CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2026

Convenor: Thomas Giddens (t.giddens@dundee.ac.uk) This stream sits within the ‘Performing Bodies’ mode of this year’s conference. This stream is intended as an encouragement and a platform to ‘think outside the box’ in how you engage with your work with and for an audience as part of the CLC community, offering a challenge to disrupt the sedimented media and protocols of expression that dominate knowledge production. Written papers and the spoken delivery of ideas at a conference are the dominant normative protocols by which (critical) legal knowledge continues to be distributed. This format, that of the ‘conference paper’, is not neutral, but is a contingent and crafted performance of knowledge and critique. This mode of epistemic performance is but one option among many, and alternative formats and media can provide verdant opportunities for novel and enriching reflections on the work being shared. Accordingly, this stream extends a warm and supportive invitation to those who do not normally ‘perform’ their work in a manner outside the standard protocols of the 20-minute (often PowerPoint driven) talk. This stream provides a safe space for experimenting and embarking upon different modes of articulating your research. A ‘performative’ version of a standard conference paper being given in another stream is archetypal: a sung, dramatised, metaphorised, poetic, or impressionist rendition, or whatever else you might imagine, engaging with your themes and ideas, opening to alternative and productive reflections and interrogations. Unique performances designed just for this stream are also welcome, as are performative critiques of the ‘conference paper’ format itself. Feel free to contact the convener to discuss possibilities. The format of any particular contribution can be flexible, depending upon what stream contributors wish to share and how. Given that this invitation is extended primarily to those who do not normally partake in the performative expression of their work outside the relative safety and familiarity of the ‘conference paper’, the stream convener will be on hand (well, email) to provide support and encouragement for stream contributors to facilitate their ideas for translating their work into new and different modes of performance.

Convenors: Illan rua Wall, University of Galway (illan.wall@universityofgalway.ie), Ruben Wissing, Katre Luhamaa, David Diallo The classroom is one of the key spaces where the protocols of legal thinking are reproduced for each new generation. As a liberatory practice, teaching is often the most effective intervention a critical legal scholar can undertake. However, because of the way neoliberal institutions work, teaching of all varieties, but particularly critical teaching is seriously devalued. This is partially because high-metric publication, impact activity and grant capture is exclusively prized; while education is framed as producing the value of ‘employability’ and measured by abstracted student ‘feedback’. Critical legal education is often outflanked by this pincer movement of the neoliberal university. Faced with this, we often resort to teaching the (often deeply uncritical) textbook, retreating into critical research, or focusing our critical energies into small bespoke optional modules. In response to this, we invite critical teachers and scholars to write for a new online repository which will be launched at the CLC. There we develop and share plural ways of teaching law in a critical way. Those involved in this stream will go forward for publication on the new platform, and will have their work read by students and teachers around the world. To take part we ask for a short abstract (200 words) of your entry. The entry should be around something that you might teach to undergraduate students. It might be a topic in a conventional legal curriculum, a theme, a key concept, a theory or text, a thinker’s work or some other element. Once accepted onto the stream, you will be invited to write a 500-750 word entry, and given instructions on what should be included in your text. The stream will consist of a collaborative workshopping of the entries. The platform has been supported by ENLIGHT funding, split between Universities in Ghent, Galway, Tartu and Bordeaux.

Convenor: Bernardo Vitta, Faculty of Law, University of Buenos Aires (bjvitta90@gmail.com) Mode: Performing Bodies Given that law is expressed in many ways, its constitution can be reimagined. Is it possible to learn to imagine from normativity itself? What profane uses can move from codification to invention, from texts to textures, from algorithmics to rhythms, from the centre to the borders, and back again? What precarious ideals might emerge when putting imagination to work co-operatively, patiently, and obstinately vis-à-vis normativity? How can expressing the law in different ways become a gesture that redirects law’s functioning? Law-oratory aims to use imagination as a material power capable of twisting normativity from within and opening it up to alterity. Imagination does not operate in an abstract register; on the contrary, it destabilises what counts as real. Rather than treating protocols only as infrastructures of governance, this stream asks how they can be co-agitated and reinvented through unfinished gestures between form and matter. Since protocols are bound up with horizontality, since protocols depend on co-operation, since protocols know about blockchains and law-chains, this space encourages interventions that may serve both as an epistemic space for understanding the operations of normativity; and as practices of counter-montage capable of transforming its effects and rehearsing modes of public appearance. The requirement is that interventions engage a normative material and bring it into a gestural register. Protocols may be subjected to operations of disassembly, translation, transposition, misquotation, cutting and pasting, juxtaposition, remixing, parody, inversion, musicalisation, dramatization and dance. This can take the form of a public oration, a manifesto circulation, a series of disruptive exclamations, a sound or video installation, a textual choreography, or a site-specific work that will begin and evolve throughout the three days of the conference.

Convenors: Kfir Lapid-Mashall (kfir.lapid-mashall@glasgow.ac.uk), Marett Leiboff (marett@uow.edu.au), Maria Federica Moscati (m.f.moscati@sussex.ac.uk), Sean Mulcahy (s.mulcahy@latrobe.edu.au), Rhys Ryan (rhysjryan@gmail.com). This stream, ‘Law, Gender, Queerness, and the Moving Body’, aims to advance new understandings of gender and queerness through the fields of dance and law, building on the discussions and insights generated during the previous Dance/Law stream at the CLC 2025. We invite contributors to dance, discuss, perform with us! In response to the conference theme of Protocols, we invite contributors to address, discuss, and dance questions including, but not limited to: What are the legal protocols we refer to when we look at the moving body? In what ways and to what extent can legal protocols concerning gender and queerness be translated, embodied, or reconfigured through dance? In what ways do choreographic practices inspire new ways of rethinking and re-moving legal protocols that govern, shape decision-making, and produce normative orders concerning gender and queerness? In what ways and to what extent might dance and movement generate alternative protocols that reimagine legal forms of organisation, responsibility, and collective experiences of gender and queerness? In what ways do different genres of dance generate different protocols and address legal protocols concerning gender and queerness? Possible areas of engagement could include, but are not limited to: dance and movement-based adaptations of legal protocols dance and movement-based legal research and pedagogy the relation between legal protocol and the choreographic score dance activism as resistance to oppressive legal protocols dance and/as the staging of law as critique feminist, gender, and queer studies of dance/law dance, law, and the non-human speculative movements in dance and law dance as a challenge to legal protocols concerning gender and queerness dance as a mechanism of gender and queer justice We welcome contributions from scholars and practitioners working across dance, performance, queer and gender studies, law, and related fields. These may include, but are not limited to, dance performances, performance workshops, visual art, sound art, creative writing, choreographic or musical scores, and reflective or critical writing. Creative interventions may take the form of standalone works or be integrated within more traditional paper presentations. Whilst gender and queerness are a thematic, we also welcome contributions that deal with dance/law more broadly. The stream will include a shared dance practice session. All contributions – text, visual, videos, performance - will be considered for publication in a forthcoming special issue.

