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Job Posting: Rhetoric and Public Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington

Posted: 14 Jul 2012 03:59 PM PDT


Assistant Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture Indiana University, Bloomington

Indiana University, Department of Communication and Culture, seeks an Assistant Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture focused on the rhetorical critique of law and/or public policy with an orientation toward civic engagement.  This is a tenure-track position, which requires a strong research agenda, a commitment to excellence in teaching, and a PhD completed prior to August 2012.

In addition to teaching graduate courses in rhetoric and public culture that reflect core requirements and more specialized areas of expertise in law and/or public policy, the person filling this position is expected to teach undergraduate courses in areas such as freedom of speech, argumentation and advocacy, and legal communication.  Ideally, this person would help to mentor undergraduate students aiming for careers in law, government, and non-government organizations as well as enhance linkages with the interdisciplinary Political and Civic Engagement Program (PACE), the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (which maintains a campus debate program), and the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions.

Applicants should send via email a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to:  Robert Ivie, Chair, RPC Search Committee c/o Amy Cornell, Assistant to the Chair, Department of Communication and Culture atcmcl@indiana.edu> or to RPC Search Committee, 800 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405.  Email applications preferred.  Review of applications will begin on September 28th, 2012 and continue until the position is filled.


Indiana University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.  The university actively encourages applications of women, minorities, applicants with disabilities, and members of other underrepresented groups

Invitation and Call For Participation: Northeast Regional Law and Society Meeting, January 2013

Posted: 14 Jul 2012 03:57 PM PDT


Northeast Regional Law and Society Meeting
January 11-12, 2013
Amherst College




Invitation and Call for Participation

You are cordially invited to participate in the third Northeast Regional Law and Society Conference which will be held at Amherst College on January 11 and 12, 2013. This meeting is intended for law and society scholars from New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

We have designed this conference to bring together faculty and graduate students from the region's diverse community of law and society scholars for two days of intellectual exchange and community building. We hope to provide a collegial, informal, and small setting in which to explore law and society as a field, to introduce scholars to the field, to discuss areas in which our research agendas need to be developed, to engage debates about the various theories which animate our work, and to establish an intellectual forum for sustained and engaged conversation.  The meeting will provide the occasion for a lively mix of small group discussions, presentations, debates, and social gatherings, all designed to encourage spirited dialog and collegial conversation.

We will be organizing sessions of the following types:

  1. Paper Presentation Sessions.
In these sessions we will have one paper and two commentators who read and discuss the paper and in which the paper which they discuss would be circulated in advance to those who would like to attend the session We invite scholars interested in having their work be the focus of such a session to send a one page abstract of your paper as an e-mail attachment in Word or RTF to northeastlaw@amherst.edu by October 1st, 2012.  


  1. Critical Intervention Sessions.  For these sessions we will revisit classic texts in the field and/or leading scholars will pose questions about, and moderate discussions of, key research areas. Examples of the kinds of topics considered in past years: legal consciousness, law and war, psychoanalysis and law, and race and racial justice.

We will also have a plenary speaker.

You are invited to attend without presenting work, to submit a proposal to present work in a paper presentation session, or to volunteer to serve as a chair/commentator.


If you are interested in serving as a chair/commentator, please send an e-mail to northeastlaw@amherst.edu by October 1st, 2012 indicating your willingness to serve and your areas of expertise/interest.

If you have any questions please contact Austin Sarat at adsarat@amherst.eduor 413-542-2308.


Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities

Posted: 14 Jul 2012 03:54 PM PDT



From Linda Meyer, Quinnipiac College
Call for Papers
 16th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities University of London, Birkbeck March 22 and March 23, 2013
  Sculpting the Human: Law, Culture and Biopolitics
  In recent times, diverse thinkers and artists including Foucault, Derrida, Esposito, Malabou, Coetzee, Agamben, Latour, Kentridge, Nancy, Butler and Brown have raised, or attempted to re-articulate, the question of 'the human.' The ASLCH meeting at Birkbeck, London, invites you to (re-)consider transformations in contemporary legal arrangements in light of emerging theoretical, cultural, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, and socio-political understandings or interrogations of the 'human'. Tapping diverse conceptualizations of the indeterminacy frequently associated with the human, conference participants are invited to engage contemporary analyses of humans, others and legal forms.
 The question of the human is, in many ways, an age-old one.  In other ways, however, it is peculiarly ours as we face current debates on what it is to qualify as human, in-human or animal life. These might include, but need not be limited to, discussions on: changing political cultures of disqualified lives; re-negotiating the subjects of postcolonial governance; understanding new forms of life politics and the associated determinations of life sciences; literary and artistic chronicles of intersecting orders and disorders; science fiction's utopian or dystopian futures; the use of warbot and drone technologies; geographies of beastly spaces; histories and ethnographies that highlight the ordering required to exact popular hierarchies; the reframed spirit of bodies; visions of who may be tortured, or locked away as inhuman; critical images of human and animal rights; deployed governmental homologies between beasts and sovereigns; biopolitical frames that prefigure subjects through statistics, demography, neuroscience but also via 'immunization', 'plasticity', and so on.
 Law is a place where these orders, distinctions and divisions are frequently navigated, constituted, articulated, shared and enforced. The narratives, rights, justifications, punishments and neglect represented or contested through law intimate the legal codes by which humans and others are drawn into orders of the governed. Participants are encouraged to reflect on this broad, but not exclusive, conference theme.
 Paper and panel proposals will be accepted until Oct 15.  For more information and registration instructions:  www.regonline.com/16thannualmeetingLCH>
 For those interested in applying for our graduate student workshop or Austin Sarat graduate student presentation award:
 http://www.law.syr.edu/academics/centers/lch/graduate_student_workshop.html  For those interested in applying for our Julien Mezey dissertation award:
  http://www.law.syr.edu/academics/centers/lch/association_award.html 
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