Legal Imaginaries

 – a Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia Conference

16-18 December 2024 (Conference)  |  15 December (PhD Day)

The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law 

This Conference is an invitation to collectively examine, critique, and, for the more daring, transform the imaginaries that constellate our grasp of reality and sustain the authority of law – from the racialised and gendered representations that give form and force to the colonial and patriarchal imaginaries of both North and South; to the configurations of sovereignty that are held together by the sociotechnical and technoscientific imaginaries of the Anthropocene; to the confined and confining figures of justice that populate the modern imaginaries of the state…

If the ‘imaginary’ is not so much a social context, which risks reification, nor an historical curiosity, which risks uncritical periodisation, then we might think of it as a fluid. We are immersed in it; it saturates everything; it is in the air that we breathe; but more like water to whales than quicksand to humans: inescapable, perhaps, yet nonetheless enabling of individual as well as collective forms of expression. As with any body of water, there are currents and eddies, particular ways of imagining that coalesce and recycle, for a moment, for a decade, for hundreds of years – but always with the potential for new ways of imagining to flow through.

Which is why, for every vortex(t) of ideas, tropes, desires and fears, which sucks us in and hold us down, there must be counter-currents – streams – to help move us in new directions. All Stream proposals are welcome; those that wash with the Conference theme of Legal Imaginaries are encouraged, but so too are Streams that spring from an entirely different source. On how, and why, to submit a proposal, follow the link below.