Dissents and Dispositions

Conference of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia

City of Melbourne: La Trobe Law School and Melbourne Law School

12-14 December 2017

(Postgraduate Day on 11 December 2017)

Keynote Speakers: Tony Birch (Victoria), Marianne Constable (UC Berkeley),

Karen Crawley (Griffith), Suzanne Ost (Lancaster), Nikos Papastergiadis (Melbourne)

towards a monument to batman's treatyTom Nicholson, ‘Towards a Monument to Batman’s Treaty’ (2013) 101 A0 printed sheets, pasted to the wall of the museum, and 3,520 bricks collected from citizens in and around Healesville. Exh.: Future memorials, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 19 October 2013 — 9 February 2014. Photograph Christian Capurro. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery

Dissent and disposition are both relational. To dissent is to disagree and be at variance: to refuse an established order, to diverge from orthodoxy, to oppose, critique, quarrel and rearrange. If political dissent is commonly understood as speaking truth to power, how does this occur, or occur differently, now that power is increasingly dislocated from state forms, and the production of ‘truth’ by experts is itself subverted? How might law facilitate and energise, or suppress and silence such dissent? More than just political or legal dissent, how might these forms work alongside aesthetic, literary and artistic modes of dissent in reshaping the conduct of law, and of life?

Dispositions relate to the character, arrangements, tendencies and temperaments of conduct – arrangements of language and law, orderings of space and time, as well as proclivities and attitudes. Dispositions involve legal transfers, bestowals, and powers to dispose or control. What, then, of lawful or unlawful dispositions, as well as dispositions of literature, of images and imagination?

The Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia invite consideration of the arrangements and rearrangements of the conduct of law and life; of the dispositions of law and jurisprudence, and how these relate to dissents, resistance and transformation. Conference streams include:

  • [pdf_attachment file=”1″ name=”Public Art, Public Law?”]
  • [pdf_attachment file=”2″ name=”Dissents from Environmentality, Forging Ecological Disposition”]
  • [pdf_attachment file=”3″ name=”Dispositions of Disability”]
  • Cities, Spaces, Justices
  • Visuality

Researchers and others working in any area of law or the humanities, broadly conceived, are called to share your own engagements with dissents and dispositions. As with previous conferences, we especially welcome scholarship into relationships with indigenous jurisprudences and the humanities, Asian and Australian humanities and jurisprudences and the regional elaboration of the South.

Details:

Deadline for paper and panel proposals: 30 June 2017.

Please submit proposals for papers and panels to llhaaconference@gmail.com. Proposals should consist of a short abstract (max. 250 words), a short author bio and where relevant, noting your interest in a particular stream. Registration from 1 June.

For further details, including conference streams, see: https://lawlithum.org/conferences/

Queries should be addressed to llhaaconference@gmail.com

Please download [pdf_attachment file=”1″ name=”a PDF”] of the Call for Papers and circulate widely.

towards a monument to batman's treaty 2Tom Nicholson, ‘Towards a Monument to Batman’s Treaty’ (2013) 101 A0 printed sheets, pasted to the wall of the museum, and 3,520 bricks collected from citizens in and around Healesville. Exh.: Future memorials, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 19 October 2013 — 9 February 2014. Photograph Christian Capurro. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery