136. The Law and the Conflictive Reconfiguration of Collectives: Detachment, Discontinuation, and Re-unions
Nicolas Baya-Laffite, Université de Genève; Maria Valeria Berros, Universidad del Litoral / CONICET; BILEL Benbouzid, Université Paris Est Marne la Vallée; Stefan Cihan Aykut
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Science, technology, and the law are core to the ordering and reordering of modern societies. The many facets of their dynamic entanglements have been the focus of both STS and legal scholarship. Engagements have been particularly important around environmental and health problems, sociotechnical controversies, and the governance of innovation and risk. While the law is put to work to govern hybrid assemblages, sociotechnical conflicts put the law at trial. With the reconfiguration of attachments linking heterogenous networks, there are eventually also smooth evolutions in the legal relations among human and non-human entities. Latin America has seen pioneering developments in this sense – for instance in the parsimonious inclusion of non-human life forms as legal persons. The fundamental divide between subjects and objects of law is reconfigured, opening up an uncertain ground. In keeping with the conference’s theme this panel calls for papers exploring how the law reconfigures attachments in heterogenous collectives and how conflictive assemblages reconfigure legal concepts, categories and principles. Studies can focus on the role of law-making, regulation, and litigation around conflictive innovation processes dealing with withdrawal, discontinuation, sluggishness, recovery, maintenance, and resistance. Relevant areas include markets of technoscientific and biological products, human body, personal data, artificial intelligence, biodiversity loss, climate change, energy infrastructures and sustainable practices. The panel is expected allow creating an international network of STS and Legal scholars working on critical approaches innovation, environmental conflicts and law.
