Cultures of Law in Global Contexts presents the following events:
Spring Reception on February 27
Dear CLGC Project Leaders, Faculty Participants, former fellows, and friends,
We graduate fellows and Project Leaders of the CLGC Project 2014-2015 are inviting you to our spring reception onFebruary 27, 1:30-3:00pm, at Lucy Ellis Lounge (1080 FLB).
Each year, the INTERSECT-CLGC project awards six fellowships to graduate students who step out of their comfort zone and make impressive efforts to establish intellectual dialogues with faculty and students from a variety of disciplines. Our annual reception provides group members an opportunity to know our plan of events in spring, to say good-bye to Project Leaders who are leaving, to welcome new PLs, and to meet new faces and chat with old friends.
Please join us. Even if you have not RSVP'd, you are welcome to stop by and say hi to everyone.
Looking forward to seeing you!
CLGC Group
Abolition Geography: Challenges and Opportunities for the Popular Front Against the Prison-Industrial Complex
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Earth & Environmental Sciences and American Studies, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) will give a presentation in the CAS Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts entitled "Abolition Geography: Challenges and Opportunities for the Popular Front Against the Prison-Industrial Complex," Monday, April 28 2014, 4:00pm in the Knight Auditorium of the Spurlock Museum at 600 South Gretory Street, Urbana.
Abstract: A number of trends illuminate the proactive and reactive social-spatial dynamics that shape the carceral geographies that have arisen unevenly as the earth’s surface has become increasingly ensnared by globalizing capital. Not surprisingly, the trends coalesce around categories: policing, immigration, terrorism, public expenditure/the social wage, civil injunctions, sexuality, gender, age, premature death, parenthood, housing, public education, privatization, formerly and currently incarcerated people, public sector unions, devalued labor, and (relative) innocence. Racism both connects and differentiates how these categories rise to prominence in both radical and reformist policy prescriptions, and invites renewed energy in understanding and enacting how ordinary people –- to use Peter Linebaugh’s exquisite phrase –“pierce the future for hope.” Insofar as policies are a script for the future, they must indeed be sharp, a quality often confused with excessive narrowness.
And yet, breadth carries analytical challenges as well. It’s not news that we find the answers to the questions we ask. What then would the most adequate general term or terms be that gather together for scrutiny and action such a disparate yet connected range of categories, relationships, and processes as those concentrated by the carceral? Nearly 15 years after the 1998 Critical Resistance conference popularized the phrase “prison industrial complex”–and in conjunction with a broad range of groups throughout the USA and abroad helped bring renewed and expanded focus on the fact of “mass incarceration”–it is wise to refresh our thinking. What’s at stake is how people pursue both political strategies and alliances, how they organize, promote ideas, and pursue to completion the unfinished work of freedom, which is one of modernity’s central contradictions.
This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
Can the Islamic Shari`a Be Constitutionalized?
Nathan Brown (Political Science and International Affairs, The George Washington University) will give a presentation in the CAS Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts entitled "Can the Islamic Shari`a Be Constitutionalized?," Tuesday, April 8 2014, 4:00pm in the Knight Auditorium of the Spurlock Museum at 600 South Gretory Street, Urbana.
Abstract: Many states in predominantly Muslim societies have written constitutions that go beyond proclaiming Islam the official religion to promising some role for Islamic law in the constitutional order. Such clauses seem to mix law of divine origin with that of human origin. Why are such clauses inserted and what is their real effect?
Additional support: Center for African Studies, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
On Normative Dualism: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Chinese Approaches to Order and Disorder
Xingzhong Yu (Cornell Law) will give a presentation in the CAS Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts entitled "On Normative Dualism: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Chinese Approaches to Order and Disorder," Tuesday, March 11 2014, 4:00pm in the Center for Advanced Study at 912 West Illinois Street, Urbana.
