Birkbeck Law Review Annual conference 2019
'Dystopias here and now: Critical thought at the ends of time'
11-12 October 2019
Additional panels
We are briefly extending the call for contributions, specifically in relation to three panels detailed below. If you would be interested in submitting an abstract for one of these panels, please contact the relevant coordinator named below by Tuesday 1 October.
Abstracts should be no longer than one page and should highlight the topic and theme of the submission, the general argument and a summary of how the theme and argument contribute to contemporary discussions.
Panel 4: Technology and its new relationalities
Our everyday lives are now saturated with largely anonymous representational regimes over which each of us has very little agency. From mass surveillance to the new challenges brought forth by algorithmic governance and the imminent advent of artificial intelligence, the dystopian imagination has provided us with numerous disastrous scenarios to think through the recrudescence of communicative capitalism and its ubiquitous disciplinary techniques. This panel scrutinises the emerging paradigms according to which these apparently all-seeing and nearly inescapable technological networks and events contribute to our dystopian present and future – be it through attitudes of legal practitioners on the legal personality of artificial intelligences, be it through the dystopian logics of surveillance in reality TV.
Abstracts may be sent until the Tuesday 1 October to lacvjunior@gmail.com, with the subject “Technology and its new relationalities”.
Panel 5: Contesting the economic/legal/political divides
The relations among law, politics and the economy have always been difficult to unpack. With the emergence of neoliberalism in the latter part of the 20th century, it may perhaps be the case that there is no longer a relation (which presupposes clearly discernible boundaries to each sphere) among these different realms, but rather a continuum, as may be glimpsed in the work of authors such as Wendy Brown. This panel questions any such clear-cut distinction, attempting to think through the interpenetrative logics of the market and humanitarian law; environmental protection, national politics and indigenous rights; and even the marketisation of higher education and its detrimental effects to political knowledge and practice.
Abstracts may be sent until the 1st of October to lacvjunior@gmail.com, with the subject “Contesting the economic/legal/political divides”.
Panel 7: Speculative Fiction and the ‘Now-Future’: Imagining (and Predicting) the Worst in Sci-Fi Movies
Utopian and dystopian scenarios depicted in sci-fi movies offer a vision of the future that is respectively better and worse compared to the present. In both cases, the social and political structures of the imagination are distorted in order to accommodate ideal and hostile worlds. Such worlds are made to exist by mixing real and unreal narratives that force us to rethink desires and fears about the ways in which we inhabit spaces and communities. While imagining a better society means hoping for a better future, the hopelessness of Dystopian representations forces us to engage more with our social, technological and environmental concerns.
These concerns, in fact, are at the core of the injustices of today as depicted in a range of Sci-fi movies. We can think, among others, of Metropolis (1927), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Blade Runner (1982), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Waterworld (1995), Minority Report (2002), V for Vendetta (2006) and Children of Men (2006). While this list is not exhaustive, these movies challenge the constituted order of society by offering an extreme, subversive and mostly blank image of how oppression, dehumanisation, tyrannical governments and environmental disasters have come to shape our nightmares.
Looking at dystopia as imaginative and predictive speculative fiction, a Now-Future in the making, this panel aims at bringing together a variety of discourses and perspectives about social, political, environmental and technological representations of the ‘(un)real’ in science fiction films. In particular, it aims to interrogate the predictive potential of such representations in terms of how Sci-fi movies might distort our ways of thinking through and with hope; their potential as a mode of denunciation of inequalities, injustices and violence; their excesses within contemporary landscapes of ‘survivability’.
Abstracts may be sent until the 1st of October to anto.patteri@live.it, with the subject “Speculative Fiction and the Now-Future”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To return to main conference call for contributions, click here.
We are briefly extending the call for contributions, specifically in relation to three panels detailed below. If you would be interested in submitting an abstract for one of these panels, please contact the relevant coordinator named below by Tuesday 1 October.
Abstracts should be no longer than one page and should highlight the topic and theme of the submission, the general argument and a summary of how the theme and argument contribute to contemporary discussions.
Panel 4: Technology and its new relationalities
Our everyday lives are now saturated with largely anonymous representational regimes over which each of us has very little agency. From mass surveillance to the new challenges brought forth by algorithmic governance and the imminent advent of artificial intelligence, the dystopian imagination has provided us with numerous disastrous scenarios to think through the recrudescence of communicative capitalism and its ubiquitous disciplinary techniques. This panel scrutinises the emerging paradigms according to which these apparently all-seeing and nearly inescapable technological networks and events contribute to our dystopian present and future – be it through attitudes of legal practitioners on the legal personality of artificial intelligences, be it through the dystopian logics of surveillance in reality TV.
Abstracts may be sent until the Tuesday 1 October to lacvjunior@gmail.com, with the subject “Technology and its new relationalities”.
Panel 5: Contesting the economic/legal/political divides
The relations among law, politics and the economy have always been difficult to unpack. With the emergence of neoliberalism in the latter part of the 20th century, it may perhaps be the case that there is no longer a relation (which presupposes clearly discernible boundaries to each sphere) among these different realms, but rather a continuum, as may be glimpsed in the work of authors such as Wendy Brown. This panel questions any such clear-cut distinction, attempting to think through the interpenetrative logics of the market and humanitarian law; environmental protection, national politics and indigenous rights; and even the marketisation of higher education and its detrimental effects to political knowledge and practice.
Abstracts may be sent until the 1st of October to lacvjunior@gmail.com, with the subject “Contesting the economic/legal/political divides”.
Panel 7: Speculative Fiction and the ‘Now-Future’: Imagining (and Predicting) the Worst in Sci-Fi Movies
Utopian and dystopian scenarios depicted in sci-fi movies offer a vision of the future that is respectively better and worse compared to the present. In both cases, the social and political structures of the imagination are distorted in order to accommodate ideal and hostile worlds. Such worlds are made to exist by mixing real and unreal narratives that force us to rethink desires and fears about the ways in which we inhabit spaces and communities. While imagining a better society means hoping for a better future, the hopelessness of Dystopian representations forces us to engage more with our social, technological and environmental concerns.
These concerns, in fact, are at the core of the injustices of today as depicted in a range of Sci-fi movies. We can think, among others, of Metropolis (1927), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Blade Runner (1982), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Waterworld (1995), Minority Report (2002), V for Vendetta (2006) and Children of Men (2006). While this list is not exhaustive, these movies challenge the constituted order of society by offering an extreme, subversive and mostly blank image of how oppression, dehumanisation, tyrannical governments and environmental disasters have come to shape our nightmares.
Looking at dystopia as imaginative and predictive speculative fiction, a Now-Future in the making, this panel aims at bringing together a variety of discourses and perspectives about social, political, environmental and technological representations of the ‘(un)real’ in science fiction films. In particular, it aims to interrogate the predictive potential of such representations in terms of how Sci-fi movies might distort our ways of thinking through and with hope; their potential as a mode of denunciation of inequalities, injustices and violence; their excesses within contemporary landscapes of ‘survivability’.
Abstracts may be sent until the 1st of October to anto.patteri@live.it, with the subject “Speculative Fiction and the Now-Future”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To return to main conference call for contributions, click here.