Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Volume 21

The Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies Volume 21 conference will be held at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 16-18th 2013. This year’s topic is “Regulatory Translations: Expertise, Uncertainty and Affect in the Global Scene.”

Here is a brief explanation of the topic and what we hope to accomplish at the Symposium:

Translation has long been of interest in science studies and the human sciences, but it has not been studied systematically in the context of legal regulation. The conference is intended to foster novel interdisciplinary dialogues between law and adjacent fields by taking the translation of regulations simultaneously as linguistic activity, part of the processes of adaptation and implementation, and a theoretical object. Through roundtable discussions and paper presentations conference participants will examine the work of translation as it is performed and conceptualized by legal practitioners, and also by a growing number of NGO leaders, bureaucrats, private actors, and academics, with heterogeneous backgrounds in fields such as economics, engineering, social sciences, and who also hold highly valued “practical” knowledge. These actors’ work makes possible translations across languages, different national jurisdictions, regimes of value, technical languages, and affective registers. Translations occur, too, when sites or scales of human activity, are differently constituted as sites for economic, scientific or social regulation. While the premise of the conference is that translation is central both to transnational regulation and to sociolegal scholarship concerned with transnationalism, we do not assume that translation is always possible or productive; impasse is also integral to our concerns.

The conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to consider how the work of translating regulatory instruments takes place, enabling their circulation while at the same time illuminating asymmetries and incommensurabilities across legal fields. The papers will circulate in advance as drafts (due on May 1), with the expectation that they will be revised in light of the discussion and findings at the conference. The conference will also include collaborative translation events–roundtable discussions amongst participants where the possibility and impossibility of translation across disciplines, purposes, political commitments, or epistemological paradigms is performed in real time.

Please check back for contributors and article titles.