"In Search of the “Political”: Law’s (Il)legibility between Violence and Care

14 February 2022

Working Group for Advanced Ph.D. Students and Early-Career Researchers

Titled “In Search of the ‘Political’: Law’s (Il)legibility between Violence and Care”, the virtual interdisciplinary working group brings together 13 advanced graduate students and early-career researchers to discuss narratives, processes, and institutions through which the law is produced and contested. It seeks to draw attention to the entanglement of violence and care in modern law and to the global judicialization of politics.

The monthly meetings run from October 2021 until June 2022, and will be followed by an in-person workshop in 2023 to present work in progress that will ultimately be published as a series on the TRAFO-blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien. The seminar is supported by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius and the Forum Transregionale Studien, and facilitated by Bucerius fellows Ola Galal, PhD Candidate, at the Graduate Center at CUNY, and Revital Madar, postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber program at the Law Department at the European University Institute. If you have any questions, you can contact law_care@trajectories-of-change.de 

The working group is interested in the following questions, but is by no means limited to them:

• How has care become a key modality of governance? In what ways have vulnerability and protection emerged as key grounds for rights claims-making?
• How can modern configurations of law and (in)equality help to rethink facile distinctions between reason and passion; the religious and the secular; and the local and the transnational that underlie modern governance?
• What defines law’s carness and carelessness?
• Do inclusive legal actions that seek to improve the lives of minority groups enhance the law’s caring performance? Can we, and should we, dismantle the law as a caring mechanism?
• How is the political constituted, reshaped, and contested in relation to the law’s care/carelessness?

The working gropu is closed and consists of the following researchers:

• Aino Korvensyrjä (MA), PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences, University of Helsinki

• Alyssa Miller (PhD), Postdoctoral fellow, Institute for Middle East Studies, GIGA (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)

• Dana Lloyd (PhD), Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University

• ElSayed Mahmoud ElSehamy (MA), PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, the University of Manchester

• Emily Hoffman (MPhil), Doctoral candidate, Department of Anthropology and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

• Francesco Trupia (PhD), Postdoctoral fellow, University Centre of Excellence IMSErt, Faculty of Humanities, Nicolaus Copernicus University

• Luise Durstewitz (Dipl. Jur., MA)

• Ola Galal (PhD Candidate), The Graduate Center at the City University of New York

• Revital Madar (PhD), Postdoctoral fellow, Max Weber program, Law Department, European University Institute.

• Rukmini Sen (PhD), Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India

• Sophia Hoffinger (MA), PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh

• Žilvinas Švedkauskas (PhD Candidate), PhD Researcher and Lecturer, Institute of Political Science, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

• Zülâl Fazlıoğlu Akın (PhD), Lecturer, Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy, Ohio State University