Socio-Legal Hub Seminar Series: Law, Registration, and the State: Making Identities through Space, Place, and Movement

The Socio-Legal Hub Seminar Series is a forum for substantive, methodological and conceptual discussions within the field of socio-legal studies.

In this talk, I will present findings from my book Law, Registration, and the State: Making Identities through Space, Place, and Movement (Routledge, 2023). Critical legal and socio-legal scholarship tends to assume that registration is a textually mediated act of statecraft which governs through the technology of writing. Taking a different approach, the book develops movement as socio-legal method to illustrate the legal, social, and bureaucratic layers of movement which unfold in everyday engagements with the law. The book presents empirical and theoretical analysis of historical, contemporary, and future-oriented places of registration: a community hub, a city of pilgrimage, and the General Register Office. Drawing from diverse perspectives across anthropology, geography, sociology, architecture, and mobility studies, the book argues for an understanding of registration as evolving, socially constructed, and shaped by spatial imaginaries which are materialised in its architecture. This mobile understanding of registration expands conceptual discussions of legal materiality whilst opening up possibilities for legal identities unconstrained by the assumed desirability of stability or endurance.

Speaker: Dr Jess Connolly-Smith

Dr Jess Connolly-Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln and Visiting Fellow at LHub, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Jess is an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar with research interests in the areas of legal geography, law and identity, and socio-legal theory. Jess’s research explores how law engages in abstract and material practices of meaning-making to produce identities which construct, shape, and permeate our experience of everyday life. To date, Jess has explored concepts essential to the construction of identity including registration, movement, place, and the sacred/secular. Jess is particularly interested in how identities are built through the interaction between human (individual, citizen, gender, person) and non-human (buildings, places, communities, publics). She is currently working on a research project which looks to develop a socio-legal approach to quiet and its intersections with everyday life. Dr Connolly-Smith is the author of Law, Registration, and the State: Making Identities through Space, Place, and Movement (Routledge, 2023) – awarded the Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics 2024. Jess has also published her research in journals including Social & Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, and The Sociological Review.

A light sandwich lunch will be provided at the event.

This event will be on a first-come first-served basis.