Law’s Topologies:

The Map, Territory and Spaces in Between

The Osgoode GLSA Graduate Student Conference 2021 asks graduate

students to consider the relevance of space to one’s research project
on law and legal phenomena. Not only are there countless spaces to
which law is germane, but also the use of a spatial lens has contributed
to new ways of seeing or sensing law, legality and justice, drawing
associations or connections between objects, materials or phenomena
that previously went unnoticed.

The Graduate Student Conference will be held online on

February 18 and 19, 2021 during times optimal for participants
from the Americas; however, all are welcome to present or attend
irrespective of one’s geographical location. Abstracts must be
submitted by December 20, 2020, to guarantee consideration.
Logistical details
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Osgoode Hall Law School’s Graduate Law Students Association (Osgoode GLSA) at York University, Toronto, invites
graduate students from around the world, and from all programs (law or law-adjacent), to present papers at the
Osgoode GLSA Graduate Student Conference 2021 (Graduate Student Conference) on the theme of Law’s Topologies:
The Map, Territory and Spaces in Between.

The Graduate Student Conference will be held online on February 18 and 19, 2021 during times optimal for
participants from the Americas; however, all are welcome to present or attend irrespective of one’s geographical
location. Abstracts must be submitted by December 20, 2020, to guarantee consideration.

Format:

The online conference will be held over teleconference software, such as Zoom. It will be comprised of up to seven
panels comprised of three to four presenters; the event is likely to be held over two days. A facilitator or chair will
provide feedback to presenters on a panel who provide a written product in advance of their presentation; however,
this feedback will ideally be of a kind that synthesizes or otherwise draws connections between presentations to
promote discussion among presenters and audience members alike. Each presentation will be fifteen minutes in
length, allowing for thirty to forty minutes of discussion.

Presentations should be made in the typical conference format; however, creative outputs will also be considered
provided that they sufficiently pertain to the conference theme. Graduate students are encouraged to submit
works-in-progress to test ideas and solicit feedback from peers. For detailed comments from a facilitator, a written
product should be submitted in advance of the presentation; however, it is not necessary to have a written product to
present.

Applications:

Please submit proposals through the page linked through the QR code on the front page of this poster by December
20, 2020. Abstracts should be approximately 250 words in length (this applies to creative proposals as well). Please
also include your name, affiliation, title of presentation, a short description of your methodology, and a list of up to
five keywords. Any questions can be sent to Joshua Shaw, Chair of the Osgoode GLSA (2020-2021), at the e-mail
address JoshuaShaw@osgoode.yorku.ca.

Registration & Accommodation:

Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance by January 4, 2021, and will be provided with registration forms
and information about accommodation options. The final deadline for registration is February 1, 2021.

Contributions:

Successful applicants are expected to submit an outline—or, in the case of creative work, an equivalent preparatory
object—by February 1, 2021. Where another format is intended, such as a short documentary, artwork or installation,
the successful applicant should discuss with the workshop organizers to ensure appropriate, preparatory steps are
taken.
Conference theme
The Osgoode GLSA hopes that unifying behind the theme of space and law will help find convergences or interesting
disjunctions in our varied projects, which allow for productive and critical discussion among us. Papers may engage
the theme of space and law through the device of metaphor, designating certain spaces through which the advanced
study of law is organized, categorized or contested topically, methodologically or theoretically; or space and law can
be analyzed substantively such as in sociolegal studies and legal geography.

For example, papers may address (although, are not limited to) any of the following topics:

Space, Time and Law: Legal Geographies

Legal geographers and scholars of spatio-legal theory have sought to describe the ways that law enacts certain
spatialities, and how space exhibits certain legalities, and the mutual constitution of both. Further, sociolegal scholars,
like Mariana Valverde, have challenged legal geographers to attend to the temporality of law alongside space, so not
to unnecessarily and detrimentally fetishize space or law. Papers might explore particular case studies that analyze
law’s relations to space and/or time or attempt to contribute theoretically to our understanding of
spacetimematterings/ spatiotemporalities/ nomospheres/ lawscapes/ chronotopes of law.

