LAW HORROR HOPE

A Law, Literature And Humanities Association Of Australasia Conference

University of Technology Sydney

7-9 DecEMBER 2026

7 Dec: HDR Day / Welcome drinks at night
8-9 Dec: Conference

Please note this conference is an in-person event. We apologise that we will not be able to facilitate remote access.

Untitled Artwork by Laura Joseph, representing a curled wolf-like animal with yellow and blue stripes

  ©
 Illustration by Laura Joseph (2026).

We are living through a moment shaped by climate catastrophe, rising fascism, tech-authoritarianism, intensifying genocide, and the slow collapse of liberal institutions. Law is everywhere in these crises: instrumentalised as lawfare, deployed as a weapon, invoked as a shield, and often revealed as something far stranger than our theories can contain.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline: July 31

This conference explores the tensions between horror and hope in legal and cultural life.

Some guiding questions include:

Is law complicit in the horrors of our time, or does it offer ways through?
How do horror, the gothic, the uncanny, the apocalyptic and the speculative illuminate contemporary legal crises?
What forms of hope appear in legal practice, resistance, imagination, or refusal?
How might we rethink law in an era of lawfare, institutional decay, and late-capitalist extraction?
What does it mean to produce scholarship that matters when the world is on fire?

We welcome broad interpretations of the theme, particularly if they're interesting, adventurous or fun, as well as other papers within the field of law and humanities.

Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk.

SUBMIT AN ABSTRACT

SUBMIT A ROUNDTABLE

SUBMIT A PANEL

Keynote Speakers