Convenors: Dr Joshua Shaw (joshua.shaw@usask.ca) – Assistant Professor of Law, University of Saskatchewan; Caitlin Daly (bgwm0589@leeds.ac.uk) – PhD student, University of Leeds. The human body is routinely subject to the regulatory effects of law and medicine. The relations of law and medicine together discipline the body, producing a body that behaves according to their protocols. However, the body is not a static substrate or object. The body is itself formed from the protocols of corporeal matter, patterned normatively in relation to physical and cultural milieus, which can defy or resist the principles of regulation inscribed by law and medicine. That matters because the relations between law, medicine and bodies are commonly foundational to embodied experience of the human body and the identities and practices formed through the body. And it is through the dynamism of law, medicine and bodies acting on each other that the effects of broader social and physical formations on bodies are often mediated. For example, the relations between law, medicine and bodies matter to the process of subject formation including experiences of identity and difference; the making and/or use of capacities; and the production of value relative to the human body including the containment and destruction of that constructed as without value or as harmful. Our stream primarily invites papers (“works of text”), including works in progress and creative engagements with text, that explore the protocols formed in the middle of the relations of law, medicine and bodies. Proposals for performances or workshops on concepts are also welcomed, although it is not anticipated this will be the focus of the stream. Scholars are invited to consider a variety of topics including laws affecting alternative and traditional medicine, biomaterials and dead bodies, disability, human-technological enhancement or modification, intersexuality, medical assistance in dying, pregnancy, public health, reproductive technologies, sexuality, and transgender care. Scholars can explore such topics through a variety of jurisprudential or theoretical perspectives, including critical disability studies, feminist legal theory, law and aesthetics, law and phenomenology, law and psychoanalysis, new materialism, queer theory, transgender studies, or any other jurisprudence relevant to or which draws from body studies. Research may be historical or contemporary in focus, and relate to any geographical region. Abstracts (200 words) and author information (including name, affiliation and e-mail address) should be sent to Dr. Joshua Shaw at joshua.shaw@usask.ca and Caitlin Daly at bgwm0589@leeds.ac.uk.

Convenors: Zoe Bantleman, Erdem Ertürk, Can Öztaş. Contact: zbantleman@gmail.com; erdem.ertourk@gmail.com; can.oztas@googlemail.com  This stream proposes 'to take apart, to produce a reading, to open the textuality of' (Spivak, 'Translator's Preface' to Derrida's Of Grammatology) cultural works, across literature, art, and film, to critically examine how following protocols in the bureaucratic legal order results not in legality, but antinomy: unlawful laws, (international) rule by but not of law, and transgression by omission, inaction, and indifference. It considers that the very openness within domestic and international laws and the protocols underpinning their making and unmaking — which may be necessary to respond to new injunctions of unprecedented historical situations, in aid of a justice-to-come — may be easily weaponised. In an age of rampant authoritarianism, the hollowing out and denunciation of the (dominant) rights and rule of law discourse leaves little to legally constrain both intentional and arbitrary exercises of violent power. Thus, international law not only structurally reproduces violent exclusion on lines of gender, class, and race, it may be denuded of its utility as a tool of resistance. Against this backdrop, this stream invites contributions that: ⁠(Re)think and (re)articulate the reproduction of violence through reading cultural works. ⁠Interrogate the link between the real and unreal, engaging with concepts such as post-truth, post-human, hyperreality, etc. established protocols (diplomacy, nationalism, etc.) and newer technological protocols (AI, blockchain, social media etc.) for negotiating power. ⁠Explore what forms counter-hegemonic, anti-authoritarian, decolonial, and everyday resistance should take in this historical moment. ⁠Address whether and how critical legal practitioners, activists, and scholars can and should meaningfully engage in current legal, political, and ethical debates to challenge inequality and iniquity.

Convenors: Thibault Mechler, Sciences Po, Pierre Thevenin, Centre national de la recherche scientifique Contact: pierre.thevenin@cnrs.fr, thibault.mechler@sciencespo.fr This stream explores the interweaving of sound and law. Too often, this dimension of law’s normative distribution remains outside theoretical inquiry. It is as though the soundscapes that surround us—and through which we move—were detached from any jurisprudential shaping. Yet beyond the aesthetic dimensions of law and legal proceedings, our very habits of listening and expression are shaped by legal categories. Might it be possible, then, to draw on sound’s elusiveness to challenge the law and perhaps even destabilize its categories? Might this allow us to move beyond legal texts and immediately apparent meanings? And if so, how might this be achieved? In dialogue with the CLC 2026 theme, we ask: what protocols can we develop to capture the sound(s) of law and the sound(s) that law masks? How, as legal scholars, can we cultivate the reflexivity suggested by sound’s evanescence? How do we resist the urge to legalize our perceptions? Drawing on pioneering work from the Law and the Senses movement, this stream particularly aims to explore sound as a fertile ground for encounters between legal scholarship and artistic practice, unsettling law’s distribution of the audible. We invite participants to experiment with new ways of engaging acoustically with law. Might it be possible to study and teach law by sounding it out? We welcome submissions engaging with, but not limited to: ·       Law and Sound Studies / Sound art; ·       The sensoriality of law’s enactment; ·       The politics and practices of listening in jurisprudential contexts; ·       The soundscape of justice; ·       The distribution of the audible by law; ·       The tension between the scripturality and orality of law; ·       Law and sound poetry; ·       Law and sonic forensic research; ·       Law and sonic archives. As we are planning to organise this stream around listening sessions, we especially welcome creative proposals, including sound pieces and installations.

Convenors: Dr Shane Burke (mailto:BurkeS3@cardiff.ac.uk) Dr Joy Twemlow (j.twemlow@mmu.ac.uk) Katie Chatburn Dr Laila Maia Galvão This stream ‘Law and Sound’, seeks to explore the methodological potential of the sonic for disclosing non-discursive features of legal experience, processes, and spaces. The manner in knowledge is created, taught, and communicated is a powerful protocol which is being (re)shaped through current technological changes. We believe sound offers an opportunity to reorient how we do, and think about, not only legal but epistemic protocols within the academy. Sound is a constant feature of day-to-day existence for many of us. Yet, in a visually oriented world—and in the textually-obsessed discipline of law—sound is often overlooked when conducting research. From the low hum of our electronics, the chatter of our gatherings, to the personally curated soundtrack that emits from our noise cancelling headphones – sounds implicitly or explicitly acts to organise interaction, distribute authority, pre-structure decisions, and shape collective outcomes. Research in the intersection of sound and law have explored the relevance of tonality in legal speech (Nomi Dave, 2023), what music can disclose about law and legal history (Laila Maia Galvão, 2025), the impact of courtroom sound-design on legal proceedings (James Parker, 2011) and legal spaces (Kate Herrity, 2020). We are interested in building on this existing interest by treating sound not only as an object of research, but as a method of research, participation and engagement. Responding to the CLC theme of protocol, the stream invites participants interested in thinking through how sound (in conjunction and beyond speech) can disclose, disrupt, and reimagine (legal/governance/epistemic) protocols. We welcome creative works and performances, as well as written text on themes such as (but not limited to): The sonic and legal spaces Sound and legal sense making Sound as an object, method, and output of knowledge production Sonic Agency and the Law Music/Censorship/Sound and Social Control Sirens/Alarms and Governance Governance of Urban Soundscapes Sound Recording as Evidence and/or Archive Please submit abstracts to Joy Twemlow (j.twemlow@mmu.ac.uk) with the subject line ‘CLC Sound and Law’ Stream leads will also be running a Proof of Concept Protocol Soundtrack Session where participants will be invited to send in a sonic recording and related 500 word reflection related to the theme of ‘protocol’. These recordings will be used by Katie Chatburn and Shane Burke to create a soundtrack that will be played at the CLC. The soundtrack will act as the basis for a roundtable discussion on the potential of the sonic in legal research. All those who apply to the stream will be invited to the Protocol Soundtrack Session, but individuals can apply to take part in this proof of concept workshop without applying to the stream. If you wish to take part in just this session, please email your recording and 500 word reflection to Shane Burke (BurkeS3@cardiff.ac.uk) with the subject line ‘Protocol Soundtrack Session’.

