CALL FOR PAPERS: Gender and the Law International Conference -- Limits, Contestations and Beyond

Call for Papers: Gender and the Law International Conference -- Limits, Contestations and Beyond

Izmir, Turkey

4-6 June 2014

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the discursive, historical, political, social limits of legal systems, including state laws, policies, institutionalised un-written based customs, traditions and their operation about gender-related as well as gender-specific issues. Legal systems often structure, impacts, controls, constructs or deconstructs, intervenes and acts against certain relations whether between or intra states. Legal norms established to protect or promote gender equality may have unintended consequences and legal norms that seem irrelevant to gender may nonetheless significantly impact gender issues and various forms of gender-related violence.

The conference aims to engage with different legal systems across cultures focusing on the ways in which social mores are institutionalised in societies aiming to render a subtle, complex account of the discursive construction of gender, linking together ideologies, language, their cultural groundings and their operation in legal context. It invites the participants to bring in the cases that enable further discussions in relation to broader contexts including social, political, cultural, economic and legal processes that underlie the construction of the gendered subjectivities.

This conference is open for papers across disciplines, including, but not limited to, legal studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, politics, international relations and else.

The conference will explore the following themes:

1- Language structure and legal system: How do systematic aspects of language, structure the meaning of gender roles and mediate the social conflicts with legal institutions deal? How does law affect the meaning system that demarcates the boundaries between right and wrong, moral and immoral? How do legal orders (such as customary law, international law) interact with the hegemonic effects of the state law? : In a related vein, how do we understand the complex and non-determinist embodiment of social epistemologies in legal language?
2- Power and Hegemony: How are both imposition hegemony and moments, discourses acts of resistance made possible in, through and by legal language? How do people use state law or other legal norms to enact their hegemony and or to create resistance?
3- Affect and Law: What are the possibilities of thinking about the ‘affect’ and law? How do particularly debated cases that created public outrage should be understood and analysed in relation to court decisions especially when the decision was against the public? How does the affect of ‘the law’ spread across institutions, media and the public?
4- State and Law: What is the role of ideology of official state in the legal/institutional regimentation and sedimentation of language in the legal institutions? What is the role of culture in legislation? In a cultural relativism-universalism debate, what is the common understanding of human rights and freedoms for the full realization of this pledge?
5- International Law and Gender Politics: How do global political measures affect international law related to gender?
6- Employment and Labour Market: How does discrimination and equality in relation to gender, apply within the field of employment in a legal context? What are the limitations of the principles of non-discrimination and equal treatment in achieving to enter the labour market?
7- Migration: What are the impacts of policies that cause gender-discrimination in migration and refugee context? What kind of policy and practices are needed in the global policy agenda to address gender equality in the migration context?

The decision process for the contributions will include two steps: in the first instance abstracts (up to 350 words) will be reviewed by the conference committee and those invited for the second step will be asked to submit a full proceedings paper (up to 4000 words). All papers invited for the final programme will be published in the conference proceedings and will also be considered for a potential edited book that will be compiled by the organisers after the meeting. Formal meetings will be followed with a social programme and relevant site visits organised by the host institutions.

Abstract Submission Deadline: 7 December 2013

For more details, visit the conference website: http://www.socialstudies.org.uk/conferences/genderandlawconference.