Conference Streams

Digital disruption and legal futures

The hype caused by generative AI, like ChatGPT, is the latest in a long line technological ‘crisis’ events that have generated social and legal anxiety. This stream deals directly with both the contemporary focuses of social and legal disruption – AI, automation, blockchain – to earlier crisis events from Sputnik to Dolly the Sheep, to the early internet. It also encourages speculation of the laws and legalities disrupted and needs of the ‘next’ technologies emerging from the event horizon – quantum computing, AI singularity, terraforming, commercial and urban space settlement.

Further, there are critical literatures on the tech-hype-disruption-legal change cycle. This stream also invites critical reflection on the underlying methods and theoretical resources that inform ‘law and technology’ scholarship.

Stream coordinators: Lachlan Robb and Kieran Tranter

Jurisprudence of the future IV: Science Fiction will save everything!

Following blockbuster showings at LLHAA 21, SLSA 2022, a special symposium in Law Technology and Humans (https://lthj.qut.edu.au/issue/view/115) and a workshop at ISRL23 in Rome in May, we are proud to host Jurisprudence of the Future IV. Jurisprudence of the Future celebrates, explores and boldly goes to the future of law, order and legal theory through the taking seriously of science fiction (in all its media, mutations and metas). Welcome are existing contributors to the Cultural Imaginary of Science Fiction and Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction edited volumes and new participants wishing to join the crew and terraform the universe.

Stream coordinators: Mitch Travis, Alex Green and Kieran Tranter

Uncovering the human: Exploring tax theory, Invisible taxes, and tax impact on Aussie battlers

Taxation is often presented as the realm of economic technocrats. The papers in this stream demonstrate that taxation is in fact an intensely human concern. Presenters consider the philosophy that underpins tax law; how taxes impact on ‘Aussie battlers’ in rural Queensland; and, borrowing from Italo Calvino, the phenomenon of invisibility in taxation.

Stream coordinator: Jonathan Barrett

Disruptive legalities in more-than-human societies

This stream will focus on how an acknowledgement of nonhuman agency and normativities – including those of animals, plants, and technologies – disrupts and transforms existing understandings of law, legality, normativity and justice. We invite papers that explore the theoretical, practical and methodological implications of the shifting ways in which nonhuman beings and their communities are subject to legal techniques and authority, as well as how the complexity of nonhuman and human interactions challenges existing legal techniques and modes of exercising authority. We welcome contributions that consider the role of legal institutions, technologies, techniques and techne in the histories and legacies of ecological degradation and injustice, and contemplate the modes of lawful relation or legality that are necessary to build ecologically liveable and just futures.

Stream Coordinator: Kathleen Birrell, Julia Dehm, Afshin Akhtar-Khavari and Marie Petersmann

Archiving atrocities, archiving international justice

New technologies in warfare are met by new technologies in recording atrocities. As a result, a new kind of atrocity archive is created where analogue records of atrocity are joined by digital and open source records. These atrocity archives are found at international courts and human rights commissions where digital records such as satellite imagery and social media data are used to evidence international crimes and human rights violations, and at older truth commissions and the legacy institutions for former international(ised) tribunals where analogue archives are digitised for the purpose of preservation and dissemination. These developments occur at the same time as there is increased interest in the role of memory and memorialisation, something which may or may not involve a legal institution.

At this conference where we ‘build, dream and work towards better law and technology futures’, this stream brings together papers that examine the role of technology in international atrocity archives. We welcome papers that examine forms of archiving or archives in the context of international conflict or international justice. This includes:

• Role of AI in committing, documenting or evidencing atrocities
• New technologies in warfare
• New technologies in documenting, collating and preserving records
• Digitalisation and memory
• Role of arts or cultural artefacts in international justice

Stream Convenors: Maria Elander and Valeria Vázquez Guevara

Feminist legal scholarship to reimagine the world: A celebration

This stream aims to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Australian Feminist Law Journal (AFLJ). Founded in 1993, the AFLJ has been an important intellectual home for generations of feminist legal scholars from Australia, the Asia Pacific, Europe and beyond.

To celebrate this important milestone, this stream will bring together papers examining questions of law and justice by drawing on, and contributing to feminist legal scholarship. In line with the AFLJ’s aims and scope, this stream seeks to showcase papers that: centre the voices and experiences of women (including trans women and gender diverse and non-binary people); offer broad feminist and/or gender-based analyses of laws, legal institutions, and socio-legal issues; and embrace a materially and structurally grounded intersectional analytical sensibility.

We invite reflections on but not limited to:

• Feminist legal method(s)
• Similarities and differences across feminist legal scholarship over time
• Contemporary legal issues facing women and gender diverse people
• Encounters between feminist legal scholarship and other modes of critical scholarship

Reflecting the AFLJ’s feminist ethos, the stream will welcome presentations by both leading and emerging feminist scholars and strongly encourage contributions from scholars who are Indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse, people of colour, faith-based, differently-abled, LGBTIQA+ and/or from the Global South. The stream is open to Graduate Research Students (including master’s by research), Early Career Researchers and senior academics.