Convenors: Joaquín Santuber (University of Linz, joaquin.santuber@jku.at) Miriam Tedeschi (University of Turku, mitede@utu.fi) Judy Radul (Simon Fraser University, judy_radul@sfu.ca) Lene Vollhardt (Westminster Law School, lene.vollhardt@googlemail.com) Data is not merely an abstraction. It is material. It is felt. It is sensed. It leaves traces on bodies and everyday spacetimes and subtly modulates them. It affects who is in/excluded, who is surveilled, and who is harmed, and how this happens. It produces multiple data-selves by extracting and aggregating biometric information, affective and emotional profiling, and behavioural tracking. Such data-selves precede and exceed legally binding individual consents, live their own (in)dependent data-life while subtly (re)infiltrating into the ‘original’ human selves. Yet data tends to be treated as external, objective, disconnected from the embodied lives it marks and the socio-spatial injustices it may produce. It also remains out of touch in daily human-machine interactions: powerfully invisible and intangible, yet very material. This interdisciplinary stream brings together critical legal and socio-legal scholars, philosophers, social scientists, human, digital, feminist and legal geographers, designers, computer and data scientists and beyond to experiment with and perform everyday datafication as data mattering: as an embodied, sensorial, material and spatiotemporal phenomenon leading to hard to detect yet pervasive forms of (in)just practices. We ask, for example: In what ways does data come to (just) matter? How can we make it sensorial, and how does such sensoriality and materiality intersect the law? And how can we trick or avoid or perform other forms of resistance to its invasive presence? We seek performances that engage with and expand legal data protection frameworks into experiments with physicalisation of data-bodies. The performances can take any form, including digital/physical, data visualisation performance, performance workshops, collective experiences, etc. The performances can address, without being limited to, the following themes on data mattering: data-bodies as legal subjects sensorialities of data and socio-legal awareness data-harms, social sorting and discrimination missing data, tricking data, data obfuscation and absence of data intimate data Please send us a max 500-word description of the performance along with your technical requirements. If available, please share with us the project documentation, visual references, or links to related work.

Convenor: Erik Bordeleau, Lisbon NOVA University (erikbordeleau@fcsh.unl.pt) The 21st century inherits institutions and infrastructures — legal, financial, computational — that don't know how to perish. Most contemporary protocols are designed to hold, keep, preserve, and accumulate. They enact a governance of inventory: assets to be retained, positions to be defended, value to be locked in. Their dominant verb is capture. Even commons-oriented protocols frequently inherit this grammar, reframing stewardship as a more careful form of holding-still. But what if the conditions we actually live in no longer reward such forms of value preservation? What if the question is not how to hold things in place, but how to coordinate without arresting them? Critical theory has a name for the foundation of accumulative logic: primitive accumulation — the violent enclosures, dispossessions, and capture-events that make ongoing extraction possible. This stream proposes its inverse as design horizon: primitive dissipation. Not dissipation as loss, but dissipation as the elementary act through which non-accumulative coordination becomes possible — value generated through expenditure, coherence sustained through circulation, organisation produced by letting go rather than holding tight. A shift, in short, to what Thomas Nail calls kino-topology: a processual register where bodies and stakes do not occupy pre-given jurisdictions but produce locality through their own recursive movement. What organisational shape does such coordination take? The swirl is what holds by letting go. In fluid dynamics, a vortex maintains its coherent form precisely because matter flows through it: arrest the current and the shape dissolves. The swirl is the form taken by systems that maintain coherence through primitive dissipation. Where hierarchies concentrate decision and pyramids concentrate wealth, the open-ended swirl distributes agency de proche en proche, transductively and mimetically. There is no centre that doesn't immediately become periphery, no accumulation point that doesn't leak back into circulation. Forests, festivals, gift economies, dissipative structures — non-accumulative systems consistently take this circulatory, partly recursive and dissipative shape. But how does a natural pattern become a synthetic figure — one capable of guiding techno-collective individuation? The passage from observed morphology to operational principle requires a speculative leap that treats the swirl not as metaphor but as enabling design constraint. This is the stream's wager: that the swirl can be deliberately composed as infrastructure, that shared metastability (Simondon, Stiegler) can be cultivated rather than left to chance, that holding-and-letting-go can be encoded into protocols without being captured back into accumulative grammars. Between Harney and Moten's undercommon hold — where dispossession turns into irreducible commoning — and finance's holding of volatility as the medium of contemporary collective existence, the stream proposes a third register: holding as a practice of shared metastability, centered around the question: what does it mean to design protocols for systems that maintain coherence through dissipation rather than accumulation? The stream gathers three live experiments as starting points, with room for many more. The Sphere (web3 commons for circus and live arts, represented by Erik Bordeleau) tests proof-of-celebration as a consensus mechanism for collective volatility-holding. The DEEP protocol (Sovereign Nature Initiative, represented by Andrea Leiter) binds and circulates attentional value across live ecological and digital economies — rendering non-human agency legible without rendering it capturable. Indigenous Valued Relations accounting, developed with the Peskotomuhkati Rights Group in Maine (USA) (represented by Joel Mason), is an accounting infrastructure built on relational rather than extractive value. Contributions from law, design, performance, ecology, indigenous practice, web3, and the critical study of finance and + are all warmly welcomed. The stream will include a screening of Lene Vollhardt's Swirls of Fortune (14’, 2025), a hallucinogenic descent into the Sphere’s cosmology, guided by its dissipative goddex. Participants bio: Erik Bordeleau is a philosopher, fugitive planner, curator, and essayist. He is a researcher in Cinema and Philosophy at IFILNOVA, NOVA University Lisbon, where he works on the question of value in its techno-mediatic and financial forms. He co-founded and is co-director of The Sphere, a Web3 research-creation project developing new financing ecologies and a digital commons for the performing arts, and facilitates the Cosmo-Financial Study Group at weirdeconomies.com. Andrea Leiter is Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (University of Amsterdam), where her research addresses transnational lawmaking, the digital economy, and blockchain governance. Her current project (Re)coding Value(s) in the Digital Economy (2024–2027) is funded by an NWO VENI grant. She co-founded the Sovereign Nature Initiative, a Dutch nonprofit working at the intersection of ecology, technology, and economics. Her book Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922–1959 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Joel Elliot Mason is a researcher for the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group, an organization that represents the Peskotomuhkati Nation in Canada. He works in the hybrid and transdisciplinary methodologies of action research and research creation. He likes to help build little machines that provably produce social ecological benefit.

