Date: Tuesday 3 July 2012 to Thursday 5 July 2012

Location: University of Edinburgh

Although violence (in its different forms) is an integral part of everyday experiences, it has so far been largely conceptualized in the home through domestic violence. Veena Das’ seminal work on the anthropology of violence however, has drawn our attention to the relationship between violence and subjectivity and the ways that violence is rendered ordinary in everyday life. Drawing upon new insights into violence from Das and other scholars, this session will explore the violence in/of home through its relationships with law, subjectivity and justice in everyday life. We are interested in papers exploring how violence in/of the home are shaped by the founding and maintaining violence of law and how encounters with law across public/private spaces transform subjectivity and justice within the home.

This session will explore violence in two forms – as a social force inflicting harm in the home and as a transformative force that changes the home itself into a form of violence. On the one hand, violence is often used as a political tool within modernist visions of the state or in state development projects to produce fear or compliance in the home. Violence also becomes an often brutal tool that scripts the erasure of subjectivities and homes. We are particularly interested in papers that explore what happens to the home when violence is sanctioned through law, when law itself becomes a form of violence in the home, and when security in the home is rendered possible only through forms of violence. On the other hand, uncertainty over the right to inhabit produces a violence of the home whereby everyday domestic life is rendered impossible. For example, the home becomes a form of violence when the gendered body becomes the locus of punishment, when particular encounters with law authorize the forced opening of the home to the outside, and when those occupying this home become complicit in its own destruction. In both instances, we are interested in examining the different politics and practices through which violence in/of home is normalized and the discourses through which this violence is rendered both outside and inside of law. Finally, we are particularly interested in papers that discuss these issues through in-depth focus on the dialectics between violence in/of home and the different subjective encounters with law and justice in/through the home.

Papers are invited on (but not limited to) the following themes

- Violence, law and justice in the home

- Violence as the fear of uncertainty of the home

- Violence of home as an aspect of development/modernity/tradition

- Subjective encounters with violence, law and justice in the home

- Public and private understandings of violence in/of home

- Bodily explorations of violence in the home

- Domestication/normalization of violence

- Law as mimicry and resource during violence

- Law as recognition, confrontation and subversion during the violence in/of home