Hello AoIR! I am looking for one or two law and society scholars to participate in a panel about religion, law, and technology for the 2010 Law and Society Association Annual Conference (Chicago, 27-30 May). The panel is being organized by myself and Iza Hussin (UMass-Amherst). We are hoping to bring together people interested in beginning a generative conversation about law, religion, society, and technology. The impetus is an ongoing research project to understand the effect of ICTs on the balance between state authority and religious authority as well as the scope of religious authority over local communities. We are hoping there are other people out there interested in the same intersection of topics-—but welcome more broadly related work as well. The (rough!) panel proposal is: Law and technology studies have traditionally concerned dispute resolution, the interaction between the idiosyncrasies of online world and offline legal institutions, the regulation of the internet, and e-governance. Our panel attempts to expand the field of law and technology to include questions of the ways in which online communities are changing the state-society relationship and challenging legal institutions across geographical contexts. With a particular focus on the Muslim world, we examine disruptions in carefully crafted balances between state authorities and other societal actors, such as religious legal authorities. Also, we focus on the ways in which the online social world is shaping power negotiations between different societal actors. We additionally interrogate the often used dichotomy off the “online” and “offline”— instead focusing how the online world weakens, reinforces, and expands community boundaries and challenges state authority. The ! panel is an attempt to carve out a new direction of research that is theoretically engaged with the law and society paradigm but builds bridges between traditional disciplines. Please email me with any questions. If you are interested in participating, please send me a brief outline of your project. Or, if you aren’t interested in participating, but have any references or people you think we should know about, send an email! All and any help is very welcome. Thank you in advance, Jessica --------------------------------------- Jessica L. Beyer Doctoral Candidate University of Washington Department of Political Science http://students.washington.edu/jlbeyer ---------------------------------------