This article describes a personal relationship to a common green space in a town in the United Kingdom during the lockdowns prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21. It considers the new meanings that are attaching to 'commons' as conceptual spaces and material places; and it links this consideration to the terms in which values and norms are being reassessed in the context of environmental crises.
Michel Foucault's modes of power (sovereign, disciplinary and bio-politics) have dominated both our understanding of power and norm. It is pretty impossible to think of the organisation of life outside his thinking. Here I argue that the idea and practice of mutual aid, articulated by Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 book Mutual Aid (2009) stirs us towards a different understanding of the management of life, bereft of hierarchies and bestowed with co-operation and care. Moreover, as I argue, the existence of mutual aid groups and practices challenges the very idea of the norm. This has become even more apparent during the Covid19 pandemic with the surfacing of mutual aid groups globally. It is therefore rather misleading to understand our present as generator of the 'new normal'; such claims are mere rhetorical devices aiming at keeping us in our place.
In this article the author examines Fitzpatrick's foundational critique of liberal legality and racism, a theme which remained central to his decades-long excavation of modern law's self-identity. After considering Fitzpatrick's 'separation thesis', the author then turns to consider the ways in which neoliberal legality is parasitic upon liberal legal racial formations while at the same time, obscuring the foundational place of race in contemporary capitalism by subsuming material life within its modes of value extraction.
This is an entry into a collective journal of the twenty-first century years of plague. It introduces the notion of 'lawfare' by way of the contemporary case concerning Lula da Silva and Brazil's fall from grace. The latter is presented as an instance of violence in the international context, the managerial attitude to global disasters and, indeed, a plague. It chronicles the social struggles around the case and on that basis builds a somewhat playful manifesto for a new relationship between legal scholarship, the law school and the imaginary of permanent catastrophe and plague.
The space, work, and pedagogy of universities have undergone rapid and unprecedented change during the Covid pandemic. These developments have been heralded as marking the emergence of a 'new normal'. Reflecting on the unique aspirations and utopian sense of universities, I give an account of the political stakes at a time of fundamental change. I also provide a brief introduction to the other essays in this Supplement.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：