Seminar Series “The Comparative Imagination”

(ERA Chair IMAGINE Seminar)

Next October 12th, at 10.30am, Luisa Schneider (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), will be presenting the seminar titled Love, Violence, and the State's Protective Imagination, at ICS-ULisboa (Maria de Sousa Room).

Abstract: This lecture traces the evolution of my research from Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy After Conflict (Cambridge University Press 2025)  to my current work on law, kinship, and the state's protective imagination. Love and Violence explored how violence within intimate relationships is understood, negotiated, sanctioned, and repaired through overlapping institutions such as households, communities, and courts. Rather than treating violence as simply an individual or criminal act, the book examined how different social worlds produce competing understandings of love, responsibility, care, obligation, and justice. My current work shifts this analysis from the interpersonal dynamics of love and violence to the institutions through which the state increasingly seeks to govern intimate life. It asks what happens when the state comes to position itself as protector, guardian, and arbiter of intimate relationships. In seeking to prevent future violence, abandonment, exploitation, or repeated offending, legal institutions increasingly intervene not only in response to past acts but in anticipation of future lives. Kinship ties, social relationships, histories of care, and forms of social embeddedness become evidence through which institutions imagine who people are likely to become and what futures they are likely to inhabit. I argue that this marks a broader transformation in the relationship between love, violence, and law. Rather than simply adjudicating harm after the fact, the state's protective ambitions increasingly seek to shape the futures they deem desirable while foreclosing those they perceive as dangerous. In attempting to protect, the state does more than respond to violence: it increasingly participates in producing the futures it wishes to bring about while preventing those it fears. I describe this future-oriented mode of governance as carceral forecasting—the growing tendency for legal institutions to anticipate, classify, and intervene on the basis of imagined futures. The lecture asks what this shift reveals about changing relationships between love, violence, kinship, and state power, and what it means when law no longer simply judges the past but increasingly seeks to author the future.

Luisa T. Schneider is an anthropologist whose work focuses on intimacy, violence, law, and everyday ethics. She is Associate Professor and Programme Director for the Master’s in Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research in Europe and West Africa, her work examines how carceral abandonment shapes personal relationships and institutional practices. Her publications include Love and Violence in Sierra Leone (2025), Let Me Take a Vacation in Prison Before the Streets Kill Me! (2021), and Sexual Violence During Research (2020).