Posts by Pagona Kytzidis
Law, Normativity, and Violence

By living and aging in the United States, many Americans assume the goodness, the neutrality, and rationality of law. Some even judge the morality of others based on their adherence to these legal regulations, without critiquing the merits or source of the law itself. Others recognize that some laws unequivocally create unjust worlds and resist them actively. Few, however, question the very nature of law as a systemic means of regulating and organizing the social Normative, arising not from objective and liberal ‘truth’, but from “a human desire for reliability and pattern that protects a finite being from a chaotic world.”

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Status Crime in the 21st Century: The Criminalization of Homelessness

Many scholars have employed the “conduct/status conflation” framework to analyze how anti-homeless conduct legislation works to target and to disempower homelessness status. For example, Leonard C. Feldman claims the “status of homelessness” became “constitutionally regulable” by translating homeless status into homelessness’ “component acts,” such as public sleeping or public sidewalk sitting. [4] However, homeless status demands the exercise of component acts to maintain individual agency and autonomy.

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Pagona Kytzidis