gmail.com
Other information will be announced in due course at lassnet@blogspot.com and
www. lassnet.org
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