Convenors: Romain Chuffart (University of Akureyri, romain@unak.is) Apostolos Tsiouvalas (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, apostolos.tsiouvalas@uit.no) Mana Tugend (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway) The word autonomy (from the Greek: αὐτός and νόμος) folds self into law. It presupposes a self already constituted prior to the law it gives, and a law already recognisable as such prior to the self that authors it. Liberal legal theory resolves this circle by installing a sovereign subject whose rationality grounds and guarantees normativity. Polar law inherits this resolution, with legal authority emanating from the sovereign self. The governance protocols and instruments now consolidating over polar spaces reproduce the autonomous subject as the origin of every norm they generate, precisely under conditions of technological acceleration, ecological transformation, and institutional destabilisation that require a rethinking of how nomos is self-produced. Polar Autonomies is therefore a series of situated practices, through which “selves” (bodies and materialities) produce, carry, contest, and metabolise normativity without dependence on, or reference to, a sovereign centre. Materiality distributes normativity through polar spaces, inscribes regulatory memory into these spaces and imposes thresholds through the cyclical operations of material changes that precede any temporality of the law. These material operations perform, quite literally, the work that the nomos often claims as its exclusive domain. However, the materiality of polar spaces is transforming faster than the human laws that seek to govern them‏, and the nomos struggles to keep pace with these material realities. In that sense, the poles offer a glimpse into physical spaces where the conditions in which the material premises of all existing normativity have been withdrawn from within. The very bodies in which norms are carried are warming, retreating, rerouting, and being re-encoded by new infrastructures that reconstitute the relationships to and between material conditions. What is emerging is a normativity that can no longer presuppose a stable planetary substrate, a governance that must operate in a space that is ceasing to behave as that space. Under these conditions, new legal protocols are re-assembled in ways that destabilise the categories required to make sense of them, and the question of whether the material world that subtended existing legal orders will persist long enough to be governed by them remains structurally open. This stream takes the form of a collaborative and experimental encounter. We encourage participants to come and develop, collectively and across disciplines, a tangible speculative structure of polar autonomies and move toward a shared conceptual and material prototype that attempts to specify what governance becomes when the autonomic capacity of polar bodies is taken as its foundation. This prototype will be developed iteratively through the stream, through collective writing, speculative drafting, and sustained cross-disciplinary exchange, with a commitment to publishing the output openly. We invite everyone prepared to build together and to think with and against the following ideas: How can governance depart from the normative capacity of material bodies when the material conditions of that capacity are themselves in radical and accelerating transformation? Autonomy requires a self that persists long enough to give itself law, but polar bodies persist otherwise than through the operations that previously sustained them. What becomes of self-norm-giving when the self is in flux?

Convenor: Zuzanna Karcz, University of Warsaw, Faculty of Law and Administration / currently working at the Ministry of Digital Affairs of PL (z.karcz@student.uw.edu.pl) Mode: primarily Works of Text, open to Proof of Concept When the European Union codified a "human-centric" framework for artificial intelligence in Regulation 2024/1689, it did so not by inventing new rights, but by embedding existing ones within a pre-existing product safety architecture, known as the New Legislative Framework (NLF), originally designed in 1985 to certify elevators, toys and pressure vessels. Human rights protection in the AI Act consequently takes the form of CE-marking, conformity assessments, risk categorisation, and technical documentation: instruments calibrated for products, now applied (without modification) to persons. This stream begins with that architectural fact and asks what it reveals about the broader transformation this conference calls protocols. We argue that the industrialisation of rights – their translation from political claims into auditable procedures – is not an anomaly of AI regulation but a structural feature of contemporary governance. The same logic pervades ESG and CSRD due diligence frameworks, GDPR enforcement architectures, and platform content moderation regimes. In each and every domain, rights are operationalised as mere “compliance requirements”, and such compliance is managed through private evidentiary infrastructures (e.g. logs, impact assessments, risk registers, documentation trails) to which the persons ostensibly protected retain no meaningful access. The stream takes as its central figure the "affected person", a subject produced by regulatory protocol who appears in legislative text as a bearer of procedural entitlements, but not of substantive rights at the core of the AI Act. Affected persons can be documented, risk-categorised and fully logged; what they cannot do, in any effective sense, is claim their rights. The evidentiary infrastructure designed to protect them operates inside corporate compliance systems, readable only by auditors, opaque to the individuals it notionally concerns. Drawing on Foucault's concepts of governmentality and responsibilisation, we understand this architecture not as a technology of governance (of technologies). The systemic risks are re-coded as individual competency deficits, political disputes over justice are neutralised and enclosed within specialist evidentiary registers, and the legal subject is constituted precisely at the point of their own exclusion from the conditions of rights-claiming. This diagnosis is enriched by two further analytical frames. Following Michael Power's account of the audit society and Sally Engle Merry's work on the quantification of rights, the stream examines how the cascade of indicators, scorecards, and impact assessments produces auditable knowledge as the primary currency of regulatory legitimacy – a form of knowledge that is, by design, inaccessible to those it purports to serve. And following Mariana Mazzucato's analysis of value extraction and the hollowing out of state capacity, in this stream we ask a structural question that critical legal theory must confront: when governance is outsourced to compliance infrastructure, who captures the rents of verification? Notified bodies, certification auditors, and compliance consultancies are not neutral intermediaries in this case. They are the beneficiaries of a mandatory market created by regulatory design (only if it applies), and such a market's existence depends on the continued unintelligibility of rights to those who hold them. The genealogical argument is deliberately historical. The NLF was not designed to protect rights. It was engineered in the wake of the Single European Act (1986) to remove technical barriers to trade by harmonising product standards – a market-integration instrument whose defining logic is the displacement of state oversight by third-party certification. Its wholesale adoption into the governance of artificial intelligence – via the AI Act's conformity assessment categories, Annex III risk classifications, notified bodies, and CE-marking – is therefore not a neutral technical choice. It should be captured as a political settlement, one that positions rights protection as a species of product compliance, foreclosing the adversarial logic of rights-claiming. It also constitutes a new and peculiar legal subject: neither citizen nor consumer, but an affected person. The stream invites contributions that engage with this problem across domains, methods, and registers. We welcome: Critical analyses of AI Act, CSRD, DSA/DMA, GDPR or other, non-EU-based regulations, as instances of compliance-based rights governance - comparative critical perspective would be highly recommended; Historical and genealogical accounts of the migration of product safety logic into human rights and regulatory frameworks; Foucauldian, STS or post-structuralist analyses of audit culture, responsibilisation, and the production of regulatory subjectivity, especially in the rise of pro-deregulation narratives; CDA and discourse-analytical approaches to legislative trajectories in technical and digital regulation, including attention to how ostensibly neutral drafting choices carry normative weight; Institutional and comparative analyses of the gap between formal rights recognition and substantive enforceability, particularly for structurally marginalised groups; Theoretical contributions on the conditions of rights-claiming in datafied environments and on the political possibilities that remain within or against compliance architectures. The stream operates primarily in the Works of Text mode and invites four to eight textual contributions across one or two two-hour sessions. Work-in-progress, experimental and interdisciplinary contributions are welcome. The stream organiser will contribute a paper examining the AI Act's legislative trajectory through critical discourse analysis, from the 2021 Commission Proposal through to the Digital Omnibus on AI political agreement of May 2026. She will be arguing that what appears as progressive rights codification is, structurally, the industrialisation of fundamental rights through a conformity infrastructure that was never designed to bear them. *** notes on format *** The stream is conceived primarily in Works of Text mode (~4 papers per 2h slot, discussion included), but is open to including a Proof of Concept session if participants wish to move from critique toward prototype – for instance, developing alternative regulatory architectures that do not reproduce the compliance logic under critique. The stream proposal is submitted by a policy maker herself, at governmental level of one of the EU countries. This would be consistent with the conference's understanding of sessions as "protocols of encounter" rather than merely a presentation-oriented approach.