Selected papers in this stream will be invited to submit their papers for publication in the journal. Please note that all submissions will undergo double-anonymised peer review based on an initial editor screening.

Stream Convenor: This stream is convened by the Editorial Board of the Australian Feminist Law Journal. Contact information: aflj@griffith.edu.au

Crisis and critique: Critical responses to technological and other disasters

This stream focuses on the dangers and opportunities arising in situations of crisis, disruption and disaster. We invite participants to explore the critical potential of systems breakdowns. These might be technological, climatic, social, or other crises. Responses might come from empirical, theoretical, legal or policy perspectives. Above all these perspectives will be critical: because they study crises, because our condition is critical, and because a return to an unexamined – uncriticised – normality is not an option. This stream builds upon the ‘Condition Critical’ symposium published in the most recent issue of Law, Technology and Humans https://lthj.qut.edu.au/

Reflections on the entanglements between critique and crisis are welcome. Do crises call forth critique? What is to be criticised: the crisis or the response? The technology or the humans? Can the interactions between nature, humans and technology be explored from within the crisis?

Stream Coordinator: Richard Mohr

AI and the automation of criminal justice

The role of AI and ML systems in criminal justice has been well explored and the concerns of bias, lack of transparency and the decline of human discretion has been closely detailed. Notwithstanding critics’ concerns, the deployment and use of these systems across

jurisdictions has been accelerating. Further, generative AI is being rapidly adopted by all levels of the criminal justice system to facilitate text. If Robert Covers’ famous ‘Violence and the Word’ connected the text creating activities of judges to the ‘pain and death’ of the legal system, then the automation of text generation in the criminal justice system witnesses the dehumanisation of a machine dedicated to exercise of sovereign power over human life. This stream encourages engagement with the automation in all levels of the criminal justice system.

Stream Coordinator: Nigel Stobbs

Decolonial futures: Technologies of law and colonialism

We welcome papers that interrogate the relationships between colonialism, law, and technology, broadly conceived. The stream will be a home at the Conference for projects that are thinking through the decolonial role of new technologies, or the ways in which these technologies are implicated in new colonialisms – and how, in either case, law is in the machine, ‘lex ex machina’. The stream will equally be home to projects that are undertaking critical historical and cultural studies of colonial legal technologies, from the literary to the cartographic, the architectural to the monumental, the industrial to the urban. We especially welcome projects that are investigating the laws and technologies of ‘treaty’, ‘voice’, and ‘truth’, and that are working towards decolonial futures through research which brings a critical eye to the technological as much as to the legal and the colonial.

Stream Convenors: Shane Chalmers and Maria Giannacopoulos

The benefits and risks of brain-computer interface

The promises of brain-computer interface technology (BCI) significantly impact on individuals, offering renewed capacity for those who have experienced physical or neurological impairment. However, with the benefits come with a range of risks: privacy, enhancement, side-effects, normality, agency, responsibility, personal identity, legal personality, to name a few.

Insight, wisdom and critical dialogue on the benefits and risks of BCI will contribute to a better law and technology future. Scholars and researchers from all disciplines are encouraged to participate. Particularly emphasis will be given to interdisciplinary work that considers the future possibilities of BCI and appropriate legal, technical and/or ethical frameworks for their use and the risk management.

Stream Convenor: Scott Kiel-Chisholm

Technology, sustainable development and legal education

Achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or global goals, is highly dependent on technological development and dissemination. Many of the 17 Goals and 169 targets involve conducive international and national legal systems that support justice, equity, and human rights. Enhancing ‘North-South, South-South and triangular regional and international cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation…’ have been identified as a major means of implementation target for achieving SDGs (UN Doc, A/RES/70/1). Law and legal education are relevant for this. At the same time, artificial intelligence and other technological advances have emerged as a significant disrupting factor in legal education. This stream invites presentations on any of these issues.

Stream Coordinator: Saiful Karim

Cultural legalities of corporate technologies

Stream Coordinators: Tim Peters and Jordon Belor

This stream explores the cultural legalities of corporate technologies—both the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain technology, decentralised autonomous organisations and big data by corporations, as well as the corporation as a legal technology that structures rights, duties and legal capacity for non-human entities. It aims to consider the way in which the possibilities of technology for corporate governance, power and authority is structured by our cultural imaginary but also that the corporation itself is already an artificial legal structure, a technology that frames mechanisms of joint-decision-making and the exercise of power and authority. Papers considering any aspect of the cultural representation and instantiation of the corporation as/and technology—cinematic, televisual, graphic, ludic and artistic—whether fictional or factual will be considered. This stream will also form part of a larger project on the cultural legalities of the corporation.