A Call for Papers has been posted for the 2023 Law, Culture, & the Humanities Conference, to be held at the University of Toronto on June 22 and 23, 2023. This year's theme is "Absence, the Present and the Past":
The last few years have been marked by palpable absence: the absence of face-to-face encounters, shared meals, shared lives; the absence of in-person study, of spontaneous meetings in hallways and coffee shops — a seemingly interminable stretch of missed experiences and encounters. As we come back together and restart our offline lives, we carry the absences and missed opportunities of the recent pandemic with us. Absence signals both a void and a clearing: a call for us to be present once more to ourselves and each other. In some instances, we know what we have missed; at other times, we find ourselves surprised and undone by what we have not realized has been missing all this time. To dwell on this absence is not only to live in a state of lament or regret; it is also to imagine the possibilities that arise when we attend closely to what has been missing.
In this spirit of absence as loss and potential, we invite papers from across the disciplines that consider law in relation to absence. How might we conceive of law in the absence of justice, or imagine jurisprudence in the absence of precedent? What juridical potential arises in a moment of crisis and deprivation? What does law miss in entering these moments—and how might law’s missed encounters bring into relief the gaps in the interstices of contemporary culture? What does law miss—and what does it engage—when it serves as a source of social meaning and remediation?
More information is available here. The deadline for submissions is March 17, 2023.
-- Karen Tani
