Mumbai
Conference 2015
Location:
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay
Dates:
14-16 December 2015
In
the last decades legal pluralism as a field of research and study has matured
across different disciplines and inter-disciplinary areas including law and
legal studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, history,
and development studies. The concept of legal pluralism has also gained
credence in ‘area studies’ domains such as Southeast Asian, Latin American and
African studies. Debates on policies, legal and constitutional changes, and
development pathways also engage with the notion of legal pluralism in diverse
ways, as do social movements and struggles of various kinds.
Taking
stock of these developments, the international Commission on Legal Pluralism is
organizing its next biennial conference in South Asia.
The
2015 international conference will pay particular attention to emerging areas
that have gained in momentum due to processes of globalization, the emergence
of ‘knowledge economies’, and the evolution of high-tech capitalism. Not
surprisingly, debates and evolving policies on information technology,
biotechnology, genetic engineering and intellectual property rights are forced
to deal with issues of legal pluralism, perceiving the danger that
high-technology regimes may further exacerbate socio-economic inequalities and
further marginalize the already disadvantaged, especially in developing
societies and ‘emerging economies’. The conference will also address
established themes that continue to cause significant concern, such as
conflicts and contestations over property, land and natural resources; governance;
religion, culture, custom and ethnicity; state and non-state laws; gender; kinship;
patriarchy; human rights; development aid and cooperation; as well as migration;
mobility; and transnationalism, while exploring how emerging and ‘old’ themes
in the field of legal pluralism relate to each other in theory and practice.
The
neoliberal turn in contemporary patterns of economic transformation and
globalization has generated new debates regarding norms, the capacity to
evolve, deploy and resist normative regimes, and new forms of normative
interfaces. Attention to these areas brings legal pluralism research into the
hitherto neglected territorial domain of urban nodes of capital and knowledge
flows. New forms of regulation, surveillance, and the ironic and contradictory
implications of transparency, accountability and participation all interact
with existing social structures to offer interesting problems for scholars of
legal pluralism. The use of social media in recent social and political
movements around the world also offers rich scope for understanding such linkages
and interactions.
At
the same time, the increasing ‘noise’ around indigenous, alternative, or
southern perspectives in social sciences and humanities has generated new
approaches in theory and practice to themes such as law, ethics, norms and
values, governance and ideas of order. These have found wide resonance in
debates and struggles on issues related to development visions, resource
expropriation, economic growth, and technological models.
The
conference organizers invite scholars and practitioners to present contemporary
work on these and related themes to the 2015 Conference. It is hoped that this
event will offer a dynamic and vibrant space for a further expansion of such
perspectives in debating issues and problems of legal pluralism.
Call
for panel proposals
We
request interested parties to submit proposals for panels in the 2015 Mumbai
conference. The panels proposed may be partly or fully ‘populated’ (including
names of at least 3-4 presenters and titles of papers per panel) or ‘empty’
(without names of paper presenters). A proposal should include (a) a title (max
10 words), (b) name of panel organizer, (c) email address of panel organizer,
and (d) a panel description of not more than 200 words. If the panel is
populated, the proposal should also have (e) a list of presenters and –
preferably – the titles of their papers or contributions.
Call
for roundtable discussions between practitioners and scholars
In
addition to academic presentations, the
Commission on Legal Pluralism is eager to involve practitioners working in
settings of legal pluralism. Practitioners frequently struggle to deal with the
problems of normative difference and the power games that support dominant
parties, while scholarly debates often address those same concerns.
Roundtable
discussions will be divided in two sessions. In the first session, a
practitioner will present on the topic of discussion and pose a number of key
questions to a responding scholar, which is followed by a plenary discussion
with those attending the roundtable. During the second session, a scholar will
present on the same topic and pose a number of key questions to a responding
practitioner, which will again be followed by a plenary discussion. Those
proposing a roundtable discussion will act as moderators of the discussion and
will be responsible for the identification and selection of the speakers and
the participants (min 4 and max 20 persons).
We
welcome roundtable discussion proposals on specific topics such as gender,
indigenous peoples, religion, land and property, exploitation of natural
resources, family law, etc. Proposals should include (a) the name of the
organizer, (b) her/his e-mail address, (c) the title of the discussion, and (d)
a description of max. 200 words. The names of the presenters can be submitted
at a later stage.
Invitation
Please
send your proposals for panel and roundtable discussions to Waheeda Amien
(Waheeda.Amien@uct.ac.za) and D. Parthasarathy (dp@hss.iitb.ac.in) by no later
than November 30th, 2014.
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