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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We can finally share our finalized program with all of you!

Marianne Constable will not be able to join us this year, but we look forward to welcoming her back in future OSIs!

Luckily, Vikki Bell has graciously agreed to hold the fourth workshop with Leti Volpp! More details will follow shortly.

We are so excited about the weeks to come and to see all the participants and conveners here in Osnabrück!

Marco Wan and Laura Zander will be convening Workshop 1 on the topic of Interdisciplinarity. Find out more in their description:

The introductory workshop explores the relationship between law and culture, and provides a forum for thinking about what it might mean to adopt an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach to research. It will examine the potential benefits of moving beyond a single discipline, while being mindful of the challenges confronting scholars who work at the crossroads of multiple subject areas. Our discussion will be anchored in readings that might loosely be placed under the rubric of ‘interdisciplinary analysis’, but the emphasis will be on students’ individual research projects. Along the way, we will engage with cognate issues such as the translatability and transferability of texts and concepts; the representations of gender, race, and sexuality; and the role of the critic in society. This workshop will provide a foundation for the other discussions in the week by encouraging its participants to reflect upon the assumptions, ethos, and value of their critical practice.

We are happy to announce Laura A. Zander as a member of the OSI 2022 faculty! Laura is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1385) “Law and Literature” at the University of Muenster (WWU), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her current research focuses on Literature as Equity in British Cultural History most specifically on legal fictions and the works of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontës. For the upcoming funding phase of the CRC, she is preparing a research project on Subjects on the Move in Literature and Human Rights in collaboration with the law school at the WWU Muenster and the Institute of English and American Studies at Osnabrueck University. Laura will convene a workshop with Marco Wan on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

Laura holds an M.A. in English Literature and Linguistics and both state examinations in Law after completing her postgraduate judicial service traineeship. After receiving her PhD by the faculty of language and literatures at the University of Munich (LMU) she worked as a lecturer in the English Department. She also worked as a research assistant and taught at the Faculty of Law at the Universities of Munich, Frankfurt and Saarbruecken, for a master’s program in Digital Forensics. Publications include Writing Back / Reading Forward: Reconsidering the Postcolonial Approach (Berlin 2019), as well as articles on law and literature, gender and postcolonial studies, and both South African and Caribbean literature