2024: Sailing the Ship of Fools
About
Gaudeamus igitur! The Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris is this year celebrating its 20th anniversary, and we warmly invite you to join us for an afternoon and evening of celebration.
Like all anniversaries, this is a chance to reflect and take stock. We do so with a sense of accomplishment at our successes and achievements over the past two decades – the projects completed, the events organized, the friendships forged. Yet it is also, and more so, an opportunity to look forward to new horizons. A time to ask not just where we have been or where we are now, but where we are heading next.
It is in this spirit that we enjoin you to set sail with us on the Ship of Fools. We propose the metaphor not in the sense of Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff – as a rudderless voyage to the non-existent paradise of Narragonia. Rather, we think it with Patrizia Comand in her suggestive revisiting of “La Nave dei Folli” as a carnivalesque space of playfulness and adventure, of creativity and imagination, far removed from the deadening rituals of convention. In Comand’s hands, the Ship of Fools becomes a landscape of possibility, a liminal zone, neither here nor there, where rules can be broken and re-made. Are the figures that populate this landscape mere foolish seekers? Or are they morosophs – those wise fools who, standing outside the order of things, can glimpse the unseen, express thoughts unsaid, provide something new?
Taking this image as inspiration, we envision this anniversary workshop as a space to celebrate the promise of working in law’s borderlands and to speculate on some possible future directions for ‘law and’ scholarship. In the afternoon, we will hear impulse contributions from a group of emerging researchers doing exciting interdisciplinary work on the law, which will feed into an extended, open discussion for all participants. This will be followed in the evening by a keynote talk by Alain Pottage on speculative fiction, and an apéro reception for all.
We look forward to stimulating conversations and to a shared moment of conviviality and exchange.
The event is free, but we ask participants to register via email to lucernaiuris@unilu.ch to help with catering arrangements.
