The BILETA 2021 Conference will be kicking off next week – 0915 BST Wed 14 April – 1800 BST Friday 16 April. I’ve been organising this year’s online conference on behalf of Newcastle University Law School with the assistance of my super virtual assistant Kirsty Melvin. We have over 80 papers, two plenaries, two paper competitions, and a poster. Our nearly-final programme is hosted on the excellent Oxford Abstracts platform which, despite the sassenach title, is actually based in Silicon Croft, Kilchoan, Ardnamurchan, a hop & skip from where my wife and I now live on Skye. We’ll be using Zoom for presentations, and Wonder.me for socialising. I doubt I’ll be liveblogging – as organiser, too busy moving between sessions, ensuring that everything is on track during the three conference days. The general theme of the conference is the pandemic – how could we not take that as our topic…
Taken by surprise: (Re-)constituting the critical in an age of digital and pandemic
“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”
Albert Camus, The Plague.
The epigraph for our conference comes from Camus’ celebrated exploration of plague and its effects on our societies, cultures, histories, our futures, our views of time, economics, values and ethics. It is an appropriate text for us because it describes one of the multiple situations we now find ourselves in that put our societies under global stress. The present moment of writing, at delivery of vaccines and in the midst of the second wave of Coronavirus, will not be the moment of the conference in 2021; but we shall still be profoundly affected by Covid-19 then and for years to come. As Camus points out, plague defines us, and how we respond to pandemics describes us with dazzling clarity. We find ourselves questioning fundamental issues – what constitutes freedom, social responsibility, to whom, when and where. We find ourselves surprised, caught in the double bind of Berlant’s cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), where those things we most desire can be obstacles to our flourishing. There are similar parallels in other contemporary political, regulatory and technological dimensions. For those of us in our disUK, Brexit has been an extraordinary political journey that few of us could have foreseen, and which has involved all Europe. Equally coming out of the blue sky has been the rise of right-wing politics and cultures, strong challenges to civic liberal cultures and the rule of law itself. Digital itself bewilders us with its protean shifts and its relentless permeation of our lives and work. It plays key roles in liberating us, misinforming us, regulating us, oppressing us, profoundly influencing our very foundational concepts of democracy, the good, learning, global economic dependencies, epistemic critique, and epidemic transfer. How can we constitute or re-constitute what it is to be critical of and through technology in such a world? How can we be critical and insightful? All these and many more questions are critical pressures upon government, regulators, professional bodies, researchers and professionals. Our conference will focus attention on the issues in all areas of technology practice, policy and governance that BILETA deals with as a scholarly body. Our keynote speakers will be addressing them, as will many of the conference papers. Key areas (but the categories are not closed…) include:
- Privacy and surveillance
- Legal education, regulation and technology-enhanced learning
- Intellectual property law and technology
- Digital cultures
- Cybercrime and cybersecurity
- Digital, cloud and Internet regulation and governance
- E-commerce, m-commerce and e-governance
- Telecommunications law and regulation
- Future technologies and law
- Human rights and technology
- Sustainability, energy, technologies and law
- Development and rural challenges
It seems to me that BILETA’s conference has become more intellectually adventurous over the years. I chaired one session two years ago in the conference at Queen’s University Belfast Law School on new approaches to internet regulation, with papers by James Griffin, Edina Harbinja and Vasileios Karagiannopoulos, and Carl Vander Maelen, which were just fascinating in their breadth of approach to regulation, and in a variety of different areas of internet regulation. I was saddened to see, though, that in the conference there were only papers sufficient for a single session in legal education, which reflected a general decline over the years in legal education digital explorations in BILETA, which was once at the forefront of this research field. I raised this as an issue at my paper, and gave reasons why this might be so. Participants also pointed to the baleful influence of the REF in law schools, to the prevailing culture of students-as-customers, and to increasing pressure on law school management to use education as income. None of this assists in the creation of innovation or its dissemination, or in the careful development of the teacher-as-researcher, which Dewey, Lawrence Stenhouse and many others in the pragmatist and constructivist traditions have advocated.
