December 7–8, 2023
This conference is open to the public.
This conference will convene a scholarly conversation about the interaction between law and regions—as both shaped by, and entangled in, transnational systems—in order to think beyond the current “crisis” in capitalism. More specifically, it will interrogate how the interplay of law and region figures in current orderings of sub-national, national, and transnational flows and systems (e.g., of value, surplus, resources, people, risk, and expertise), orderings which shape social, environmental, and material outcomes, all with an eye toward mapping pathways toward reconfigurations and transformations of such orderings over time.
To push this inquiry forward, the conference will focus on ports as a specific (although highly differentiated) type of grounded infrastructural, political, cultural, and economic configuration. We choose ports because, with their bounded and far-flung territorial effects, they are necessarily entwined, materially and symbolically, in dense systems of connectivity. Mapping these systems in turn, can raise questions about coherence, autonomy, interdependence, and sovereignty. The conference takes ports as a heuristic—a type of site—that is particularly amenable to forms of comparative socio-legal inquiry that can push the boundaries of current thinking about understandings of development, growth, economy, sustainability, and more. For “the port” manifests “the region” as both plural image and material space. And in this multiplex motion, law figures in multiple ways. Most notable, perhaps, is how “the port” shows the law “in action.”
Day 1 / Keynote Address
Thursday December 7th, 2023
6:30pm–8:00pm
CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room
Open to the public
Infrastructure, Territory, and Flow in a Fraught World
With Professors Carola Hein and Hila Shamir
Day 2 / Panels
Friday December 8th, 2023
All Panels held in CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room
Open to the public
- 9:00am–10:30am / Ports as Nodes and Networks amidst Alternative Legal Orders
- 10:45am–12:15pm / Ports and Human Lifeworlds
- 12:30pm–2:00pm / Ports and Global Labor Struggles
- 2:15pm–3:45pm / Ports and Contested Pasts, Presents, Futures
- 4:00pm–5:30pm / Ports and Fragile Ecologies/Promising Commons
Keynote Speaker Bios
Carola Hein is full professor and chair of History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Delft University of Technology. Her research interests include the transmission of architectural and urban ideas, focusing specifically on port cities and the global architecture of oil. She leads the PortCityFutures research program that focuses on evolving socio-spatial conditions, use and design of port city regions, in particular exploring areas where port and city activities occur simultaneously and sometimes conflict. Among other major grants, Hein received a Guggenheim fellowship for her research on global networks of petroleum, an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to explore port city relationships, and Volkswagen Foundation grants for mixed method digital humanities projects. Her current research focus is on port city territories, water values and the global architecture of oil.Her books include: Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage: Past, Present and Future, The Routledge Planning History Handbook (2017), Uzō Nishiyama, Reflections on Urban, Regional and National Space (2017), Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (2011), and The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (2004). A new UNESCO Chair on Water, Ports and Historic Cities has been created in the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus university consortium, working closely with the LDE PortCityFutures Centre. Professor Carola Hein has been appointed as Chair holder and professor in Leiden and Erasmus universities. Photo credit: TU Delft
Hila Shamir is a Professor at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law, and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for the Spring of 2024. She is an expert in the fields of Employment, Labor, Immigration, and Welfare Law with a focus on issues of workers in global value chains, human trafficking, and gender equality. Shamir has taught at Toronto Faculty of Law, Georgetown Law School, Cornell Law School, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University. Shamir received an European Research Council (ERC) grant to pursue research on a Labor Approach to Human Trafficking (TraffLab, 2018–2023), seeking to shift anti-trafficking policy, research and discourse, away from the predominant criminal law, border control, and human rights model, and towards a labor based approach to human trafficking that will be primarily focused on the bargaining power disparities that create vulnerability to trafficking. Her research was nominated as a finalist for the ERC Public Engagement with Research Award 2022. She then received a second ERC grant to explore “A New Labor Law for Supply Chain Capitalism (Sept 2024–Sept. 2029). She is the co-author and editor of several books including (with Janet Halley, Rachel Rebouché, and Prabha Kotiswaran) Governance Feminism: An Introduction (Minnesota 2018) and Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (Minnesota 2019). She is currently working on a forthcoming edited volume, to be published with Cambridge University Press, on “Modern Slavery and Global Value Chains” (Forthcoming 2023).
Invited Workshop Participants Include:
Daniel Agbiboa (Harvard); Sameer Ashar (UCLA); Jennifer Bair (University of Virginia); Nicole Bassoff (Harvard); Amy Cohen (Temple University); Jason Cons (University of Texas at Austin); Scott Cummings (UCLA); Dan Danielsen (Northeastern); Diane Davis (Harvard); Omer Ein-Habar (Harvard); Tomaso Ferrando (University of Antwerp); Judy Fudge (McMaster University); Joaquín Vargas (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana); Carola Hein (TU Delft); Ben Hurlbut (Arizona State University); Jason Jackson (MIT); Alon Jasper (Tel Aviv University); Peter Kimani Mbogo (University of Antwerp); Chandan Kumar (Working Peoples' Coalition); Zina Miller (Northeastern); Jeremy Perelman (Sciences Po); Guy Priver (Harvard); Alejandro Rodiles (University of Jena); Ileana Porras (University of Miami); Francesca Savoldi (TU Delft); Hila Shamir (Tel Aviv University); Samuel Tabory (Harvard); Adriane Takahara Montenegro (University of Antwerp); Amelia Thorpe (University of New South Wales); Liza Weinstein (Northeastern); Lucie White (Harvard); Austin Zeiderman (London School of Economics)
This conference is supported by a Weatherhead Center medium faculty conference grant.
