Conference – Futures of Social Justice
Friday 17 May 2024, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm BST, Leeds, UK
A conference to celebrate 10 years of the Centre for Law and Social Justice while also looking to the future.
How do we envision the future of Social Justice? What would a just society look like? What can theorising or envisioning the future tell us about the present? And, as a culture, from where we do draw the conceptual tools to imagine the future of social justice? This conference seeks to address these questions by placing arts and humanities methods at the forefront of our understandings and contemplation of the futures of law and social justice. Such methods can illustrate new worlds, but also allow for the critical interrogation of the present – extrapolating from the inequalities that are rapidly expanding at the local and global levels.
This conference engages with new and innovative methods from across the humanities including legal design, science fiction, utopias and dystopias, prefigurative methods, subversive histories, literature and instillations to interrogate, explore and bring forth social justice in the past, present and future. Topics and speakers include:
Futurity, Futures and Science Fiction
- Before the Future: Banal Sites and Zones of Temporal Possibility – Peter Conlin (University of Nottingham)
- Why Science Fiction? Challenging the Epistemology of the Ever-Present – Mitchell Travis (University of Leeds)
- Avoiding the Collapse, Living the Collapse: The Centrality of Social Justice Education and Legal Education in ‘Avoiding’ Dystopia – Craig Newbery-Jones (University of Exeter)
Future Methods
- The Future of Legal Gender: How can prefigurative projects support equality and social justice? – Flora Renz (University of Kent)
- Abolition Science Fiction – Phil Crockett Thomas (University of Stirling)
- Before the Jurisnet – Thom Giddens (University of Dundee)
Utopia. Dystopia. Apocalypse.
- Methods for Feminist Utopian Constitutionalism – Ruth Houghton (Newcastle Law School)
- Why Dystopia? Justice, the Public, and Dystopian Fiction – Patrica McManus (University of Brighton)
- Dystopia, Apocalypse and the Future – Susan Watkins (Leeds Beckett University)
Keynote
- Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching? – Folúkẹ́ Adébísí (University of Bristol)
This conference takes place 10 years after the inception of the Centre for Law and Social Justice. Whilst this is a time for retrospection it also gives an important impetus to look forwards. Indeed, the motivation to look beyond, to strive forwards and to imagine better worlds have been key markers of Centre for Law and Social Justice.
Find more information about this event and book your free place here: https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/law/events/event/1400/futures-of-social-justice#:~:text=This%20conference%20engages%20with%20new,the%20past%2C%20present%20and%20future
This event will be held at University of Leeds, Lifton Place, Leeds, UK.