Seminar description
In many ways, the contemporary world is defined by law.

As nation-states, financial institutions, supra-national unions, treaties, and organizations add ever-new legal layers to the global formation of sovereignty, the world is being increasingly legalized.

Globality has enabled new limits and altered parameters for the definition and understanding of such diverse areas of life as crime, rights, subjectivity, sociality, recognition, morality and human existence itself. The law has in other words left the domains of its creators, arbiters, and enforcers (parliaments, courts and police forces) and become a ‘total fact’.

As the realm of the legal has opened up to new fields of interpretation of what it means to be human and to new modes of (in)human ‘habitation’, the law is also redefining its own shadowy underside, the realm of illegality, fashioning new kinds of inhumanity.

The MEGA seminar 2014 invites panels and papers that explore the plural, ambivalent lives of law(s)—legal, natural, moral, social—and the way the law intersects with those actors (human as well as non-human) who are made its subjects.

Download Call for papers here.

Time and place

• Time: 13.-15. January 2014
• Venue: Sandbjerg

The new MEGA seminar
The new MEGA seminar is a research seminar for Ph.D.’s and researchers. MEGA Seminars are co-organized by Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen and Institute of Culture and Society/Contemporary Ethnography, Aarhus University. The seminar is funded by the two institutes, yet, other researchers can participate at their own expense. MEGA seminars will be held every other year.

Contact: Research Programme Director Nils Bubandt.