Life in the Cracks: Law, Violence, and Resistance in Haiti

Seminar presented by Professor Marco Motta (University of Lausanne) as part of the SOAS Anthropology and Sociology Department Seminar Series

The seminar series is funded by a grant from UKRI. SOAS launched its Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) this year, as a centre that aims to foster collaborations between anthropology and mental health research and practice.
 

Event Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic portraits of law, violence, and resistance in Haiti, this talk examines what it means to live with disappointment in the law itself. In a setting marked by international interference, global capitalism, and state collapse, I focus on the unexpected ways law surfaces in ordinary life.

Attending to the messy and contradictory textures of everyday experience, I trace how people encounter, evade, and rework the law in practice. Ultimately, this is a story not only about law, but about life and death, and about how life endures and makes the future worth fighting for.

Speaker

Marco Motta is currently an SNSF professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne, where he is conducting research on the deprivation of liberty of children and adolescents in exile. Between 2016 and 2021, during five years of postdoctoral studies in the anthropology departments of the universities of Johns Hopkins, Toronto, and Bern, he conducted field research in Haiti on the gray area and mutual absorption between formal and informal law and between state and extrajudicial justice in a postcolonial state. He is notably co-editor of Living With Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality, published in 2021 by Fordham University Press. 

Registration

The event is free to attend, but external and non-SOAS visitors are required to sign up via the link at the top of the page.

Gallery image: created in Canva with brand kit elements.

Banner image: Patrice S Dorsainville, Unsplash