Convenors: Professor Stephen Connelly (University of Warwick, S.J.Connelly@warwick.ac.uk) Dr. Kyriaki Pavlidou (University of Nicosia, pavlidou.ky@unic.ac.cy) Dr Conor Heaney (University of Kent, c.heaney@kent.ac.uk) This stream brings together works on process philosophy, process theory and process-oriented approaches to legal scholarship to ask how law can be understood as a concept of constant transformation. Dominant modes of legal thought often presume stable entities such as states, individuals, institutions, territories, bodies and objects which persist through time and become subject to legal ordering. Process approaches attend to movement, relationships, composition, and change. They ask how apparently stable legal arrangements are continually assembled and disrupted across social, technical, ecological, economic and institutional processes. The stream speaks to the conference theme of protocols. Contemporary forms of governance increasingly operate through dispersed technical and organisational arrangements that structure participation, coordination and authority without relying exclusively on traditional legal institutions. Algorithms, AI platforms, blockchain infrastructures, automated decision-making systems and logistical networks do not simply execute legal rules after the fact. They speculate outcomes, manage encounters, shape capacities for action and establish conditions under which decisions take shape and norms solidify. Process-oriented approaches explore these developments without assuming that law is located exclusively within states, courts, or formal institutions. At the same time, they raise questions about the continued reliance of legal thought on assumptions of permanence, bounded identity and determinacy. We invite contributions that examine how law emerges through open-ended encounters between environments, bodies, technologies, infrastructures, and institutional arrangements. Themes may include law and philosophy of biology, environmental humanities and legal ecologies, automation and algorithmic regulation, jurisdictional fragmentation and international law, biotechnologies and bodily processes, and the changing distribution of authority across public, private and hybrid domains. The stream is also interested in the trajectories of process thought and process philosophy and in experimental and transdisciplinary work that develops new methods for critical legal analysis. At the same time, the stream asks how legal thought remains attached to assumptions of stability, fixity and bounded identity that underpin forms of domination associated with capitalism, racialisation, colonialism, normative constructions of bodily capacity, and heteronormative forms of social organization. What becomes visible when legal categories such as personhood, property, responsibility or territory are approached as contingent and relational rather than fixed and self- contained? How might process-oriented thinking reshape understandings of legal ordering, institutional authority and collective organisation under contemporary conditions of technological and ecological transformation? In keeping with the conference’s converging modes of exploration, the stream welcomes textual works, broadly conceived, including experimental and hybrid forms of textual work, audio papers, code-based submissions and collaborative conversations. We also encourage proof of concept and performing bodies modes of contribution that explore process through practices, performance presentations and collective processes of inquiry. In treating the stream as a protocol of encounter, we hope to create a space in which legal categories and institutional assumptions are not simply analysed but destabilised and unsettled through collective thought and onsite experimentation.

Convenors: Dr Carolynn Gray (University of the West of Scotland, carolynn.gray@uws.ac.uk) Dr Sandra Duffy Golden (University of Bristol Law School) Dr Kay Crosby (Newcastle University) Format: 2 sessions (2 × 2 hour slots) Modes: Works of Text, Performing Bodies Overview: This stream proposes that legal gender recognition is itself a protocol regime in the full sense the conference intends: formally minimal yet normatively dense, operational, iterable, and increasingly distributed across state, medical, administrative, and private institutional actors. Gender recognition procedures, from birth registration and gender recognition certificates to clinical gatekeeping, document regimes, and employment equality frameworks, establish thresholds, triggers, roles, and relations that determine whose gendered existence is rendered legible by law, and whose is foreclosed. The stream draws on three converging theoretical traditions to analyse this infrastructure. From Foucault, it takes a genealogical account of how gender protocols have been assembled through medicine, psychiatry, demography, and law and how the dispersal of normative authority into private and hybrid institutional actors (clinics, insurers, algorithmic systems) is reshaping biopolitical governance of the gendered body. From Butler, it takes an understanding of gender performativity as an account of how protocols work: identity is not prior to its regulatory inscription but is produced through iteration, citational repetition and legal gender protocols are among the most powerful sites (cites- interesting play on words?) through which that repetition is organised and policed. From Barthes and Peirce, it takes the tools of semiotic analysis: attending to how legal gender markers function as signs; nominally indexical, pointing to a body, but in practice heavily symbolic, operating through convention, and how binary gender is mythologised in law as natural fact rather than normative infrastructure. Theoretical Framing: The conference frames normativity as ontological: not rules imposed from above but something that emerges through relations between bodies, technologies, institutions, imaginaries, and material conditions. This stream adopts that framing and explores how legal gender is not a classification applied to a pre-existing biological fact but rather it is a normative infrastructure that produces gendered subjects, distributes rights and vulnerabilities, and forecloses certain ways of living. The protocol does not describe gender; it cuts into the field of gendered existence and temporarily stabilises some of its possibilities while rendering others unintelligible. Bringing semiotics into dialogue with critical legal and gender theory allows the stream to attend to something that is sometime undertheorised in both traditions: the sign-work through which legal gender operates. What does it mean for a document to certify gender? What kind of sign is a gender recognition certificate and how does its indexical claim (this person is on this gender) depend on a symbolic infrastructure (medicine, law, bureaucracy) whose contingency it simultaneously conceals? Barthes’ analytics of myth, the naturalisation of historical and normative arrangements) provides tools for analysing how binary gender becomes, in law, a fact of nature rather than a product of protocol. Session 1 (Works of Text) - Cutting gender: Protocols of Legal Recognition This session invites papers, audio papers, and experimental writing examining the legal infrastructure of gender recognition across jurisdiction or institutional setting. Papers might address (but are not limited to): genealogies of gender recognition procedure, the medicalisation and de-medicalisation of trans legal status, the semiotics of legal gender markers and documentation regimes, comparative analysis of non-binary recognition schemes, the redistribution of gender governance into private and hybrid institutional actors, algorithmic and automated gender classification, and the relationship between recognition, precarity and rights. Experimental and creative textual forms are explicitly welcome alongside conventional academic papers. Session 2 (Performing Bodies) – Performing the Protocol: Bodies, Citation, and Legal Gender This session takes Butler’s account of gender performativity as its animating provocation: if gender is constituted through iterated, citational, regulatory repetition, what does it mean to perform gender identity before the law, to enact it, contest it, or refuse it? This session invites workshop-based, embodied, and durational formats: performances, structures dialogues, collaborative writing exercises, and participatory explorations of how legal protocols are inhabited, negotiated, and resisted in practice. The session is open to artists, practitioners, and activists alongside academic researchers, and welcomes contributions that work at the boundary of scholarship and practice. Indicative themes for paper and contribution invitations: The stream welcomes contributions addressing, among other things, the Foucauldian genealogy of trans and non-binary legal subjectivity; Butlerian performativity and its limits in legal recognition frameworks; semiotic analysis of gender documentation regimes; non-binary recognition as protocol failure or protocol contestation; the redistribution of gender governance through private ordering, medical gatekeeping, and algorithmic systems; precarity, recognition, and the gendered subject of rights; comparative and international perspectives on gender recognition protocols; and creative, experimental, and practice-based work on gender, law, and embodiment. Stream Organisers: Dr Carolynn Gray, University of the West of Scotland, carolynn.gray@uws.ac.uk. Research interests: trans and non-binary rights and recognition; critical legal theory; gender and the law; Foucauldian and Butlerian approaches to legal subjectivity; semiotic analysis of legal texts and documentation regimes. Dr Sandra Duffy Golden is Lecturer in Law at University of Bristol Law School. Their first monograph, on the legal regulation of gender and sexuality in postcolonial jurisdictions, will be published in November 2026. Sandra's research interests include gender identity and law, reproductive justice, and decolonial legal studies. Dr Kay Crosby is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Newcastle University. She is a feminist and latterly transfeminist legal historian, who has published on juries, the law of evidence, and trans recognition and protection at law.

