Dear readers, all news on Law and Society at The Centre for Independent Social Research from now on will be published at www.cisr.ru. Please, join in!
2013/2014 academic year will begin this Thursday with Barry Collins’ seminar on the laws on historical memory in Spain.
Law and Society seminars at the Centre for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg Association of Sociologists and Science Wednesday seminars at the Faculty of Sociology (St. Petersburg State University) invite participants for Susanne Karstedt‘s (University of Leeds, UK) seminars on May 14 at 15:00 (CISR) and May 15 at 18:00 (Feculty of Sociology). More information is available on the Centre for Independent Social Research web-site: visit.
On the 27th of March at 15:00 in the Centre for Independent Social Research a ‘Law and Society’ seminat will be held by Hilary Sommerlad: Citizenship and Access to Justice in the ‘home of liberal democracy.’ The seminar is organised by Law and Society group of the CISR and socio-legal studies research section of the St. Petersburg Association of Sociologists.
Common (and related) themes which emerge in the extensive commentaries on the neo-liberal project include its demonisation of the state and fetishisation of the free market; revitalisation of discourses of the free, possessive individual and his (sic) counterpart, the moral weakling; the populist authoritarianism spawned by its economically divisive and scapegoating policies; and the processes of ‘de-democratisation’ (Brown) and ‘de-modernization’ (Harvey) which it unleashes. In this paper, data from a qualitative study of the experience of Not For Profit (NFP) agencies engaged in legally aided welfare advice and assistance in England and Wales will be used as a prism through which to reflect on these themes. Continue reading
Susanne Karstedt
On the 14th of March in the Centre for Independent Social Research a seminar will be held by Susanne Karstedt (University of Leeds, the UK) on State Crime: The European Experience.
Susanne Karstedt is a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Before moving to the UK in 2000, she taught and researched at the Universities of Bielefeld and Hamburg in Germany. She has researched and written widely on international and comparative criminology, and on globalisation, crime and justice. Her cross-cultural and cross-national studies of crime cover a broad range of topics, from middle-class crime to organised crime, and from interpersonal violence to state crime. Her comparative research on justice looks into the role of democratic values, solidarity and inclusion in contemporary punishment. Her present focus is on mass atrocity crimes and international and transitional justice.
She was the recipient of the Christa-Hoffmann-Riehm Award for Socio-Legal Studies in 2005, and the Sellin-Glueck-Award of the American Society of Criminology in 2007. Continue reading
Hilary Sommerlad
On the 27th of March in the Centre for Independent Social Research a seminar will be held by Hilary Sommerlad (Universoty of Leicester, the UK) on Citizenship and access to justice in the ‘home of liberal democracy’.
Hilary has taught international politics at the University of York, where she completed a PhD on Latin American development, and Law at Leeds Metropolitan University, where she established and directed the Centre for Research into Diversity in the Professions. She has also practised as a solicitor. She has been invited to give keynote talks and lectures at numerous institutions in the UK and overseas including Cardiff, Kent, Harvard, Osgoode Hall Law School, Griffiths and Fordham Law School. Her work has also been translated into Japanese and Spanish. She is involved in the editorial work of two international journals: Journal of Law and Society and Legal Ethics, is a member of various international research groups including the International Legal Aid Group and the International Research Collaborative on Women Judges. She convenes streams in two research groups: Profession, Practice & Ethics ( Society of Legal Scholars) and Professional Identity and Ethics (International Working Group for Comparative Studies of Legal Professions ); and is a founder member of the Equal Justices Initiative . She is currently working on masculinities and race in the solicitors’ profession, and the development of a legal precariate. More information on the University’s web-page —>
On the 12th of March at 17:00 a ‘Law and Society’ seminar by Alexander Kondakov will be held at the Centre for Independent Social Research: “Sexuality and Citizenship: Practices of Exclusion in the USSR and Contemporary Russia.”
The seminar is dedicated to the first results of ‘Sexuality and Citizenship‘ project that seeks to find out how sexual citizenship regime influenced people’s conduct of conduct. What are the mechanisms of this influence? How the concept of citizenship is helpful in a social research of the USSR and Russia?
On the 6th of February at 12:00 in the Centre for Independent Social Research (Ligovsky, 87, 301), a seminar will be held on “Models of Relationships between state and non-state normative systems“.
The objective of the seminar is to discuss models of relationships between state and non-state justice systems, developped by Miranda Forsyth. How useful is her approach in the Russian context? What does it problematises? What examples could we provide from our own experience? The organisers encourage participants to contribute with their ideas on the models proposed. In order to prapare for the discussion, please, have a look at:
Forsyth, M. 2007. A TYPOLOGY OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN STATE AND NON-STATE JUSTICE SYSTEMS. Journal of Legal Pluralism, 56: read.The author of the seminar is: Ksenia Brailovskaya, a sociologist. Research interests include: studies of police, legal system and legal education.
The seminar will be held in Russian, whereas the article is in English.
On the international day of solidarity with Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina, on the 16th of January, the Centre for Independent Social Research organised an event together with Petersburg Philosophy Café and FemInfoteca. The event was dedicated to the interpretations of that judicial decision which was taken last summer on Pussy Riot case in Khamovnichesky Court of Moscow. We tried to see how the same political action was interpreted in the court, by the performers, in media and by scholars. Continue reading
On the 29th of November at 12:30 a workshop will be held at the Centre for Independent Social Research:
In the workshop session, segments of a transcript of a narative autobiographic interview with a Russian attorney-at-law (advokat) will be analysed. All participants are kindly asked to read these segments in advance (segment 1, segment 2, segment 3 – in Russian). The research questions which prompted me to interview Russian legal practitioners are: (1) How have professional lives of legal practitioners evolved in state socialism and post-socialism? (2) How do the experiences made in the course of these lives form the ways of thinking one’s own agency in (a) a social reality in general; (b) in the “juridical field” in which they practice and (c) in the interconnection of both. In other words: What are the cornerstones of interviewees’ habitus? Continue reading
On the 8th of November 2012, a seminar was held in the Centre for Independent Social Research: “Rules from an Empirical Perspective: Some paradigmatic problems” by Maria Isabel Narvaez Mora. The presenter addressed her critique towards analytical philosophy in its relation to law. As legal philosophers predominantly argue for being objective and neutral, this disposition was dismantled during the seminar. The same argument which is also used in law and by lawyers, was attacked. Continue reading
Law & Society 