From Southern Methodist University, we have the following call for papers:
Laying Down the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West
A Joint Symposium Sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU and the University of Nebraska Lincoln’s History Department and Center for Great Plains Studies
We solicit proposals for papers that offer a critical approach to
legal borderlands in the North American West. Legal borderlands include
spaces such as bordertowns on the margins of Indian reservations
(Whiteclay, Nebraska and Pine Ridge) and international boundaries (El
Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua); mining camps that host a vast range
of racial/ethnic and gendered residents (Clifton-Morenci in Arizona);
and multilingual courtrooms where federal, state, territorial, and
tribal laws intersect (everywhere in the West). In addition to physical
spaces, legal borderlands also include philosophical spaces where the
legal code is ambiguous or contradictory—for instance, in its support of
violence initiated as self-defense, in its assumption of consent in
heterosexual and not in homosexual relations, or in its ambiguous
definitions of racial and gendered rights.
Laying Down the Law will center its discussion on two
deceptively simple questions: how have legal borderlands defined the
North American West, and how have Westerners defined and/or challenged
legal borderlands? We expect that contributors’ answers to these
questions will characterize the West as a place of many overlapping
legal borderlands rather than a lawless place. Our aim is to encourage
proposals that center on contested jurisdictions and jurisprudence, on
disputes over authority and identity, and on inconsistent racial and
sexual regulations. Collectively, contributors’ essays should
illustrate the importance of western legal history, in its myriad and
complex forms, in American experience, history, and identity.
We welcome submissions from scholars of all ranks to contribute
critical and innovative scholarship toward this anthology of western
legal history. 8-10 selected participants will meet at UNL in Fall 2016
to circulate early drafts of their essays in a workshop setting and to
present their work in a public forum. Participants will meet again in
Spring 2017 (location TBD) to share advanced drafts. Conference
co-organizers Katrina Jagodinsky (University of Nebraska Lincoln) and Pablo Mitchell
(Oberlin College) will co-edit the chapters in an anthology published
by a university press that maintains lists in both Western and Legal
History. Noted scholars Kelly Lytle Hernández, Nayan Shah, and Jeff Shepherd
have already agreed to contribute chapters as well. Please submit a
one-page CV and a 500-800 word proposal describing your project, the
research undertaken, and its connection to the symposium theme to Pablo
Mitchell (prmitche@oberlin.edu) by September 15, 2015. For more information about the symposium please contact Pablo or Katrina Jagodinsky (kjagodinsky@unl.edu).
