[We share the following announcement. The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2019.]
Call for Papers:
A
workshop convened by Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel University) and Laurie Wood
(Florida State University)
4-5th October 2019
Hosted by Drexel University, with the generous
sponsorship of the American Society for Legal History & Drexel University
What
can historians of law achieve from engaging with their colleagues studying
environmental changes over time? How have emerging regulatory regimes
(imperial, property-oriented, maritime, medical, etc.) joined the domains of
science and law in new ways? And how can legal historians retool their methods
to study deep histories of landscape transformations and climate? These
questions are especially pertinent for the Indian Ocean region, where these
concerns have both past and contemporary relevance: e.g. rising sea levels in
the Maldives and Andaman Islands; coastal erosion and disputes over new-land formation along the littorals of
Bay of Bengal; island-building in Singapore (with sand from Gulf
states); disaster relief following the 2004 tsunami and earthquake, which
especially affected Indonesia and Malaysia; food security around the Horn of
Africa; and some of the world’s busiest shipping routes.
Time
shapes the traffic in what constitutes truth in these two broad disciplinary
arenas. Legal historians typically analyze cases, each with a specific lifespan
of years or decades. Environmental phenomena, by contrast, often span centuries
or even geological epochs. We propose a workshop to address the temporality of
expertise and evidence which will bring legal historians whose disciplinary
focus is bounded by the temporality of a case, together with environmental
historians and historians of science who are increasingly doing histories of
deep-time. For instance, when legal historians study regulatory regimes of
intellectual property to material cultures. It works with an anthropogenic
lifespan: copyrights, patents, objects, labor, commodities. Whereas
environmental phenomenon, which are increasingly entering regulatory domains,
work with long timescales spanning geological, seasonal and solar temporalities.
As states are beginning to exert regulatory powers increasingly in legal and
scientific regimes, the legal timescale of a case is getting entangled in deep
historical timescales.
We
invite abstracts for an exploratory workshop, where we will discuss articles/chapters
in progress and which have not been submitted for publication. Articles which
are in preliminary review stages are welcome, but not those in galley proofs.
The purpose of the workshop is to receive comments and feedback on works in
progress with the possibility for incorporating the discussions of the
workshop. The presenters will be paired with senior discussants who will offer
feedback on their articles/chapters and then open it up for discussion.
Presenters will be required to submit their articles/chapters of 8000 words and
no more than 12,000 words by 30 August 2019. All presenters and discussants
will be required to read the articles beforehand which will be made available
through a secure dropbox account. The purpose of the workshop is to:
- Bring
together senior and junior scholars of law and/or environment who are
working in the newly-vibrant field of Indian Ocean World history.
- Generate
a methodological conversation between legal historians and historians of environment and science anchored
on the category of time and how differing notions shape practices of
evidence selection, gathering and testimony in the court and laboratory.
The
workshop will consist of 4 panels, with 2 presenters in each panel. We will
pair legal historians with historians of environment to explore how common
terminology around evidence, witness, reason, expertise is affected by concepts
of time that are distinct in each discipline. We welcome papers exploring the
following questions broadly:
·
Where
does law/do legal regimes collide with the material world?
·
Where/when/how/why
do natural phenomena become entangled in ordering
regimes?
·
How
do these relationships (re)configure the human as social (e.g. relational,
hierarchical, vocal) and material (e.g. embodied, constrained by
lifespan, etc.)?
Application
Instructions
Interested
applicants should submit a 300-word abstract and short c.v. to the convenors by
15 May 2019: Debjani Bhattacharyya (db893@drexel.edu)
and Laurie Wood (lmwood@fsu.edu ). Article-length
papers (8,000-10,000 words) will be due for circulation among participants and
invited commentators by 30 August 2019. Domestic airfare, accommodation, and
most meals will be provided thanks to support from the American Society for
Legal History and Drexel University.
