[KS] CFP From Cases to Causes in East Asian societies

[Justine Guichard]

Dear colleagues,

Please find below the call for papers for a forthcoming issue of
*Extrême-Orient,
Extrême-Occident*:

>From Cases to Causes in East Asian Societies

Legal norms are regularly transgressed, in any society, without arousing
collective attention. Those catching it are “cases” (or “affaires” as they
are called in French) that originate in the judicial realm but gain a
larger dimension through public stances whose types and outlets are
subject, over time, to change. Out of these interventions, which are not
limited to the space of the press, can emerge “causes” that mobilize more
or less. Several disciplines have confronted this phenomenon, including
history, sociology, and anthropology. The 1990s work of Élisabeth Claverie
on the Calas and Chevalier de la Barre cases pioneeringly analyzed the
public response process then initiated by Voltaire to turn both trials into
exemplary ones. At the same time in the United States, Austin Sarat and
Stuart Scheingold gave birth to the cause lawyering scholarship that deals
with the activism of legal professionals and has since expanded as
demonstrated by the research of Rachel Stern and Eva Pils for China or
Celeste Arrington for Japan and South Korea.

A case (or “affaire”), which must be distinguished from a “scandal” as
shown by Cyril Lemieux and Damien de Blic (Politix n°71, 2005), is defined
in the 2007 volume Affaires, scandales et grandes causes : De Socrate à
Pinochet (edited by Luc Boltanski, Élisabeth Claverie, Nicolas Offenstadt
and Stéphane Van Damme) as a moment of test for ordinary categories, such
as statuses and values. Based on various case studies from Antiquity to the
present day, the book ends by calling for more specialists of non-European
cultural areas to join this line of research. As far as East Asia is
concerned, one should note that Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan on the one
hand, Paul Jobin on the other have participated in the above studies by
respectively examining the Sun Zhigang scandal and the Minamata case. Their
approach asks what a case alters and not only reveals about a given social
order, differentiating itself from the microhistorical tradition that has
spearheaded a renewal in the analysis of legal cases and sources over the
past decades (among the classics, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the
Worms, 1976, and Jonathan Spencer, The Death of Woman Wang, 1979).

We offer here to continue interrogating what is at stake for a society in
the surfacing of a “case” based on East Asian experiences. We therefore
invite contributions from diverse disciplinary and temporal horizons,
unrestricted to law or the last two centuries, to investigate the
trajectory of single or multiple cases contemplating: How and why some
cases but not others engender collective attention? Which move away from
the judicial realm to enter the public space? Which go as far as bringing
about forms of mobilization? Which categories are then tested and to which
extent? In other words, under which conditions does a case become a cause?
Which actors are involved in this transformation? Following which logics,
not only strategic but also representational? Through which sources, media
and discourses? With which effects?

Such are the main questions that this thematic issue of Extrême-Orient,
Extrême-Occident plans to explore. Special awareness will be given to the
lexicon deployed in the frame of the selected cases, to be probed in the
different contexts under consideration – thus, for instance, the term
jiken (Japanese),
sakkŏn (Korean), shijian (Chinese), sự kiện (Vietnamese) invariably
corresponding to the sinograms 事件.

Proposals for papers, in English or in French, should be addressed to the
two editors of the journal: matthias.hayek at ephe.psl.eu and
pierre-emmanuel.roux at u-paris.fr, as well as to Justine Guichard:
justine.guichard at u-paris.fr, guest editor for this issue.

If you are interested in contributing to this issue, the editors kindly ask
you to submit a tentative title and an abstract by September 15, 2023.

Full manuscripts should be submitted no later than January 15, 2024 and
follow the submission guidelines outlined here:
https://journals.openedition.org/extremeorient/739.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20230713/7a363594/attachment.htm>