Foreward / Foreword : Gardens of Justice

• Our Gardens of Justice special themed issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal grew out of the 2012 Critical Legal Conference in Stockholm and its theme of Gardens of Justice, a conference organised  by Matilda  Arvidsson, Merima  Bruncevic, Leila Brannstrom and Leif Dahlberg. We issued a Call for Papers early in 2013 in which several conference theme questions were repeated. We called for papers devoted to thinking about law and justice as a physical as well as a social environment. The theme suggested a plurality of justice gardens that may function together but at times also may be at odds with each other. We invited authors to think freely and critically about both the concrete and the metaphorical garden, and invited articles that addressed questions of law and justice as spatial  and spatializing structures, as social topography and geography, as political cartography on a global scale, as places where symbolic orders and disorders become visible and may  be acted out, as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as masculine and feminine and as social utopia. Later in 2013 we re-issued the Call for Papers emphasizing the metaphorical and the juridical linking of gardens and justice: Gardens and Justice have  been joined as figurae, genres and topoi in the classical writings of Virgil, in the Old Testament text of Genesis and the Garden of Eden, in Milton's epic of Paradise Lost, in Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England, and not the last, in Neil Young's lyrics 'After the Garden', in his 2006 album Living with War. These and numerous other texts are peopled by figures who live at home, and others who depart from home. Together, and apart, they invite us to continue their genre of living and writing in a world of imperfection, suffering and violence, while  maintaining  other possibilities and other beginnings. The AFLJ invited articles which investigated the use of garden narratives, whether in jurisprudential writings, in film, in literary works, in political theory, or postcolonial theory, amongst other disciplinary conventions and media. Amongst the numerous questions which could be pursued, we posed the following: How do garden narratives and their figures structure an understanding of Justice, and for what purposes have  gardens and  justice been linked in national and international law? Are gardens our images of utopia, heaven, peace, or simply a homecoming from the deserts of life? Do gardens help us understand nations and territory? Are gardens ever secular? Are there historic forms of governance encoded in garden narratives?  In what ways  do Justice narratives in the 21st century understand  the figure who leaves the garden  as  having  a persona as stranger, serf, refugee or simply human, or not-human?

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Juridik -- Juridik och samhälle (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Law -- Law and Society (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)