Thinking Spatial Practices with & against law

An Interdisciplinary Workshop Funded by: Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Birkbeck School of Law, University of London, 19^th June 2015

Birkbeck College, Malet Street│Room 414

Across various disciplines, a resurgent interest in questions of spatial justice is prompted by a diverse range of developments such as the Arab Spring and occupy movements, drone warfare, the criminalisation of squatting in Europe, restriction of the uses of public space under securitisation, surveillance and disciplinary architecture, the housing crisis in the UK and elsewhere.

This interdisciplinary colloquium explores the specific role of law, not only in terms of its functions of disciplining, ordering and controlling, but also in terms of the possibilities it offers for critical spatial practices. Law holds a special relationship to spatiality as the latter is ingrained in its historical formation and logics of ordering and control.

At the intersection with approaches that focus predominantly on the so-called negative effects of legal spatial ordering and control, and posit themselves as working against the law, we would like to also consider what positive markers may be offered in the law and with the law in such modalities of spatial practice and thought. And this not only in the sense of legal doctrinal possibilities and established jurisprudence, but crucially so in terms of encountering the creative force of the (legal, political and architectural) imagination.

PLEASE REGISTER HERE:

Programme and Abstracts here: