Mass sociolegal visualisation

'Law and governance are intimately entangled with time'. So began the call for papers for an international conference on 'New' legal temporalities: discipline and resistance across domains of time', the third event in a two year AHRC-funded Regulating Time networking project, co-organised by Emily Grabham (Kent) and Sian Beynon-Jones (York).

I designed and facilitated the opening plenary workshop in which about 50 participants performed two experiments en masse. The aim was to encourage collaboration, openness and to focus attention on the conference theme.

Photo release forms were obtained from all participants.

Experiment I: Text and/as image

Worksheet for Experiment I: Text and/as image. Printed A3.

Keywords for Experiment I. Selected from conference abstracts. Printed A3.

Images for Experiment I. Selected from my own collection. Each of the 88 images printed at A5.

Thinking racialisation, law & time with @aperrykessaris this morning pic.twitter.com/F3ZMYl5Eu1

— RegulatingTime (@RegulatingTime) September 8, 2016 

Sharing ideas on#lawandtime @regulatingtime @KLSResearch pic.twitter.com/QRS85Y5akt

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Placing #lawandtime projects in relation to each other 1 @RegulatingTime pic.twitter.com/NfkgzUcGFb

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Accelerationism and other #lawandtime ideas @RegulatingTime @KLSResearch pic.twitter.com/GW7ojTsETs

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Experiment II: Model Making

Worksheet for Experiment II: Model Making

Turns out it is hard to model intersectionality with Lego....#lawandtime @RegulatingTime pic.twitter.com/D3Zwpxw235

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Towards the end of #lawandtime ? @RegulatingTime @KLSResearch pic.twitter.com/dcnFng77Pr

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Repressive effects of efficiency drives #lawandtime @regulatingtime pic.twitter.com/2sCKyFsLzI

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Representing the unevenness of time in social life #lawtime @RegulatingTime pic.twitter.com/JaaJINkNpR

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 8, 2016

Working out how to document plenary on visualising #lawandtime @RegulatingTime fest last week @KLSResearch @SLSA_UK pic.twitter.com/ApkAsZf3iz

— Amanda PerryKessaris (@aperrykessaris) September 15, 2016

Legal Object Workshop 2017: How to apply

Kent Law School is pleased to offer up to 10 funded places to attend the first Legal Object Workshop at the British Museum (London) on Friday 10 March 2017 10:00 – 16:00.

The workshop is coordinated by Amanda Perry-Kessaris with Lisa Dickson, Luis Eslava, RoseParfitt and Sophie Vigneron who will be allocating the funded places by competitive selection based on applicants' object proposals (instructions below).

Preference will be given to doctoral and early career researchers.

During the workshop participants will present, discuss and reproduce an object in which they can identify significance for their legal research.

Following the workshop participants will produce an object commentary for online publication.

This event is part of the Legal Treasure Project at Kent Law School.

To apply for a funded place

1. Choose an item from the British Museum collection

·       check item ‘location’ to ensure it is currently on display at the British Mueseum

·       note the item URL

·       consider this legal object resource page

2. Answer the following questions on ONE A4 page 

[Helvetica 11 pt, 2 cm margins, include questions as headings]

·       What is your name, email address + affiliation?

·       What is your chosen item name + URL?

·       What is your current research question?

·       How could you use your chosen item to answer your current research question?

·       What research benefits / limitations might be associated with using museum collections in this way?

3. Submit by 17:00 GMT Monday 26 September 2016 to legaltreasure@kent.ac.uk

Model making for sociolegal research Part 1

In 2016 Kent Law School purchased a Lego set. Curious?

It is commonly reported that we remember just 10 percent of what we hear and 20 percent of what we read, but 80 percent of what we see and do; and that over 80 percent of the information we absorb is visual. 

We intend to use Lego to press ourselves to use that 80 percent. 

Let’s say I am facing a problem in my current research/administration/teaching project, and I want to get the advice of my colleagues. I can build a model for my colleagues of where my project is now, explaining what each piece represents and how it relates to the other pieces. The building process, including the selection of the pieces and where to put them, will force me to think very precisely about my project, but in terms that are still accessible to others. I learn new things about how my project fits together, and I offer a shared point of reference or vocabulary to my colleagues. After some discussion I might be in a position build another model that is closer to where I want my project to be. I may or may not actually get there. But we will all have used more of that 80 percent.

We initiated our Lego set in early July with a drop in session based around this worksheet, which proved to productive, albeit imperfect. 

Comments from participants suggested that the process was 'very useful because it made me think about planning my work in a completely different way, ie 3d and thus it was easier to see the blockages'; and 'creative and fun and oddly comforting' causing me to 'stand back and look at my work more objectively (from outside?). Perhaps that's why I found it calming.'

The contribution of KLS researcher Joanne Permian resulted in this, the first of a series of short films I am making to  demonstrate how 3D model making can facilitate thinking though, and sharing, complex projects and ideas:

Sociolegal model making 1 Decisions from Amanda Perry-Kessaris on Vimeo.

Legal Treasure Tour 2016: an audiovisual essay

Workshop on Visual Communication of Social Science Research

In March 2015 I ran a full day workshop at University of Kent for PhD students on Visual Communication of Social Science Research for Kent Graduate School.

The aim was to attune students to the potential of visual materials at all stages of the research process, from conceptualisation, to data collection and analysis, to dissemination and impact promotion.

Attendees specialised in disciplines ranging from business to anthropology and conservation.



The day was split into blocks of seeing, creating, interpreting and showing.

Topics covered included typography, images, objects and data visualisation.

Students were asked to bring one quotation and up to 5 images that were relevant to their research.


These, together with a wider range of materials such as graphic design books, Story Cubes and THESIS were used in a series of hands on activities.

Addicted to Law?

In April 2013 Chandra Lekha Sriram and I co-hosted an invitational meeting of the Folke Bernadotte Academy's Rule of Law Research Working Group at SOAS, University of London. Chandra offered the following generative theme of 'Addicted to Law?':

It is well documented that an ever-increasing range and volume of activities are conducted under the umbrella of the Rule of Law--whether in response to acute crisis, prolonged instability, political transition, poverty or inequality. When presented with symptoms in the form of social, cultural and institutional problems, do we too readily diagnose rule of law failures? Do we then too often reach for rule of law cures--invoking tropes such as justice and human rights?

Participants are invited to consider what their research and practice reveals about the possibility that we--donors, recipients, commentators and lay-people--are addicted to law. The following questions may prove to be productive:

Who are the addicts and the dealers?
What are the symptoms of addiction?
What are the triggers for the addiction?
What are the effects of the addiction?
Are there safer alternatives?
How might we identify the proper dose?

Thanks to Folke Bernadotte Academy for generous financial support.

British Museum tour

I constructed a tour of Rule of Law Treasures at the British Museum for the Folke Bernadotte Academy Rule of Law Research Group meeting on the theme of 'Addicted to Law?' co-hosted by Chandra Lekha Sriram and I in April 2013 at SOAS, University of London. Thanks to the Folke Bernadotte Academy for funding.

The tour is based on the British Museum-BBC History of the World in 100 Objects project and the accompanying volume by Neil MacGregor.

For best results listen to each linked podcast episode, listening out for the relevant theme. Then print out the guide and visit each object in the British Museum--it should take about an hour. Alternatively, you can do it all virtually.

The tour is part of the Legal Treasures Tours series.

1. Ife Head Room 25 (Level -1)

Theme: Rule of law within.
Origins: Wunmonije Compound, Ife, Nigeria, 1300s – early 1400s AD.
Reading: B Davidson West Africa before the Colonial Era

2. Pillar of Ashoka Room 33 (Level 1)

Theme: Spreading the word.
Origins: Uttar Pradesh (probably), India, about 238 BC
Reading: N A Nikam and R Mckeon Edicts of Asoka

3. Standard of Ur Room 56 (Level 3)

Theme: Urban economy and security.

Origins: Ur, southern Iraq, about 2600-2400 BC
Reading: N Postgate Early Mesopotamia: Society and economy at the dawn of history

4. Ming bank note Room 68 (Level 3)

Theme: Rule by faith.
Origins: China, AD 1375
Reading: R Huang Taxation and Government Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China

5. Suffragette-defaced coin Room 68 (Level 3)

Theme: Subverting the rule.
Origins: United Kingdom, AD 1903
Reading: M Phillips The Ascent of Woman

Reading group

Diamond Ashiagbor and I began an Economic Sociology of Law reading group at SOAS in early 2011 which continues to run. It is an informal gathering of faculty and students from across disciplines and institutions who are interested in the idea of an economic sociology of law—that is, the use of sociological approaches (empirical, normative, analytical) to investigate relationships between legal and economic phenomena.
 
For forthcoming meetings and instructions on how to join, see the Reading Group webpage. A record of meetings held to summer 2013 is below.

11.06.13       Economic Anthropology
Pierre Bourdieu (2005) 'The state and the construction of the market' and Part II 'Principles of an economic anthropology' in The Social Structures of the Economy Polity, pp. 89-125 and 193-223.

24.04.13       Slavery          

Frederick Douglass (1888) ‘I denounce so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud!' Speech delivered on the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1888

Katie McDade (2011) 'Liverpool slave merchant entrepreneurial networks, 1725–1807' Business History Vol. 53:7.

Jenny B. Wahl 'The Jurisprudence of American Slave Sales' The Journal of Economic History Vol. 56, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 143-169

06.03.13        Back to Marx

M. Cain (1974) 'The main themes of Marx' and Engels' sociology of law' 1:2 British Journal of Law and Society 136

K. Marx (1939) 'Introduction: Production, consumption, distribution, Exchange (Circulation)' in Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [Translation by Martin Nicolaus] Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1993.

30.01.13        Legal realism

Robert Hale  (1943) 'Bargaining, Duress, and Economic Liberty' Columbia Law Review 63

Sally Engle Merry (2006) 'New Legal Realism and the Ethnography of Transnational Law' 31 Law and Social Inquiry 975.

Mark C. Suchman and Elizabeth Mertz  (2010)'Toward a New Legal Empiricism: Empirical Legal Studies and New Legal Realism'  Annual Review of Law and Social Science 555-79.

05.12.12        Performing the econo-legal         

Michel Callon (2006) 'What does it mean to say that economics is performative?' No. 5 Papiers de Recherche du Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris.

Judith Butler (2010) 'Performative agency' 3:2 Journal of Cultural Economy

24.10.12        Informality: costs, benefits and human life

Prabha Kotiswaran (2008) 'Born Unto Brothels: Toward a Legal Ethnography of Sex Work in an Indian Red-Light Area' 33:2 Law & Social Inquiry 579-629.

Hernando De Soto (1990) 'The costs and importance of law' in The Other Path: The invisible revolution in the Third World, Chapter 5.

30.05.12        Max Weber and 'the' law and development 'movement'

C. Thomas (2006) 'Max Weber, Talcott Parsons and the Sociology of Legal Reform: A Reassessment with Implications for Law and Development' 15:2 Minnesota Journal of International Law' pp. 383-424

M. Weber (1925)  'The economic system and the normative orders' in Economy and Society M. Rheinstein ed. (1967) Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society.  Translated by E. Shils and M. Rheinstein, pp 11-40.

02.05.12        Law and economy through the lens of 'community'

Roger Cotterrell (2008) 'Community as a legal concept? Some uses of a law and community approach in legal theory' in Living Law: Studies in Legal and Social Theory. Farnham: Ashgate, Chapter 2.

Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2011) 'Reading the story of law and embeddedness through a community lens: A Polyani-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law?' 62:3 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly.

21.03.12        Economics as if people mattered

E. F. Schumacher (1973) 'Buddhist economics' in Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered Vintage Press: Chapter 4.

D. McCloskey ( 2002) The Secret Sins of Economics Prickly Paradigm No. 4. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

08.02.12        Legal reasoning in financial markets

Annelise Riles (2011) Collateral Knowledge: Legal reasoning in global financial markets. Chicago: Chicago University Press: Chapter 4 'Placeholders: Engaging the Hayekian Critique of Financial Regulation'; Chapter 5 'Virtual Transparency'.

