Events

Events & Activities

Events and activities involving ALSN participants

Global Meeting on Law and Society – Lisbon 2022

ALSN participants will be attending the 2022 Global Meeting on Law and Society to be convened in Lisbon from 13-16 July 2022. Details forthcoming.

Chicago Law and Society Conference – 2021

In 2021 members of the Africa-IRC Mapping Project (virtually) attended the Chicago Law and Society Conference, participating in the following two roundtable discussions:

  • The first session, entitled “A Handbook Mapping African Law and Society – Cartography? Temporalities? Text?” centred on how to conceptualise and organize a ‘Handbook on the Pasts and Futures of Law and Society Scholarship in Africa’? Chaired by Sanele Sibanda, the roundtable entailed a facilitated conversation with scholars whose work has provoked or engaged with a range of critical questions, including: Who or what constitutes Africa? What does it mean to ‘map’, in light of hegemonic colonial historiography? What is the goal of the mapping exercise? Who is the mapping for, who is it by and who is it about? Is mapping concerned with providing a dynamic account for how space is arranged or experienced? Or, is it about epochs of time? And how do we best measure, arrange, or understand them? Are we confined to the written word? What of indigenous knowledge which eschews individualized narratives of origination?
  • The second of the roundtables, entitled, “Developing a Repository and Reader on African Law and Society – On Achieving the Appropriate Balance Between Authoritative Answers and Critical Questions,” was chaired by Dee Smythe. Working from the premise that there is a contested multiplicity of histories in African law and society scholarship, this session engaged in a trans-disciplinary discussion on the space and place of a repository and reader in imagining the futures of African law and society – asking whether the primary conception of the repository and reader imagines them as spaces from which we seek authoritative sources and answers, or if we can imagine them as spaces that actively foster critical and novel reflections and questions. This roundtable entailed a facilitated conversation with scholars whose work has provoked or engaged with the themes explored and provided all attendees the opportunity to influence what is primed to be an inclusive, yet critical, project of imagining while archiving.

This intensive writing workshop selects a small and promising group of draft papers from advanced postgraduates or recent PhD’s to receive close attention and feedback from senior socio-legal scholars and mentors. A primary objective of these workshops is to prepare the papers for journal submission, with the aim of improving the diversity and quality of scholarship in socio-legal studies, and supporting early-career scholars to publish their work in quality journals. The inaugural 2-day workshop was convened in 2017 (hosted by the Centre for Law and Society, UCT), with the second in 2019 (hosted by the National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Security and Justice, in partnership with CLS, UCT). A total of 15 early-career scholars from countries including Nigeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa participated in the workshops. 

Law and Society in Africa Conference – 2016 & 2019

This biannual  3-day conference showcases innovative research and socio-legal work originating from across Africa, and specifically aims to build the field of scholars and scholarship on law and society on the African continent. The inaugural conference, held in Cape Town in 2016, entitled: ‘Dynamism, Liminality, Reality? Policy, Research and the Law in an Afropolitan era’, was hosted by the Centre for Law and Society (CLS, UCT), in partnership with the Law and Society Association  (over 110 law and society scholars from Africa and beyond attended). The second conference entitled: ‘Africa and the Middle East in an Era of Global Fragility’, held in 2019 in Egypt, was hosted by the Law and Society Research Unit at the American University in Cairo, in partnership with the NRF SARChI Chair in Security and Justice, and CLS, UCT (more than 70 law and society scholars were in attendance).

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We draw participants representing a broad spectrum of disciplines, including law, gender studies, history, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology.