Gender & Law at Durham (GLAD) Conversation 2012: with Finn Mackay

Gender and Law at Durham (GLAD) supports, develops and enhances research and teaching in the broad field of Law & Gender, primarily in Durham Law School, but also across Durham University as a whole. GLAD conversations are our annual Q&A discussions, with significant figures across feminist and LGBT activism, politics and law. Previous speakers include Stephen Whittle OBE, Lord Lester QC, Vera Baird QC, Frances Crook and Baroness Kennedy QC.

We are very pleased to announce that this year’s speaker will be the award-winning feminist activist Finn Mackay.

Finn is the Founder of the London Feminist Network and the revived Reclaim the Night London, Co-Founder of the Feminist Coalition against Prostitution, and Individual Winner of the 2010 Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for Outstanding Work on Women and Violence.

A short interview with Finn can be watched here.

The event will take place on Tuesday 7th February 2012, in the  Joachim Room, St Hild & Bede College, Durham University, from 3.30 to 5.30pm. Places are free but limited. To book, please contact law.events@dur.ac.uk. The event will be followed by an informal drinks reception.

Finn has also agreed to hold an informal workshop for feminist activists from 2pm. The workshop is an opportunity to learn more from Finn about organising feminist groups, events and campaigns. If you’re interested in attending the workshop, please clearly state this when booking your place.

If you have any questions about the event, contact Dr Erika Rackley at erika.rackley@dur.ac.uk. More information about GLAD and the 2012 GLAD Conversation can be found on our website.

Download the poster here: GLADFinnMackayFeb2012

 

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Call for Papers: Bodies of Law/Law and the Body

Bodies of Law / Law and the Body

An interdisciplinary conference for postgraduate and early-career academics in the area of law, gender and sexuality (see the PECANS network).

Friday 30 March 2012

School of Law, University of Westminster, London, UK

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CALL FOR PAPERS

This one-day conference seeks to bring together postgraduate and early-career scholars from across the UK and beyond to explore the general theme of ‘law and the body’. This event will investigate the different dimensions of how the ‘body’ as a governed entity is represented, regulated, and normalised within the legal order, while encouraging debate about law’s relationship to wider social structures and knowledges.

Law mediates various power structures and is interwoven with numerous other knowledges that participate in the construction, normalization and regulation of bodies, such as medicine, social media, religion and the nation-state. Numerous feminist legal scholars have commented on law’s intimate relationship to, for example, medical discourses, arguing that the shape of legal power has changed to more regulatory and disciplinary forms. Inevitably law’s relationship to bodies/states of embodiment alters as it takes on these increasingly pervasive roles. One might conclude that the notion of a space where the law will not intervene is a liberal fantasy, out of step with the reality of law’s operations. How, then, should law be evaluated and/or harnessed?

Within this context, some of the questions we hope to address are:

• Does law privilege certain bodies/states of embodiment? If so, what are some of the ways that these privileged bodies can be detected in law and resisted?
• Should legal scholars continue to appeal to (or return to) fixed understandings of bodies, such as the ‘female’ body?
• How do bio-technologies affect and transform the relationship between body and law, especially within the processes of neoliberal governance and consumerism?
• In what ways are marginalised groups affected by the interaction of law and body within the discourses of (in)equality and difference?
• What has the advent of post-human and object-oriented thought meant for feminist conceptions of ‘the body’?
• Can we conceive of law without ‘the body’?

We invite papers addressing these and other related questions for inclusion in the conference program. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent to Katie Cruz at llxkc4@nottingham.ac.uk by Friday 6 January 2012. Successful participants will be notified no later than mid-February.

We regret that we cannot guarantee participants funding for travel however there may be some small subsidies available. We will advertise any opportunities as they arise. Finally, papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication in a special issue of feminists@law, a peer-reviewed, online, open access journal of feminist legal scholarship. For more information about the journal, please visit http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/index. 

Download the CFP: PECANS WORKSHOP 2012

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International Law and Feminist Futures

Registration is open for a one-day workshop to be held at the University of Leicester on Thursday 28th April: ‘International Law and Feminist Futures’.

‘International Law and Feminist Futures’ will bring together individuals committed to feminist approaches in order to develop and share their research, generate ideas for future events and collaborations and consider what contribution feminist analysis can make to the future of international law.

The keynote speech will be given by Professor Dianne Otto, University of Melbourne, who will speak on ‘The Paradoxes of Feminist Engagement with International Law’

For more information about the workshop and to register for the event (the deadline for registration is 14 April), please visit www.le.ac.uk/law/conference/feminism-international-law/index.html

Download the flyer: International Law & Feminist Futures

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