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<div>Hi All,</div>
<div>please find below the Call for Papers for the Melbourne Legal Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory happening in December at the University of Melbourne . This year, the organising committee have decided to have a more actively interdisciplinary focus and we
would like to encourage Postgrads and ECRs from Cultural Studies to participate. We have listed a broad scope of possible topics and hope to bring together researchers from a broach range of fields.</div>
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<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="line-height:18px">Please send abstracts of 500 words (max) and biographies of 100 words to: </span><span style="line-height:18px"><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">law</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">-</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">mdflt</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">@</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">unimelb</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">.</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">edu</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">.</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:18px; color:rgb(17,85,204)">au</span></a></span><span style="line-height:18px"> by
Monday 6<sup>th</sup> August 2012.</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal">Also, there are a limited number of interstate and international travel bursaries available, so please indicate on your application if you would like to be considered for these. </p>
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<div>Many thanks,</div>
<div>Timothy Neale.</div>
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<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span class="x_Apple-style-span" style="font-size:12px">Timothy Neale</span><span class="x_Apple-style-span" style="font-size:12px"><br>
</span><span class="x_Apple-style-span" style="font-size:12px">PhD Candidate / Tutor</span></div>
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span class="x_Apple-style-span" style="font-size:12px">School of Culture and Communication<br>
University of Melbourne</span></div>
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span class="x_Apple-style-span" style="font-size:12px">email:
<a href="mailto:nealet@unimelb.edu.au">nealet@unimelb.edu.au</a></span></div>
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<p class="x_MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center; line-height:normal">
<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino">Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory</span></b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"></span></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"> </span></b></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino">‘Grounding Law’</span></b></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"> </span></b></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino">6–8 December 2012</span></b></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"> </span></b></p>
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<b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino">Call for Papers</span></b></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"><span style=""> </span></span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">The fifth annual Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory will be held at the Melbourne Law School, Melbourne, 6-8 December 2012. It will
again bring together higher research students and early career researchers, who in different disciplines and across diverse fields of scholarship, engage with law and its theoretical and methodological questions.</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">This year the forum will explore how the challenge of ‘ground<span style="">ing’</span> law could offer a critical and political engagement
with and responsibility for law. This is a different task to legitimating or substantiating a new foundation, basis or ground for law. Deconstructive jurisprudence has exposed the constituted violence inherent in every asserted or disavowed ground of law.
What are the challenges of a ‘grounded’ jurisprudence? How can law be reflexively constituted by the demands of contingency or its context? Some elaborations of Australian Indigenous jurisprudence, for example, speak of a form of law which needs to contextualised
rather than decreed: law is less a force that compels and more something that needs to be actualised, rebalanced and re-patterned into the land.</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">To ground, as a verb, could mean to connect something to the ground – to the surface of the Earth, the terrain, the
<i>humus</i>. It could mean to connect to the immediacy of the present moment through affect and the senses. Grounding law may be a process of finding law in, and making law more responsive to, the question of particularity and immediacy, to the imperatives
of being and dwelling. </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">To ground, as a verb, could also mean to discipline or constrict (law as the insolent child grounded in her room) or to prohibit something
(such as an aircraft) from flying. As such, to ground law, may also be a process of constraining its abuses, its terrors, its excesses.</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Grounding, both as place-making and disciplining, as the site of the burial of the dead, the method of constriction and the stage for stories
and songlines, impels a law of relations. It thus compels obligations of surplus, of giving more than we take, and of transmission. ‘To ground’ could also then mean to relate to the past and the future, and to compile a legacy, history and genealogy.
</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">This year we come together, on stolen land, at a time of a social and ecological crisis. Law, in both its humanitarian and authoritarian
guises, is complicit in global capital’s assault on the ecological processes that sustain life and the practices of communal life. Being attentive to the grounding of law may present possibilities of thinking of resistance beyond questions of the means, tactics
or processes of constructing a rebellion to a broader challenge of constructing the places where rebellion articulates and encounters itself, shows itself and begins to know itself.
</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino">We welcome participants from all disciplines to explore what a theory of grounding law could offer a critical and political engagement
with law. </span></p>
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<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify; line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino">Possible topics may include (this list is non-exhaustive):</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">the force of law: rethinking violence as a ground of law</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">the ecological crisis: the relationship between law and the environment</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">land, sky, sea: the ethereal and terrestrial in law’s cosmos
</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Indigenous jurisprudence</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">settling/settler laws in the international</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">radical legal pluralism, religious laws and customary laws
</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">the place and space of law</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">the Occupy Movement and/or resistance as a grounding project</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">the groundless community of global capitalism: the disciplinarity, (ir)regularity and cooperativity of law</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">grounding fiscal reform in economies of possession and dispossession, austerity and surplus, accumulation and expenditure
</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">methodologies of legal ethnography, history and geography</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">transmission, transplantation and legacies of law making</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%"><span style="">●<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">constituting community: critical constitutionalism and administrative law</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="margin-left:18.0pt; text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">A limited number of bursaries will be available for interstate and international presenting participants who are unable to claim funding
to cover the full cost of travel from their home institution. The bursaries are intended to contribute towards travel expenses. Please indicate in your application whether you would like to be considered for a bursary.</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Conference Organisers:</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Julia Dehm and Marc Trabsky and Timothy Neale</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Send abstracts of 500 words (max) and biographies of 100 words to:</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">law</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">-</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">mdflt</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">@</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">unimelb</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">.</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">edu</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">.</span></a><a href="mailto:law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au"><span style="line-height:115%; color:#1155CC">au</span></a></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">
by Monday 6<sup>th</sup> August 2012. </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Confirmation of accepted abstracts will be made on 20<sup>th</sup> August 2012.
</span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino"> </span></p>
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:Palatino">Submission of written papers (maximum of 3000 words) are due on 5 November 2012.</span></p>
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