RGS-IBG 2019 CFP: Practising Legal Geography (deadline 7th Feb).

If my time spent as a practising lawyer taught me anything it was that the law only makes sense when it is actively applied to a particular situation – when it is used tool-like to achieve something. There’s a similar, practice-focused, sensibility in theories of space and place: that delineation of bodies within space, and identification with defined ‘places’ only really happens as part of some pragmatic project or other. Just as law is activated by doing, so the material, extensive world is only parsed and invoked as part of doing or being something.

I’m not involved with the following CFP, but its aim to focus on the role of practise within legal geography (that intersection of two normally unrelated seeming modes of delineation)  potentially raises some interesting opportunities for unpacking the ways in which law and geography each borrow from the other in the doing of their worlding…

Call for Papers: Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual Conference, London, Wednesday 28 to Friday 30 August 2019.

Session convenors: Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway, University of London), Alex Jeffrey (University of Cambridge), and Fiona McConnell (University of Oxford).

Session sponsorship (pending): Geographies of Justice Research Group and Political Geography Research Group (POLGRG).

In the sessions we are interested to bring together papers from across the natural and social sciences which engage in practising legal geography. While the legal geography project has grown and strengthened in the discipline since the 1980s, it has lacked sustained discussion of practice, variously defined.

Practice includes questions of methodology and approach (i.e. feminist, participatory etc.) in the ‘doing’ of research. The sessions seek to reflect upon and expand the methodological diversity and playful experimentation called for in legal geography (Braverman 2014). Practice also encompasses the use of findings from research (perhaps initially unrelated to the legal realm) in impact-work which can take diverse and unanticipated forms in a plurality of legal settings. These include, but are not limited to: acting as an expert witness, giving testimony, assisting individuals or groups facing legal challenges, and/or advising those seeking to change the law.

Our call seeks papers which speak to one or more elements of practice. As such, we are keen to foster critical discussion on the making of, and inter-relationships between, geographical and legal knowledges, performances, and expertise.

The sessions build on a national survey of geographers (findings forthcoming) by the conveners and Fiona Nash from the RGS-IBG “Using Geographical Expertise in Legal Settings: An Exploratory Survey”.

We are looking for titles and abstracts of up to 250 words to be sent to Katherine Brickell (katherine.brickell@rhul.ac.uk) by Thursday 7th February 2019.

We are also considering proposing a special section for the journal Area. A special section normally consists of 5 to 7 papers. Please let us know if you would like your abstract to be considered as one of the papers when you submit your abstract to us.

Reference: Braverman R (2014) Who’s afraid of methodology? Advocating a methodological turn in legal geography. In Braverman I, Blomley N, Delaney D and Kedar A (ed) The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.120-141.

Image source (added by me): a land surveyor’s chain. The chain is a unit of length equal to 66 feet. It is subdivided into 100 links or 4 rods. There are 10 chains in a furlong, and 80 chains in one statute mile: 3.bp.blogspot.com/-SpSYznV0XZs/TXFXr318cLI/AAAAAAAAAAU/zefhcO_q3oE/s1600/