Convenors: Marta Arisi (PhD Candidate, Sciences Po Law School, marta.arisi@sciencespo.fr) Mostafa Taherkhani (PhD Candidate, Sciences Po Law School, mostafa.taherkhani@sciencespo.fr)   ‘Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion... the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’ – Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression  Background Law refers to the archive for justifying its authoritative existence, its normative legitimacy. The archive is considered as the source of law, the preamble, the depository of law’s story and the record of its history. However, the archive functions not just by recording, but by forgetting. By selection and removal, it covers the hidden voices and words that were silenced violently with emergent of the legal order. By recording the story of legal order, the archive simultaneously covers the violence that created the law. What is removed “through archiving is then what lies before the law as such, the making of the law”. This is why archiving has been indispensable for Imperialism and colonialism. And yet, if we go back to the archive, we “confront an aporia, the impossibility of saying in advance what is the archive, what is archiving, and what is archivable”. We have learned about the archive as a perpetual site of reconfigurations and struggle, and many examples where the archiving is multiple, including via difficult work, failures and the navigation of old and newer harms, confronting impossible questions. The archive remains part of how law works, but also of how it can be scrutinised and contested. The process of archiving has been greatly complicated through time and now it appears that data/AI make up new possibilities to do archival work by institutions, corporations, as well as civil society. We therefore ask: how do contemporary digital practices are changing the law’s archive? Are they bound to reproduce the archival violence, or can they be used for contest and subvert it in new ways, and reconfigure the law’s archive? Proposition Data confirms, as in the past, central to governing projects. In the aftermath of Big Data and current AI moment, thanks to increasingly ubiquitous and powerful data collection and infrastructural capabilities, ‘everything’ can be potentially captured and repurposed, to trace unexpected connections and predictions. More recently, in ‘Generative AI’, knowledge is produced via a shrinking, a compression, where the underlying processes cannot be scrutinized easily. This seems to suggest the image of a data/AI law archive as a powerful site of protocoling, one that, building on the ‘given’, keeps reproducing and stabilizes the inequal world as it is and further forecloses the horizons of normativity. This data/AI law archive also seems one where it is increasingly difficult to pursue the task of ‘reopen and deconstruct the law’s files’. At the same time, the digital offers many spaces and everyday examples of ‘making data public’, also explicit commitments of data activism, which reveal a potential for counter-archiving practices for the law data/AI archive. Civil society has engaged in difficult data work, such as for instance data inquiries and forensic work, for the living and the dead, counting feminicides, mapping violence and those who passed trying to cross borders, bearing witness to fundamental rights violations. These are important efforts to reappropriate data practices to create alternative accounts and to oppose datafication; at the same time, they are struggles immersed in power asymmetries and negotiating their legitimacy, and they may reproduce predominant logics and narratives. On this background, we aim to open the reflection whether and how data/AI practices may help to interrogate the law archive, or to make it multiple, and what type of methodological and theoretical commitments are needed to do so. Also, how can we understand these practices and their significance for law? What are their potential and limits? Invite We wish to collectively reflect about ways in which we can or should question, sabotage, mend or remake the data/AI law archive, if at all, or how we otherwise engage in techno-legal modes of resistance, in a view to data/AI practices, and what they mean for law. Reflections that would like to engage with these concepts from any disciplinary perspective are welcomed. We look forward to contributions interested in understanding law as archive and its configurations with data/AI, the dominant framings and temporalities at stake, and implications for governing. We also wish to engage with contributions around the remaking and questioning of the data/AI law archive, and therefore around the experience of doing archival research with law, and the doing archival work/archiving in relation to law, including between digital and analog compositions, institutional and affective dimensions.

Convenor: Tracey Cui Contact: traceyyercui@gmail.com We are in a world where we become more and more human, while losing our imagination and acceptivity to the protocol of the non-human world. There are two major forces that are eroding these capacities, the law of the nation-state and the law of the science, both weld undeniable and benevolent forces over us, and acts against those rules yield to “justified punishment” in economic, social, moral, and epistemic forms. The laws of human-based nation-states, being the most rational and legitimate, gradually impair our imagination about what non-human-based “tradition” “authenticity” could be, and formation of protocol of uncertainty, centered on “personal indigenousness”. In this stream I propose the concept of “personal indigenousness”, where indigenousness, while derived from temporal and spatial humus, is not claimed as a group right, but practiced by individual or collective as experiments or improvisations in public space that allows uncertainty and resists centralized definition. My personal experience of living in the Kinki area in Japan inspired me with this a-political concept of “personal indigenous”. Similar to “shukyo” (religion), a concept in Japan that mostly operates in habitual, sometimes purposeless, everyday kin-making rituals with non-human, “indigenousness”, when taken as an everyday practice, reveals how the uncertain, unpredictable, and useless are modes of imposed descriptions that divide us from the other non-human in symbiotic existence with our everyday life.   Dialogues with friend practitioners of “personal indigenous” in Japan are collected including those who do direct mugwort acupuncture, ripened-sushi pickling, and field-burning mountain farming and soba-making. The dialogues will focus on how, regardless of being "traditional", their "indigenous" practices are being “rejected” and “marginalized” in Japanese society. A review of the laws of the nation-state from food regulations, intellectual property laws to natural resources conservation act will show. Through this stream, participants are welcome to contribute stories of non-human kin-making in everyday life and how laws from the relevant jurisdiction work against a diversified and uncategorizable field of personal indigenousness.

Convenors: Sara Dal Monico (Marie Curie Fellow at University of Zurich, sara.dalmonico@unive.it) Federica Valerio (PhD Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, federica.valerio@unive.it) Selena Vitti (Schumann Fellow at University of Münster, selena.vitti@uni-muenster.de) Our stream’s point of departure is a seemingly modest yet analytically far-reaching claim: legal categories are constitutively incomplete. As Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin argued in The Boundaries of International Law (1999), the legal system has long been permeated by entrenched attitudes about the roles and status of men and women in society, sustained by “the inherent conservativism of legal institutions, respect for precedent and established categories” which “helped to perpetuate the underlying gender bias of the law”. Legal codification and the perpetuation of legal categories do not simply reflect or capture social reality; they actively contribute to organising experiences into bounded and recognisable forms that can perpetuate forms of discrimination and stereotypes. The categories that anchor legal systems – “victims”, “nature”, “gender”, “right”, “law” itself – are the cornerstones upon which legal systems are built. They rely on ostensibly abstract categories or subjects which, upon closer examination, prove to be premised on a white, western, heterosexual, male individual. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler argued that the “subjects’ foundationalist myth” generates far-reaching problems, especially in terms of its normalising and exclusionary effects. In order to operate, law must stabilise meaning. This stabilising function is neither neutral nor merely technical. It entails a series of political and epistemic operations through which certain experiences are rendered visible, intelligible, and credible, while others are marginalised, distorted, or excluded altogether. To interrogate these tensions, the stream works through the metaphor of law as theatre, not as a merely illustrative device, but as a way of naming something constitutive about legal form itself. Legal proceedings, particularly in the criminal context, can be understood as performative events governed by scripts, roles, temporalities, and conventions that condition in advance what may appear, how it may appear, and with what effects. Drawing on the theatrical vocabulary of front stage and backstage, we understand the courtroom as a “front stage”: a highly regulated space of appearance in which narratives of harm must be rendered coherent, credible, and legally intelligible. The “backstage”, by contrast, is not external to law, but constitutively produced by its modes of representation. In this sense, the legal “script” does not merely organise what is said, but actively structures what can be said at all. This performative dimension of law also operates through apparently technical and procedural dispositifs, such as protocols, guidelines, administrative standards, and institutional routines. As Enrico Gargiulo has recently argued in Protocollo: uno strumento di potere (2026), protocols are often perceived as neutral instruments elaborated by experts, while in fact functioning as subtle yet powerful technologies of governance: they organise conduct, standardise practices, and displace political conflict onto procedural terrains. In this sense, protocols may be understood as part of law’s backstage machinery – dispositifs that silently regulate visibility, intelligibility, and participation, while simultaneously obscuring the political choices embedded within them. Far from being merely ancillary to legal categories, they actively contribute to reproducing and stabilising them. Thinking law through the theatrical metaphor thus allows us to shift the analytical focus. The question is no longer only what law captures or fails to capture, but how its very modes of staging (its scripts, roles, and conventions) produce both visibility and occlusion. In this sense, the distinction between front stage and backstage is not a stable or neutral one, but a site of ongoing contestation. The theatrical metaphor thus extends beyond the courtroom itself and includes the procedural infrastructures that sustain legal performances: scripts, protocols, evidentiary conventions, institutional timings, and bureaucratic forms all participate in determining what can appear on the legal stage and under which conditions. It is here that feminist and intersectional critiques intervene, not simply by seeking to expand the existing script, but by exposing the limits of its form and by asking what it would mean to take seriously what remains offstage. This stream takes that question as its organising provocation: not only what law excludes, but what structural conditions make such exclusion both inevitable and, to a degree, necessary for law’s operation. Contributions: This stream is situated within feminist and gender-oriented legal critique, while explicitly engaging with broader concerns that have long animated the CLC: the indeterminacy and limits of legal form, the politics and violence of categorisation, and the performative dimensions of legal practice. We invite contributions that critically interrogate legal categories not only in terms of their doctrinal content, but as epistemic and political devices that organise perception, structure narratives, and delimit the field of the legally thinkable – attending in particular to the productive and exclusionary effects of categorisation, and to the tensions between legal intelligibility and lived experience. We welcome proposals from across law, socio-legal studies, feminist, posthuman and queer theory, criminology, international law, and related fields, in the form of both traditional academic papers and more experimental, reflective, or practice-oriented interventions in keeping with the spirit of the Critical Legal Conference. We invite contributions that seek to, but are not limited to: 1. Analyse how legal categories operate as productive and exclusionary devices; 2. Reflect on certain categories within legal systems and how they produce externalisation and othering of experiences perceived as beyond “the norm”; 3. Reflect on the persistent gap between lived experience and its legal representation; 4. Rethink justice beyond the confines of a singular legal script; 5. Explore the alternative, complementary, or disruptive frameworks of justice that emerge when the limits of legal categorisation are taken into account; 6. Examine the role of protocols, administrative procedures, and technical standards as dispositifs that shape legal intelligibility and depoliticise institutional power. Abstracts should be sent to Sara Dal Monico (sara.dalmonico@unive.it), Federica Valerio (federica.valerio@unive.it) and Selena Vitti (selena.vitti@uni-muenster.de).

