Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

Vikki Bell and Leti Volpp will be convening Workshop 4 on questions of Property, Migration and Belonging.

The first session will address law’s relationship to interdisciplinarity with a focus on questions of immigration. We will examine how property surfaces as a way to conceptualize various rights and entitlements, including the right of a lawful resident to return, the claim of an irregular migrant to remain, and the request of a refugee to belong.  We will also consider how immigration might be re-theorized as the management of claims for resources rather than as spatial movement over territory.

The afternoon session will consider the ways in which those things are left behind after periods of state violence – buildings that were used as clandestine detention centres, photographs, clothes – become a focus within the community’s struggles for memory and justice. How are buildings, images and the cultural productions they provoke mobilized within the struggles to ‘re-set’ the norms of a society in the wake of such violence? Taking examples from Argentina and Chile’s experiences, we will consider how processes we can understand as bio-political created a caesura of differential belonging during the Southern cone’s experiences of dictatorship, and how in their post-dictatorship transition different modes of ‘repair’ seek to act on the property and traces that remain in order to demand new socialities and new normative commitments. We will pay attention to the different forums in which these demands are made, within and beyond the law, as well as how new forms of belonging and affiliation arise that may require further attention and critique. In terms of interdisciplinarity, the session will encourage you to think about how you engage with cultural productions such as performances, textual and visual interventions, in your own work.

We are happy to announce Vikki Bell as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Vikki is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the Cultural Analysis pathway of the MA programme, is the Director of Postgraduate Research and co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. Her research has addressed transitional justice within societies emerging from periods of conflict, with a focus on Latin America, with an emphasis on questions of the aesthetics and ethics. She has several decades of engagement with critical, feminist, post-structuralist, post- and decolonial theory as well as with photography, contemporary art and film. Vikki is looking forward to joining OSI this year and will be convening a workshop with Leti Volpp on questions of Property, Migration and Belonging.

Vikki is the author of four monographs, including Culture and Performance (Berg, 2007) and The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina (Routledge, 2014), and has also written over fifty academic articles and chapters. She is currently completing a further book on the complexities of ‘propositions of memory’ in archives, artworks and memory sites in Argentina, Chile and Colombia, including the implications of creating archives and making artworks from the ruins and remnants that remain in post-conflict worlds. She is a former editor of Social & Legal Studies and Theory, Culture & Society.

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