Legal geography 1: Court materiality

Legal Representation in the Chinese Criminal Court

Cases in vaccine court--legal battles over vaccines and autism.

1275 focus on the path of the vagus nerve, not the human being to whom it belonged. Early in our training, bending over our cadavers, we learned to silence a part of ourselves. We learned the power of humor as a means of avoiding hard conversations about more complicated feelings. Often we kept those feelings to ourselves, rarely giving voice to them as we proceeded through far more challenging...

Excavating Legal Landscapes: Juridical Archaeology and the Politics of Bureaucratic Materiality in Bogotá, Colombia

In Bogotá, urban planners employ the notion of juridical archaeology to describe the difficulties associated with the implementation of the city’s profuse and contradictory building regulations. They evoke a stratified and recalcitrant topography of decrees whose unpredictable effects are tied to the juxtapositions and gaps between sedimented legal artifacts. In practice, however, juridical arc...

Emerging Materiality

In this article we look at how materiality emerges from complex chains of mediation in creative software use. The primarily theoretical argument is inspired and illustrated by interviews with two composers of electronic music. We argue that computer mediated activity should not primarily be understood in terms of simple mediation, but rather as chains of complex mediation in which the dominatin...

Materiality , materialization

What is materiality? And is it of a different order from semiosis? In this commentary I reflect on the place of materiality—that quality of material phenomena—and materialization—the processes by which such qualities are actualized in social life—in Matthew Hull’s brilliant book, Government of paper (GoP). The analytic materiality is central to Hull’s ethnography, both theoretically (it informs...