Convenor: José Antonio Magalhães (morewillappear@gmail.com) Speculative legal theory, while emerging from critical legal theory, differs from it in two senses. In a philosophical sense, it distances itself from the post-Kantian critique of the conditions of possibility of legal knowledge and practice in favour of metaphysical speculation about the mode(s) of existence of law. In a more colloquial sense, speculative legal theory is less interested in criticizing existing juridico-political institutions, and more in speculating about legal forms that might structure world-orders to come. In that sense, speculative legal theory is inseparable from speculative legal practice, and vice versa: New legal metaphysics cannot be born from armchair, while truly new world-orders depend on transformed legal concepts. Drawing from CLC-2026’s emphasis on protocols, performativity and proof of concept, this stream invites participants not only to theorize speculatively about law, but to create, implement and test different legal forms. From new and future-oriented paradigms (blockchain-based protocols, AI-driven lawscapes) to reframings of ancestral ones (indigenous jurisprudence, nonhuman ecolaw), this stream encourages juridico-political experimentation aimed at challenging not only the content of laws, but the very form of law as we know it. Participants are encouraged to submit 1) proof of concept sessions that propose to address concrete social, technological or ecological problems through the collective imagining of and experimentation with legal forms; 2) speculative legal fictions (charters for supra/infra-national entities, strange financial instruments, digital protocols, cosmopolitical treaties, constitutions for polities to come, declarations of self-evident rights, imagined judicial decisions); 3) performances of protocols, as well as protocols/scores to be performed by participants; 4) explorations of how legal history and comparative law expose the contingency of legal forms, as well as their possibilities; 5) speculative fiction thematizing law, or scholarly engagement therewith; 6) theoretical and socio-legal engagements with speculative and prefigurative legal practice, or else.

Convenors: Yonah CIBANI (LLB Candidate, The Open University; Principal Coordinator, Sanyue Memorial Centre of Transgender Justice); GENG Zixuan (LLB Candidate, Liaoning University; Co-researcher, Sanyue Memorial Centre of Transgender Justice) Contact: yonah@sanyue.org; zixuan.geng@sanyue.org This stream is open to additional contributions from researchers working on conversion practices, political psychiatry, psychiatric governance, trans asylum law, or related intersections of state violence and gender non-conformity. This stream takes the conference theme of Protocol at its most literal and most violent. In the People's Republic of China, and, in comparative prospective, the United States. The confinement and coercive treatment of gender non-conforming youth is not lawless — it is protocolised. A parent signs a form. A psychiatrist completes a pro forma evaluation. A guardian exercises a statutory veto. An admission is recorded. A door is locked. Each step follows a protocol: formally minimal, normatively dense, and operationally devastating. The question this stream poses is not whether these protocols are legal — in both jurisdictions, they largely are — but how the infrastructure of normativity produces confinement as a routine administrative outcome rather than an exceptional act of violence. This stream is not presented from a position of scholarly detachment. The Sanyue Memorial Centre operates from within the People's Republic of China, where its principal coordinator has been subject to politically motivated threats of indefinite involuntary psychiatric admission by local government authorities and has been reported to national security services in both mainland China and Hong Kong by a former associate. The Centre's research methodology — trauma-informed testimony collection under various extreme prudence, such as post-quantum cryptographic protection, with a two-tier consent framework providing for both anonymised research use and long-term archival preservation of non-anonymised testimonies for potential transitional justice proceedings — is not an academic design exercise. It is an operational response to the fact that the state which is the subject of this research is simultaneously the adversary of its researchers. The Centre's archival custody chain now extends to a designated archivist in Canada, ensuring that the evidentiary record survives beyond the reach of any single jurisdiction - and, critically, beyond the reach of the jurisdiction that produced the violence it documents. We will also demonstrate our workflow as a part of transgender life, or transgender legal scholar life in China – underground, dangerous, and tragic. We approach our question through three converging sessions. Session 1 — Works of Text (paper): Coercion, Conformity, and the State(s). A bilateral comparative legal-historical analysis of conversion practices in China and the United States. In the United States, the paper traces the causal arc from the collapse of the theologically liberal mainline denominations, through the reactive ascendancy of politically organised evangelicalism and the invention of the 'ex-gay' therapeutic model in the 1970s, to the export of conversion practice frameworks to the Global South and the US Supreme Court's recent decision in Chiles v Salazar (607 U.S. ___, 2026), which reversed and remanded the Tenth Circuit's upholding of Colorado's conversion therapy ban, holding (8–1, Gorsuch J) that the statute as applied to talk therapy regulated speech on the basis of viewpoint. In China, the paper traces a genealogy from the incorporation of Soviet-influenced forensic psychiatry into the post-1949 state apparatus, through the political deployment of psychiatric diagnosis during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, to the persistence of coercive 'treatment' in residential 'internet addiction' camps (戒网瘾学校) and martial arts boarding schools (武术学校) after the CCMD-3 depathologisation of homosexuality in 2001. The paper proposes a tripartite taxonomy — state-sponsored (the state as direct perpetrator), state-condoned (domestic law creates institutional space for non-state actors), and state-indifferent (legislative silence as de facto permission) — that exposes juridical inaction as structural violence and demonstrates that legislative prohibition, once achieved, does not constitute a durable settlement. Session 2 — Works of Text (paper): The Guardian's Veto: Intersectionality, Mental Health Law, and the Limits of Covenant Self-Determination for Gender Non-Conforming Persons in China. An intersectional analysis of how three axes of subordination — age, ascribed psychosocial disability, and gender identity — converge under the Mental Health Law of the PRC (2012; amended 2018) and the National Health Commission's Sex Reassignment Management Regulation (2022) to extinguish the self-determination of gender non-conforming persons, whether minor or adult. The paper examines the operation of what we term the guardian's veto across three sites: involuntary psychiatric admission, gatekeeping of gender-affirming medical interventions, and the procedural marginalisation of the child's voice under the CRC, CRPD, and CEDAW. China's twenty-eight-year status as ICCPR signatory without ratification is treated not as background but as a live doctrinal question under Article 18 VCLT. The paper argues that Covenant rights lose meaningful sensitivity at the intersection of these subordinations, and proposes a doctrinal threshold beneath which guardian authority cannot extinguish rights-bearing subjectivity. Session 3 (or Interleaved) — Works of Text (audio paper): Known unto God: Survivor Testimonies of Conversion Practices in China. Anonymised, audio-processed and English-dubbed excerpts from testimonies collected by the Sanyue Memorial Centre, presented as an audio paper. Testimonies are collected under a trauma-informed interview protocol compliant with the Istanbul Protocol and IREC framework, with consent materials in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The two-tier consent structure provides participants the choice between standard anonymised research participation and archival preservation for future transitional justice proceedings — an informed choice to place one's name, unredacted, into a record designed to outlast the political order that produced the violence. This session is subject to ethics approval by The Open University Human Research Ethics Committee (or other suitable RECs – we do not rule out an independent committee); in the event that approval is not secured by conference date, the session will proceed as a text-based analytical presentation drawing on publicly available survivor accounts. Relationship to conference theme: The stream reads protocol in two directions simultaneously. In the first direction, protocol is the bureaucratic instrument through which confinement is administered: admission forms, diagnostic criteria, guardian consent signatures, household registration gatekeeping, the quiet collapse of the adult–minor distinction under a regime that permits parents to confine their adult children without judicial review. These are protocols that are formally minimal yet normatively devastating — each one a 'distributed condition of encounter' between the individual and the state, operating without stable accountability or judicial oversight. In the second direction, protocol is the counter-infrastructure through which survivors' voices are preserved against the state that sought to silence them: encryption protocols calibrated to a state-level adversary, post-quantum cryptographic key management, Shamir's Secret Sharing for backup across jurisdictions, a cross-border archival custody chain extending from the PRC to Canada, and a consent framework that asks survivors not merely whether they agree to participate in research, but whether they wish their testimony to be held, intact and unredacted, for a court that does not yet exist. The normative infrastructure that confines and the normative infrastructure that documents are mirror images — both formally minimal, both normatively dense, both operating without stable sovereign centres. The difference is who holds the key. Mode: Works of Text (papers and audio papers) Format: Three sessions within one stream. Sessions 1 and 2 as standard paper presentations (approximately four presenters per 2-hour slot). Session 3 as audio paper with contextual presentation. Streams may be combined into two 2-hour slots if timetabling requires.

