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Workshop on authoritarianism, law, and the remaking of society

Key information

Date
to
Time
10:00 am to 3:30 pm
Venue
SOAS, University of London
Room
Senate Chamber (Paul Webley Wing)
Event type
Conference

About this event

Join us for a 2 day workshop that seeks to draw attention to the social life of laws used by authoritarian states and leaders to change the composition of societies. 

Schedule

Thursday 19 JuneEvent
10amWelcome and introductions 
10:20amAuthoritarianism in affective registers: From the ordinary to the spectacular
This panel will look at ideas of belonging and othering, and the ways in which every day affective registers are invoked to construct such identities.
 
11:40amAuthoritarian temporalities
This panel unpacks the grammar of time. Papers will examine the continuities and ruptures in authoritarian legal strategies employed around the world.
12:30pmLunch
1:30pmGeographies of violence: The urban, ‘home’, and ecology
This panel will explore how authoritarian lawmaking engages with notions of spatiality and remakes public and private spaces.
3:15pmConstructing dissent and the dissenters
This panel will explore how the authoritarian State adopts new vocabularies to earmark dissent and target dissenters in contemporary times. Papers will also ask the question of who is labelled as a dissenter and examine the implications of such labelling.
Friday 20 JuneEvent
10:30amPolicing bodies through law: Between the carceral and the everyday
This panel unpacks the everyday impact of carcerality in authoritarian times, focusing on how it is embodied by the State and the non-State and how the effects of carcerality travel beyond institutional spaces such as prisons.
11:45amImagining resistance: Modes, optics, and politics
This panel looks at how people defy authoritarianism, finding ways to both engage and rescript legality to articulate resistance through alternate modes.
12:45pmLunch
2:00pmProducing knowledge in authoritarian times: From the individual to the institution
This panel peels back authoritarian legality to the process of knowledge-making, focusing on who makes such knowledge, what grammars do they use, and what are the challenges to disrupting these processes of knowledge-making.
3:00pmDebrief, closing remarks, way forward
In this session, we will try to round up a list of questions which emerge from the workshop, theoretical frames, and identify points of divergence too. We will also discuss next steps in terms of publication opportunities.

Photo credit: Fariya Yesim