An attempt at academic blogging
Panu Minkkinen
This is a version of the oral presentation I prepared for a seminar in Oslo celebrating the life and work of Inger-Johanne Sand. The enlarged essay will eventually be available in a Festschrift published by Karnov.
Continue reading “Sociological constitutionalism versus constitutional ethnography (25 May 2023)”
This is a transcript of how I had intended to present my lengthier paper on Helsinki’s Senate Square at the Workshop Institutional Architecture event organised on 19-20 October 2022 by VU Amsterdam’s Legal Sightseeing project. In the end, the actual oral presentation turned out to be much shorter, so this may clarify some arguments. Thanks to the organisers for having me.
Continue reading “Senate Square, Helsinki (19 October 2022)”
My paper for the LSA 2022 conference in Lisbon is part of the larger ‘Seats of Power’ project that investigates the spatial dimensions of the political and legal institutions that are typically established in constitutions, a configuration that I have elsewhere called ‘constituted space’. The paper is aligned with the LSA 2022 general theme ‘Rage, Reckoning, & Remedy’ in the sense that it focuses on colonial constituted space. I use the notion of ‘realms of memory’, coined by French historian Pierre Nora, to show how the coloniser’s public architecture and town planning imposed on the former colonies serve as powerful symbolic transplants that perpetuate colonial rule even after decolonisation has been nominally completed with independence. By doing so, colonial realms of memory continue to support inequalities and discriminatory practices that colonialism itself introduced. The paper draws link’s between a critical reading of Nora’s notion of commemorative sites and how Latin American cultural theorists like Néstor García Canclini and Armando Silva discuss the ‘imagined’ quality of urban identities. I use Mexico City as an illustrative example. You can find a pdf version of my full paper ➜ here. I welcome all criticisms and suggestions.
This is my presentation for the Law, Space, Matter online seminar that took place all over the globe on 9 September 2021. Our session was called ‘Law, Politics and Emptiness’, and it was organised and chaired by Dorota Gozdecka. This was developed from material that you may have seen elsewhere.
This essay is once again part of a larger work in progress. But as I also tried to develop it into a self-standing paper for the ASLCH 2020 conference at Quinnipiac Law School, I thought that it would work as a blog, as well. You be the judge. As before, it draws on material that I’ve worked on earlier, and in a similar way, with a rather limited amount of material available in languages that I know, it’s again only ‘getting there’ discovering the nuances and finer details as I go along. Baby steps. If you prefer to download the longish manuscript as a pdf, you can find it here. Note: The final published essay is here, unfortunately behind a paywall. Continue reading “‘Eat me like a cannibal’: anthropophagic architecture as cultural criticism”
This text is part of a longer paper that I’m currently working on and that I’ll be presenting at a couple of seminars over the spring (e.g. SLSA 2020 in Portsmouth). But I thought that it might work as a shorter piece on its own here in the blogosphere, as well. It continues my (perhaps misguided) self-reflexive engagements with ethnography and expands from a few lines towards the end of an earlier text. All comments are welcome, as usual. Note: The final article is available as open access here.
Below you’ll find the paper that I prepared for and presented at the ICON-S 2019 conference in Santiago, Chile. If you prefer to download a pdf, you can find it here. Continue reading “Seats of power: ethnographies of constituted space”
These notes belong to the same project on constitutional spaces that I have been working on for a while. They represent my first attempt to look at the intersections of constituted power, architecture, and urban planning. A very early version was presented in Hong Kong at the ICON-S 2018 conference, but the notes below are closer to something I discussed with colleagues in Gothenburg later that year.
I continue my project on constitutional spaces and begin to develop here something of a template that could work for a series of individual analyses. Continue reading “An empty square”