In contrast to most annual conferences there is no committee or scholarly association behind it, and it has no formal existence outside the 3 days of the conference itself. Instead, conference delegates meet each year to collectively decide where it will be hosted the following year. The host chosen by the conference then decides on the themes and specific details for the next CLC. This minimal structure seeks to promote and maintain a communal and anti-establishment ethos, in line with the critical focus of the conference itself.

Each year the conference chooses where the next CLC will be held and the next hosts choose the general theme of the conference, with recent examples being ‘turning points’; ‘catastrophe’, ‘regeneration’, ‘alienation’ and 'frankenlaw'. This year's there is LIMINALITIES.

Liminalities are spaces and temporalities of transition, interstices inhabited by the no longer and by the not yet. As spaces and times in-between, neither in the past nor in the future, liminalities are transient embodiments of the flux of practices, of the mobilities and becomings of life. As such, liminalities challenge what appears as the essential conatus of law seeking to fix, regiment, constrain, define, delineate, oppress. Yet thinking law through liminalities may reveal the juridical as a living practice.

We are living in a conjuncture where lines of fixity are continuously impressed on our psyche and on our bodies through neat boundaries such as those between order and chaos, health and sickness, citizen and alien, human and non-human, true and false, right and wrong, good and evil.At the same time, we are also pushed into liminal spaces and states, through the liminalities of politics, the precarities, the suspensions, the exceptions, the “anocracies”, so that we find ourselves increasingly inhabiting in equal measure political illusions that no longer hold and radical new visions that always seem to remain in the future.

It is then crucial to think law through liminalities, to explore the possibilities that make themselves available only as they are fleeting, to find spaces that exist only beyond the fixity of their boundaries, and come alive in tentative flashes, in transversal temporalities, without letting themselves be grasped.

We invite streams proposals that connect with this overall theme, as well as to other possible liminal thresholds and mobilities - whether conceptual, theoretical, performed, whispered or embodied, whether solid, watery, oceanic or atmospheric - to be emplaced and discussed in the Arctic, with its luminosities, its twilights, its material shapeshifting, and its indigeneities.

Please send your proposals to vito.delucia@uit.no

You will find relevant information about registration, fees, the Conference theme, the program and the plenaries as well as travelling and accommodation here. For any information please get in touch with vito.delucia@uit.no