There are deeper issues, too, and I tried to articulate two of them in my paper in that conference. First, there is the strength of ‘dynamic conservatism’ (Schon’s phrase), ie the vigorous effort to remain the same. In its turn this is a response to a wider problem of digital transformation which is raised by many communications and network theorists. I explored the model of modernism outlined by Ulrich Beck, and which goes under a number of titles – second modernity, reflexive modernity. I’m drawn to Beck’s work in part because of my experience of theorising postmodernity, which I first encountered in literary and aesthetic theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Edinburgh. Long hours spent in the Scottish National Library on George IV Bridge, reading Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, de Man, Lyotard, Kristeva, piecing together my own education in classical psychology (reading masses of Freud to understand the base theory, and reactions from Adler onwards). And my gradual convincement that the effort, though valuable in insights, wasn’t really worth the outcome. Beck had the same reaction; and out of that was borne, in part, the concept of a second modernity.
At the conference dinner I sat at a table with Italian academics working in Italy and in various other parts of Europe, and at least one academic from the Central European University. I had made the conference a Brexit-free zone for myself, broken only by the occasional reference by others in their slides; but I couldn’t help thinking yet again what an appalling mistake Brexit is for Britain, Scotland in particular (more on this in a later post). BILETA has Britain and Ireland in its title, and it has always welcomed continental European academics and initiatives, indeed global researchers. We always will. To the best of our powers we won’t allow the collective madness of Toryism to narrow in any way our research practices in the field of digital technologies.
At the NCBE conference in San Francisco a couple of years ago, explaining Brexit & the Scots position over lunch, my US colleagues called Scots independence ‘secession’. That word carries dangerous freight from the US Civil War. The Scots case is quite different: the early medieval period convergence of the kingdom from the ninth century onwards; the later period from around 1286 till 1603, and of course later in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1640s, the riots at the Union in 1708, and the repeated Jacobite rebellions in the later seventeenth and eighteenth century are all manifestations of many things, but are at least in part a determination to retain an identity of difference that had been constructed over centuries, held, and belonged to a sovereign nation. If we decide to revoke the Union we can do so under the s.30 order procedure: there is political as well as historical legitimacy to the claim. And after the Brexit shambles, let alone the Covid-19 mess, who can blame us for ditching a Westminster system that has proved itself again and again utterly incapable of rule, thirled to the lying fantasies of English Tory nationalism. Returning from the Belfast BILETA conference I had a taxi-driver conversation back to the airport: the driver couldn’t understand the 2014 Scots Indyref result. Born and bred in Belfast, he’d never been in favour of Northern Ireland joining the Republic, but now, abandoned in every way by successive Tory administrations, he felt it the only solution. I felt that strongly talking to colleagues in Belfast, and crossing the sheugh, as many of my ancestors had done, I knew again that the break-up of Britain, to use Tom Nairn’s title, is the only solution.
That crossing, from dependence to independence, is an essential moment. And it brought another to mind another crossing. Last April, almost to the day, my mother was moved from a care home to hospital, seriously ill with pneumonia. On entry, she tested positive for Covid-19. For various lockdown reasons none of my family could be present with her except me on her final day as she lay unconscious. I spent the whole day with her and later into the evening sat watching over her body, unwinding her story backwards in time. It occurred to me that I’d never spent so much continuous time in her company alone since I was a wee boy, then the only child. I remember in Africa aged around four, being taught patiently by her to read since we were both alone in the house, and piecing together letters, syllables, words, sentences. I can still remember the physical sense of being at her side, her helping me through the experience of forming meaning from the flow of the script. Reading became for me, matrilineal, suffused with love. Later, one of her stories was told to her by her mother: that her mother had been taken back as a child by her mother, my great-grandmother, to see the family croft near Inniskillen, County Fermanagh. She told my mother of her astonishment that on bending into the interior darkness, she saw the fire in the middle of the beaten floor, the smoke escaping through the sod roof. It was a way of life that subsisted for thousands of years.
Four generations later we are at the start of the digital revolution, its incunabula, and in organisations such as BILETA we try to figure out the massive changes being wrought by that four-generational shift. I’ve been part of BILETA since the mid-1990s, and given around 20 papers/presentations/workshops and this is the second conference I’ve organised in that time. I’ve been on the Exec for quite a few years, and Chair for an extended period in the mid-2000s. I’ll be retiring from it after this conference – time for new, younger members to get involved with fresh approaches. I have to say that it’s a super organisation to be part of. There are wonderful colleagues, open to all approaches to technology, theory and practice, and lots of ways for you to contribute. Please do get involved personally if you’re working in the fields of law, tech & education; and if your law school isn’t a member, please think about changing that. Our current treasurer, James Griffin, would be only too happy to let you know how to do it.