14.12.11        Equality law: legal reasoning and organizational practice

Lauren B. Edelman, Sally Riggs Fuller and Iona Mara-Drita (2001) ‘Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law' (2001) 106:6 American Journal of Sociology, 1589-1641.
Susan Sturm (2005)  'Law's Role in Addressing Complex Discrimination' in Laura Beth Nielsen & Robert L. Nelson (eds) Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities, Springer.

02.11.11        Market governance in colonial India

Ritu Birla (2009) 'Introduction' and  'Hedging bets: Speculation, gambling and market ethics 1890-1930' in Stages of Capital: Law, culture and market governance in late colonial India Durham and London: Duke University Press pp. 1-32 and 143-98.

21.09.11        Delving deeper into Polanyi         

Polanyi, K. (1944) ‘The self regulating market and the fictitious commodities’ in The Great Transformation, Chapter 6.

F. Block 'Understanding the Diverging Trajectories of the United States and Western Europe: A Neo-Polanyian Analysis'

20.07.11        Neoliberalism and law      

B. Z. Tamanaha (2008) 'The Dark Side of the Relationship between the Rule of Law and Liberalism' 33 NYU Journal of Law and Liberty

R. A. Posner (1995) ‘Introduction: Pragmatism, economics, liberalism’ in Overcoming Law Harvard University Press, Chapter 1.

08.06.11        Social capital in an economic sociology of law             World Bank (2000) The Nexus between Violent Conflict, Social Capital and Social Cohesion: Case Studies from Cambodia and Rwanda , SCIWP 23.

Ben Fine (2008) 'Social capital in wonderland: the World Bank behind the looking glass'  8:3 Progress in Development Studies 261-269

11.04.11        Polanyian versions of economic sociology of law

Sabine Frerichs (2011) ‘Re-embedding neo-liberal constitutionalism: A Polanyian case for the economic sociology of law’ in C. Joerges and J. Falke (2011) Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Market Oxford: Hart.

Fred Block (2003) 'Karl Polanyi and the writing of The Great Transformation' Theory and Society

23.02.11    The Case for an Economic Sociology of Law      

Richard Swedberg. 2003. The Case for an Economic Sociology of Law. Theory and Society 32:1–37

Legal treasures tours

Legal Treasures Tours are intended to enable those who research legal phenomena to explore some of the legal treasures--manuscripts, photographs, maps, audio-visual material, rare books, ephemera, works of art with a legal dimension--that are hidden or showcased in world leading collections. They are opportunities to see and touch unique materials, to place them in the historical and social contexts that render them 'legal' phenomena, and in so doing to consider their moral subtext. I began organising them on an ad hoc basis in early 2012, first asking the experts (archivists, curators and librarians) to construct and lead them, and then having a go myself.

The first port of call was the SOAS Archives and Special Collections with Susannah Rayner. There we viewed, among other things, material from the Restatement of African Law Project at SOAS, papers documenting the mid 1800s property transactions of entrepreneur Henry Alexander Ince in the British Settlement in Shanghai, campaign posters from War on Want and the heated correspondence they generated between George Galloway and the Charities Commission and letters and images relating to the role of missionary John Smith in the 1823 Demerara Uprising in Jamaica. 

The second port of call was the India Office Records at the British Library with Antonia Moon. There we viewed, among other things, the diaries of a C18th magistrate in Surat, the enchanting strategies employed by Thief Detector Sheikh Khyrulla of Madras, an opinion of the solicitors of the East India Company as to whether the estate of a wildly disorganised employee might be pursued for compensation, proceedings of the Sedition Committee, and certificates of freedom issued to those walking away from slavery in Aden. For an account of these first two tours see SLSA Newsletter No. 67 p. 10

The third port of call, completed as part of a Folke Bernadotte Academy workshop on the theme Addicted to Law was the British Museum. To complete the tour see here. 

In 2014 I am joining with colleagues Lisa Dickson and Sophie Vigneron, and funding from Kent Law School, to take Kent LLM students on Legal Treasures Tours.

Future tours will include the National Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Trust Collection, and the Hunterian Museum