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Introduction
The womb, airport security, the shopping mall - the sidewalk and the alley - the prison, the court, and the desert - coat of arms, trademark, and flag. In different ways we might think of all these spaces as more or less immutable. But like everything, the given is already constructed, through the universe of laws and the universe of signs. How does law contribute to the constitution of particular spaces? In what ways do the semiotics of those spaces and those laws participate, communicate, and structure each other? And with what effect, on our lives, our emotions, and our subjectivity?
What links the semiotics of space, which was so important to writers like Lefebvre and Bachelard, and the semiotics of social order, which preoccupies Bourdieu and Latour amongst others? Law (recall for example Roberta Kevelson's Spaces and Significations). Law, informally and formally, in the very specificity of its signs, and in the very generality of its effects, imagines and governs these specific spaces.
We particularly invite potential contributors to think about the spaces that make up their world: what are the laws that construct those spaces, what the semiotics that enrich, articulate, and encounter resistance to them?
Explore with us, in short, the diverse semiotics of legal spaces: historical, philosophical, psychological.
Guest editor: Professor Desmond Manderson, Convenor Canada Research Chair in Law and Discourse, Mc Gill University, Montreal.
desmond.manderson@mcgill.ca
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