Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

We are so excited to announce that the opening keynote of this Institute’s concluding conference will be held by Ravit Reichman on the topic of “Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times”! Check out our convener introductions to read up on her full bio and see the abstract in the following:

“How do we come to feel possessive over intangibles—memory, identity, history, citizenship—that, strictly speaking, we cannot own? In taking up this question as a way to understand the modern condition, this lecture examines the propertied imagination: the psychic life of property through which we experience the world as a series of possessive cases, and through which we make claims to repossess what we believe to be ours. Navigating the psychic terrain of possession, I propose that property in the modern era comes into view predominantly through loss rather than acquisition, and that this loss is accompanied by an expanded sense of property that shapes relations of ownership beyond the law. Drawing particularly on examples from law and literature, I suggest that this propertied imagination calls for a particular mode of reading, one attuned to property’s affective registers like grief, possessiveness, self-possession, or entitlement, and to its rhetorical turns—those moments when language alerts us to the existence of a propertied relationship that law is often at pains to address.”

The Keynote will be held on the 22.07.  at 4 pm. Join us in room 11/E08!

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