The Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative & the University of Essex are welcoming abstracts for their Workshop on Property, Vulnerability, and Resilience which will be held September 22-23, 2017 at the University of Essex, United Kingdom.
What?
Justifications for property law, and its role in maintaining the property status quo, are rooted in fundamental claims about stabilising the political, social and economic order. This workshop will explore the role of property law and property theory in supporting the production of resilience. It will also explore what role Vulnerability Theory can play in understanding how property ownership has sharpened an insider-outsider culture and contributed to our current political climate. Property laws, and the policies that they give effect to, have long channelled the benefits of full citizenship through one’s relationship to property. In an ‘age of individualism’, the idea that ‘exclusion’ is the essence of property law has gained significant traction; more recently, the emerging school of ‘sharing property’ has identified a new theoretical space for exploring strategies of resilience. These debates are underpinned by critical questions about property law’s role and function: should it understand and make the best out of available material; achieve or support change in a progressive (or progressive but incremental way); or contribute to, or at least not actively prevent, progress towards greater resilience.
How?
Participants are invited to reflect on how the processes of political polarisation around ‘property citizenship’ shape, and are shaped by, property-based responses to human and institutional vulnerability. The scientific committee is interested in receiving submissions that explore questions around property exclusion, property as resilience, and the actualization of vulnerability as manifested in settings from mortgage repossession and tenancy evictions to precarious occupation arrangements and homelessness. The workshop will also consider how property-based strategies of resilience may enable the vulnerable subject to mitigate its position as a ‘property outsider’, marginalised or excluded from the privilege of property.
When?
Email a proposal as a Word or PDF document by June 19, 2017 to Rachel Ezrol (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and Cat Gentry (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). Decisions will be made by June 30, 2017 and working paper drafts will be due September 1, 2017 so they can be duplicated and distributed prior to the Workshop.
For more information, please see the official announcement.