Convenors: Andrea Pavoni, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Andrea.Pavoni@iscte-iul.pt) Amedeo Policante, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (policante@fcsh.unl.pt) Fermentation is transformation through microbial relations: controlled decomposition, generative instability, the coexistence of beneficial and pathogenic processes within the same substrate. Amidst its current revival as practice, culture, and imaginary, fermentation is also, increasingly, a site of scholarly attention across feminist studies, political ecology, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies, where a so-called "probiotic turn" has repositioned microbial life as a locus of ethical, political, and ontological inquiry. This stream takes fermentation as its organising figure — not as metaphor, but as material process, lively practice, and conceptual problem. It explores how critical legal theory may help us think in new ways about fermentation practices, and how contemporary thinking about fermentation across the natural and social sciences may help us rethink legal theory. In particular, we invite scholars, artists, writers, and other practitioners to craft and perform works of text, that is, fermenting protocols that engage and experiment simultaneously with the three overlapping vectors through which the stream is articulated: the political ecology, normativity and writing of fermentation. I. political ecology. A political ecology of fermentation asks how fermentation is made possible by contingent assemblages of living bodies, material infrastructures, formal and informal knowledge and norms. Today, fermentation is increasingly proposed as a desirable nutritional, aesthetic and political practice, supposedly offering alternative ways of building cooperation, care and multispecies conviviality. Yet, fermentation is also profoundly embedded in uneven geographies and temporalities of labour, property, regulation, extraction, colonisation, and valorisation. Ferments circulate between household kitchens, neo-craft economies, laboratories, wellness markets, industrial bioreactors, subsistence practices, and global commodity chains. In each case, microbial life is enrolled into different regimes of value. This requires distinguishing between different ‘fermentation cultures’ and their ecologies, economies, and imaginaries. Following Evans and Lorimer’s warning against the de-politicising risks of current “fermentation fetishism,” this vector explores the ambivalence of fermentation as vernacular knowledge and technoscientific protocol, ecological care and microbial control, process of preservation and decomposition, culture of subsistence and formalised system of commodity-production. II. normativity. If the conference theme frames protocol as one of the operative forms of contemporary normativity — distributed, technical, minimal, dense — fermentation offers a related but distinct grammar: provisional, situated, relational, generative, metastable, and always potentially dangerous. Fermentation redistributes agency across human practitioners, microbial populations, material substrates, environmental conditions, technical devices, institutions, imaginaries, and temporal processes. It does so in and through all sorts of written and unwritten protocols made of recipes, timings, thresholds, measurements, vessels, temperatures, sensory judgements, intergenerational habits, hygienic rules, prohibitions, and tacit forms of expertise. Proposing to explore the forms of normativity that underpin fermentation practices, from the microbiopolitical to the global, this vector firstly asks what protocols are needed to hold open the political and imaginative potential of fermentation. Secondly, assuming that fermentation, understood as a process of interspecies co-production characterised by instability and unpredictability, might unsettle dominant legal concepts of agency, control, authorship and responsibility, the vector asks what law does with fermentation, and what can fermentation do for law. More speculatively still, participants are challenged to envision and experiment what would it mean for law itself to ferment: to be understood as a living normative medium, capable of transformation, contamination, preservation, decay, and renewal. III. writing. Refusing both the fetishisation of academic writing and the easy denunciation of writing as inherently dead or disembodied, we approach writing as a fermenting practice. Like fermentation, writing is a material and temporal process: it requires substrates, techniques, repetitions, inheritances, delays, revisions, contaminations, and conditions of maturation. Not simply a means of narrating fermentation, writing is a site where fermentation takes place. What happens when argument is allowed to age, sour, thicken, split, or recombine? What forms of thought become possible when academic writing is neither faithfully reproduced nor simply rejected, but worked from within? This vector asks how texts might remain alive to their conditions of production: who writes, with what materials, through which inherited forms, under which institutional constraints, and in relation to which other human and nonhuman agencies. Fermented writing may take the form of decomposed argument, annotated recipe, contaminated theory, polyvocal text, fieldnote ruminations, speculative judgement, microbial archive, or experimental essay — writing as composition but also decomposition: cutting, spoiling, preserving, mixing, translating. At the same time, the performative dimension of writing is foregrounded: fermented texts are to be activated, read, staged, voiced, or otherwise presented in the form their fermentation has taken — academic form as living protocol: structured enough to sustain collective attention, open enough to host instability, porous enough to let other modes of thought enter.

Convenor: Melanie Borit (melania.borit@uit.no) Overview TBC