A Collaborative Research Network (CRN) organised by Kent Law School academics is hosting 22 sessions at the Law and Society Association’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans next week.
Established last year by Kent Law School Lecturers Dr Luis Eslava and Dr Rose Parfitt, the CRN on International Law and Politics is taking place over four days from 2 to 5 June. In addition to an intensive programme of panels, the network will be hosting a number of roundtables, salons and author-meets-reader sessions, all planned around the theme of ‘The Global Legal Order and its Anthropologies’. There will also be a collective book launch featuring new books from nine of the network’s members.
Included on the CRN’s programme is a roundtable being held to celebrate the tenth birthday of the seminal collection Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago Press, 2006). Professor of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University John Comaroff will be joining the discussion along with other contributors to the book.
Other keynote events organised by the CRN include a session with Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley Chris Tomlins in conversation with a group of participants in the ‘Law As…’ project he directs. (Professor Tomlins will be visiting Kent Law School from 6 to 10 June at the invitation of the Clio Law and History Research Group.) There will also be a roundtable for the ‘Cold War Project’ with Professor Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne), Professor Matthew Craven (SOAS), Professor Gerry Simpson (LSE) and others. (A complete programme of events is available to view at the bottom of this page.)
The CRN now comprises more than 170 members from across the world and is sponsored by Kent Law School, Melbourne Law School, and the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. Included amongst the many members from Kent are the co-directors of the Centre for Critical International Law, Dr Emily Haslam and Dr Sara Kendall. Dr Kendall will be presenting her work on ‘Humanitarian Complicity’ in New Orleans. Other Kent academics include Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Dr Darren Dinsmore, Dr Donal Casey, Dr Donatella Alessandrini, Dr Emilie Cloatre, Dr Emily Grabham, Iain Frame, Dr Kate Bedford, Professor Maria Drakopoulou, Dr Suhraiya Jivraj and Professor Toni Williams. Graduate research students from Kent who are members of the network include Jimena Sierra Camargo, Ahmed Memo, Alison Lindner, Eric Loefflad and Paulo Ilich Bacca.
A special party will be hosted by CRN at Cosimo’s Bar in the French Quarter on the evening of Thursday 2 June to celebrate the work of members throughout the network’s first year.
The CRN was added to an approved list by the Law and Society Association (LSA) in 2015 and held its first programme of events at last year’s Annual Meeting in Seattle, grouped around the theme of ‘International Legal History and its Politics’.
Dr Parfitt, who helped establish the network, said: ‘The CRN brings together junior and senior scholars, teachers, researchers and practitioners working on issues related to the politics of international legal thought, practice, method and history. Members of the network are based in institutions and organizations both in the global North and South. They employ a wide variety of theoretical and empirical approaches in order to examine some of the most pressing problems related to the current global (dis)order and its normative underpinnings.
‘The CRN aims to make a distinct contribution to the LSA and its program through the creation of an international, interdisciplinary space in which ongoing research and collaboration in the broad area of international law and politics can be pursued on a continuous basis.’
Programme International Law and Politics CRN 23 LSA New Orleans 2016
Image credit: 365 days march by Tylicki licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0
