In this presentation, I will discuss how the landscape concept can be used as a critical tool to understand how legal patterns form within the rhizomes of human and more-than-human processes that constitute a landscape. Following the spatial turn in critical legal scholarship, the co-production of law and space is now a well-established research field. There is also a growing body of scholarship concerning the co-constitution of law and place. I aim to contribute to this evolving platial turn by exploring the potential of the concept of “landscape” as a tool for analyzing how law emerges as an aspect of its local environment. In the 1920s, Carl Sauer famously declared that the fundamental objective of geography is to establish a critical system that embraces the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp, in all of its meaning and color, the varied terrestrial scene. While this approach became influential in human geography, the landscape concept also came under heavy critique in the late 20th century for its ocularcentric connotations of a man, standing at a distance, gazing over a scenic view. However, in recent decades, the concept has returned as a process-oriented relational tool to analyze how the fabric of reality is woven from unjust relations on a landscape scale. By speculating on the morphogenesis of law in the landscape, or the emergence of law within the fabric of a landscape, I explore ‘landscape’ as an appropriate subject of study for critical legal geography.
Presentationen var en del av panelen "Speculating with Critical Legal Geographies", som jag även organiserade.