Victoria Colloquium Friday!
Date/Time: Friday, November 9th at 2:30PM
Speaker: Professor Mark Antaki
Location: FRA 152.
Biography:
Mark Antaki is an Associate Professor of Law at McGill University’s Faculty of Law. He graduated from McGill in 1996 under the National Programme with a B.C.L. and an LL.B. He has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral thesis undertook a "Genealogy of Crimes Against Humanity." He is the co-editor of Sensing the Nation’s Law : Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy. He has published on such things as the turn to imagination in legal theory, the discourses of ‘values’ and ‘proportionality’ in constitutional law, the metaphor of the book in South Africa’s interim constitution, and Roland Barthes and the common law. His work often involves attending to language and the transformation of shorthand into keywords.
Abstract:
‘Legalities,’ an infrequently used term, points to the insight that law can be and can be lived in different ways, and sometimes goes by the name of ‘polyjurality’. ‘Literacy’ is usually taken to refer to the ability to read or write text and is narrowly associated with the alphabet but has recently undergone a massive expansion in sense, hence the plural ‘literacies.’ With this new and developing project, I wish to explore the relation between how ‘we’ live law and how we read and write, including how we read and write ourselves. More specifically, I seek to inquire into the significance of re-framing ‘law and literature’ as ‘legalities and literacies.’ I aim to ask whether and how such re-framing captures a trajectory of law and literature and what is at stake in humanistic legal scholarship, whether and how thinking in terms of legalities and literacies can contribute, or is even essential, to responding to the various calls to action of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whether and how thinking in terms of legalities and literacies can contribute to an approach to legal education that avoids second-class courses (introductory, legal research) and sidesteps traditional divides such as theory-practice.
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