Abstract: Using one system of norms to positively maintain order but another system of norms to negatively punish disorder is a characteristic, if not unique, Chinese experience. This can be described as normative dualism. This paper discusses this perennial feature of the Chinese normative systems by examining its phenomenological attributes which separates “Li” from “Xing” and its more profound philosophical foundation of dialecticism that distinguishes Yin from Yang, the positive from the negative and morality from punishment.
This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
Protection, Empire, and Global Order in the Early Nineteenth Century
Lauren Benton (History, New York University) will give a presentation in the CAS Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts entitled "Protection Empire, and Global Order in the Early Nineteenth Century," Monday, March 3 2014, 4:00pm, 1092 Lincoln Hall, 702 South Wright Street, Urbana.
Abstract: Practices and claims about the extension of protection over subjects featured in a wide variety of empires across regions and over several centuries. Colonial conflicts of the early nineteenth century British Empire brought this preexisting discourse of protection into sharp focus, transforming it subtly in the process. Two modalities – one referencing British power against external enemies and one involving claims about British law’s capacity to shelter subjects from internal enemies of order – were closely related in theory and practice. Tracing the connections between “inside” and “outside” protection through a comparative analysis of the legal politics of Ceylon and in the Ionian Islands, this lecture seeks to help recover the early nineteenth century imagination of imperial law and administration as constituting the spine of the global order. The legal meanings of protection in this period also help to illuminate the imperial origins of the “responsibility to protect” as it features in current debates about humanitarian intervention.
This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
Renegade Royalist: Anti-Monarchial Politics and Affect in Thai History
Tamara Loos (History, Cornell) will give a presentation in the CAS Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts entitled RENEGADE ROYALIST: ANTI-MONARCHICAL POLITICS AND AFFECT IN THAI HISTORY, Tuesday, November 19, 4:00pm, Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 South Gregory, Urbana.
The talk focuses on the life of a renegade Thai prince named Prisdang (1851-1935), who spent half of his life abroad in political exile. In the juridical and political context of turn of the century Siam, no genuine difference existed between the concepts of exile by government threat and self-exile. Loos explores parallels with notions of self-censorship in Thailand’s explosive high-stakes context of lèse majesté today and critiques the discipline of history’s demand for causality. These microhistories reveal subjective experiences of the world in a way that engages the reader in an intimate dialogue with history and role of affect in narrative nonfiction.
Complete abstract available at cas.Illinois.edu
CAS Resident Associates Shao Dan (East Asian Languages and Cultures), Feisal Mohamed (English) and Siobhan Somerville (English and Gender and Women's Studies) lead this initiative.
This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
Center for Advanced Study 2013-2014 Initiative: Cultures of Law in Global Contexts
(Click here to see this on the CAS web site.)
Tom Ginsburg will give a presentation in the CAS Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts entitled, FROM MODERNISM TO PARTICIPATION IN EAST ASIAN LAW, Tuesday, September 10, 4:00pm, Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 South Gregory, Urbana.
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Legal reform has been on the agenda for East Asian states for the last two decades, and has led to significant transformations of legal institutions in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. The reforms include overhauls of legal education, new quasi-jury systems, and new methods of selecting judges. This lecture analyzes these reforms from a comparative perspective, arguing that they reflect a shift away from the dominant system of bureaucratic rationality toward one of "participatory legitimacy," but also cautions that the current configuration is likely to be unstable.
CAS Resident Associates Shao Dan (East Asian Languages and Cultures), Feisal Mohamed (English) and Siobhan Somerville (English and Gender and Women's Studies) lead this initiative.
This presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
Cultures of Law in Global Contexts Spring Symposium
Monday, May 6 2013, Levis Faculty Center, Music Room, 2nd Floor
3:30pm Keynote Address: "The Settler's Alibi."
Leti Volpp, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley.
3:30pm, Spurlock Museum, Knight Auditorium.
Professor Volpp’s visit is sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in Humanities. Generous co-sponsorship for the symposium is provided by: American Indian Studies • Anthropology • Asian American Studies • East Asian Languages and Cultures • English • Gender & Women’s Studies • History • Jewish Studies • College of Law • Sociology • Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
For more on this event, click here.