The LASC and PragmApolis laboratories at the Faculty of Social Sciences are hosting Luisa Schneider, Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, for a lecture entitled Love, Violence, and the Futures of Law: From Moral Economies to Carceral Forecasting.

This talk draws on long-term ethnographic research in Sierra Leone to explore the relationship between intimacy, violence, kinship, and law. Revisiting arguments from the book Love and Violence and subsequent work on carceral kinship, it examines how legal and social interventions often fail when they reduce complex relational worlds to simplified victim–perpetrator frameworks. The talk argues that law increasingly operates through anticipations of future risk, worth, and governability, sorting people not only according to past acts but according to the futures they are imagined to inhabit. Tracing connections between intimate life, legal institutions, and broader regimes of governance, the lecture asks what it means to understand law as a future-oriented moral project.