(De)Colonizing Spaces
Indigenous legal studies, third world approaches to international law (TWAIL), post-colonial and subaltern studies and
critical race studies, among others, have described and analyzed the relevance of law to colonial and racialized
projects, past and ongoing. Achille Mbembe reminds us that colonization is a spatial phenomenon, of which law plays
a significant part in extirpating Indigenous social orders and producing racialized subjects and the colonial condition.
Shiri Pasternak, Sarah Keenan and Sherene Razack have all contributed accounts addressing how law, space and race
intersect. Papers might address how law mattered and/or matters to colonization, how it affects decolonization, and
the (im)possibility of the post-colonial situation.

Legal Pluralism and the Transnational

From the sociological jurisprudence of Eugen Erhlich, to the legal consciousness literature of Sally Engle Merry,
Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, to the transnational legal theory of Peer Zumbansen, among many others, the
plurality of law has been described and theorized through many conceptual schemes. Papers might explore specific
instances of or theorize about legal pluralism and/or transnational legal phenomena. For example, what is the
enduring relevance of plurality to law, in terms of: (1) the systems, cultures, orders and meanings that define law
and/or legal experience; or (2) the transnational extensions of law, including the institutions, actors and norms that
defy or redefine jurisdiction, territory or sovereignty?

The Immaterial and Material in Law

Legal materialism, legal geography, feminist legal studies, and science and technology studies applied to legal
phenomena, among other frameworks, have challenged our understanding of how physical matter relates to law.
These frameworks often draw from the “new materialisms” that reconsider the constitutive relations between
meaning and matter, generally, like Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. Legal scholars like Hyo Yoon Kang, Margaret
Davies, Anna Grear, Alain Pottage and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos sense law as not merely discursive
representations; rather, legal meaning is inextricable from material phenomena. Papers might explore the significance
of the social study of the materiality of law, such as in study of law’s relations with the human and non-human, law’s
relations to the “less-than-human” and “more-than-human,” law’s relations to the Anthropocene, etc. Papers might also
consider the immateriality of law. For example, what extant or emerging legal forms demonstrate the “intra-action” of
immaterial and material? What legal norms are under revision under conditions of the Anthropocene?
 Conference theme (cont.)
Conference theme
Papers may also address (although, again, are not limited to) any of the following topics:

Carceral Forms and Spatialities

Law and legal phenomena pervade so many instances of the carceral state and society, which has invited
collaborations among critical criminologists and legal scholars to make sense of these intersections or relations in
policing, imprisonment and border control. Lately, legal and carceral geographers have drawn focus to the particular
spatial qualities or configurations underlying carcerality within and outside prisons, like Céline Bellot, Marie-Eve
Sylvestre and Nick Blomley’s study of “red zones,” Dominique Moran’s geography of carceral heterotopias, and David
Delaney’s nomospheric vignettes of spatio-legal forms of immigration control, among many others. Papers might
address a panoply of questions relating to law’s contribution to carceral forms of control and confinement.

“Law and…”
There are methodological concerns that arise from interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity—or the absence of a
dedicated or enclosed disciplinary space—in sociolegal and critical legal theory and studies. These methodological
concerns are often prefigured by that pesky conjunction, “and,” in the “Law and…” literatures, such as Law and Society,
Law and Political Economy, Law and Geography, Law and Bodies, Law and Sexuality, etc. Papers might address these
methodological or theoretical challenges. For example, how do we reconcile the challenge of the “and” in “Law and…”
studies inviting us always to look elsewhere? How do we ensure that the “and” does not diminish or dilute our inquiry
into specificity of legal phenomena, or is that necessary?

Mapping the Way We Do Research: Qualitative Methods, Quantitative Methods and Anti-Methods
It is a common refrain that legal scholars do not know how to do research, or that methods are not in their bailiwick
or, if used, that they lack rigour. However, sociology, empirical legal studies and sociolegal studies have long
developed methods to describe, evaluate and theorize law, which do not seem to be properly accounted for in these
claims. How do we produce studies of law in the spaces of our research-assemblages? More specifically, what are the
methods we use to collect, analyze and theorize law and legal phenomena? What cross-pollinations have emerged
between the qualitative and quantitative?