A moral politics of blame
Modern municipal waste disposal is not limited to removal of garbage, but often involves a strategic churning out of unwanted people, and extreme events such as dump fires…
Tag: law
How Museums Can Do More Than Just Repatriate Objects
Back in 1990, when I was in my third year of graduate school, then-President H.W. Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) into law:…
Why We Need a Truth Commission on White Supremacy
The author leads a teacher training seminar as part of a genocide education project run by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a local nongovernmental organization heavily involved in Cambodia’…
Authoritarian vernaculars of the right to truth. Exhuming mass graves in Rwanda and Burundi
Astrid Jamar (SOAS) and Laura Major (University of Strathclyde) will present on ‘Authoritarian vernaculars of the right to truth. Exhuming mass graves in Rwanda and Burundi’. Gerhard A…
The Fight to Secure Rights for Rainforests
The Sarayaku community hopes to convince Ecuador’s highest court that their territory is entitled to exist unmolested. Similar rights have been granted to the Ganges River and Te…
Indigenous Water Ontologies, Plurilegal Encounters and Interlegal Translation
Lieselotte Viaene (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) will talk about “Indigenous water ontologies, plurilegal encounters and interlegal translation: some reflections from the field”. Andrea Ballestero…
Kaleidoscope of truth
Sandhya I. Fuchs (LSE and University of Bern) will talk about “Kaleidoscope of truth: Legal fictions, real cases and controversial proof in the production of the Prevention of…
Clampdown. How Turkey’s New Internet Law Threatens Journalists
The free use of the internet has been subject to growing censorship pressure in Turkey for years. However, the new internet law that came into effect in 2020…
Legal Consciousness Compared: the Case of Botswana
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS WEBINAR TAKES PLACE AT 9.30am CET. PLEASE ALSO NOTE THE NEW ZOOM-LINK FOR THIS EVENT When: 26 February 2021 / 9.30-11 am…
A Radical Recentering of Dignity
A protestor in 2020 in Santiago waves the Chilean flag. Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images In an interview during October of 2019, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera made a statement that…
Sensing the Translation: Language and Medico-Legal Enactments of Expertise in Occupational Diseases Lawsuits in Turkey
When: 12 February 2021 / 2-3.30 pm CET Link: https://zoom.us/j/93210372616pwd=dTZZ… ID: 93210372616 Password: 4JzWZ6 Abstract This paper examines how expert witness reports use the gramm…
An Intellectual Odyssey. The Case of Legal Pluralism
When: 29 January 2021 / 2-3.30 pm CET Link: https://zoom.us/j/93210372616pwd=dTZZ… ID: 93210372616 Password: 4JzWZ6 Abstract Sally Merry was an active participant in the work of the project gro…
Doing an Ethnography of Corruption
When: 15 January 2021 / 2-3.30 pm CET Link: https://zoom.us/j/93210372616pwd=dTZZ… ID: 93210372616 Password: 4JzWZ6 See you on Zoom! Here is the full schedule of the webinar series. You…
Without Norms, Societies Fall Apart
From time to time, I meet an American who likes to tell me that the United Kingdom, the country of my birth, has a weaker democracy than the…
Heeding anthropological mottos in the study of law
Abstract Even though I have been based in a school of law for thirty years, my scholarly contributions do not come across as legally conventional. This is no…
Facing COVID-19 as an Undocumented Essential Worker
Many immigrants in the U.S. continue working in agriculture and other essential sectors amid new pandemic safety protocols. Brent Stirton/Getty Images One afternoon in mid-April, I was si…
The Montanelli Case: Sexuality, Race, and Colonial Forgetting in BLM Italy.
Indro Montanelli (1909-2001), the most famous journalist in Italian history, is an intellectual figure whose memory commands respect across Italy’s political spectrum. But, following the global protes…
An Archaeology of Marijuana
In June, the recreational and medical marijuana industry in my home state of Colorado reached US$199 million in monthly sales, a new record. The growth of this industry…
#Open Call: Allegra Lab / EASA LawNet webinar series in honour of Sally Engle Merry
This series of online, public seminars features presentations that examine the current state of legal anthropology. We welcome contributions from anthropologists working on ‘the law’ in the broad…
#failures: Living Out of Synch
In their introduction to this thematic series, and the symposium that preceded it, Berisha, Mafizzoli and Ojani invite us to reflect on what happens when breakdown becomes the…
The Making of Vizag Gas Leak Disaster: Procedural lapses or Regulatory Design?
Hundreds of tonnes of poisonous Styrene gas leaked out of the LG Polymers plant in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh on the 7th of May 2020, leaving 11 dead and…
The Dead Must Be Counted
Crosses bear the names of the dead and the missing along a migrant trail connecting Mexico to Arizona. Christina Felschen In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, disputes…
The FBI’s Repatriation of Stolen Heritage
The sewing kit above is one of multiple items from a massive private collection held in Indiana that the FBI helped repatriate. This particular item is now in…
Managing Refugee Mobilities: Global Flows of Migration Deterrence Technologies
In 2000, a United Nations Resolution designated June 20th World Refugee Day. In the week leading up to this day, countries throughout the world pay homage to the…