11th Annual Graduate Legal Studies Association Conference

• In-person event
• Conference Room 2228, Richcraft Hall, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

Building/Bending/Breaking Boundaries: (Re)Conceptualizing Legal Enquiry

Law is replete with boundaries and binaries that often emerge as localities of struggle in the legal balance between stability and transformation – such as: law versus equity, domestic versus international jurisdictions, private versus public law, and security versus liberty. Law pushes the bounds of social, economic, and political transformations, yet, at the same time, labours to ensure stability, predictability and continuity in its response to significant and recurring social phenomena. As a result, these binaries often shape the scope of our theoretical inquiry and, in turn, we seek to challenge the boundaries of accepted methodologies, theories, ontologies, typologies and epistemologies.

In order to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange, we encourage participants from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds to consider how we might attempt to cross the ‘boundaries’ in our exploration of contemporary or historical socio-legal phenomena. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Theories and impacts of globalization on the domestic and international society

• Legal responses to climate change narratives

• Neoliberal policies and the neo-colonial/post-colonial state

• Labour and social movements

• The stasis of government responses to a proliferation of recent and past refugee crises

View the program.

This event is co-sponsored by the FPA Research Month