Call for Papers: Exploring Legal Borderlands and Critical Perspectives on Security and Migration
Deadline for submission of extracts: 16 January 2017
A Call for papers is now open for two sessions that members of the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies are convening at this year's SLSA annual conference: Exploring Legal Borderlands and Critical Perspectives on Security and Migration. We would encourage anyone who is interested to consider submitting an abstract. You may also wish to put forward an idea for a panel (each of which will consist of three speakers).
If so, or if you have any other queries, please get in touch with owain.johnstone@chch.ox.ac.uk (for Exploring Legal Borderlands) or agnieszka.kubal@csls.ox.ac.uk (for Critical Perspectives on Security and Migration).
Exploring Legal Borderlands invites papers that explore the uncertainties and interactivity of legal borderlands. Legal borderlands are defined as including, but not limited to: the division between the formal and informal, law and non-law, and jurisdictional boundaries. Recognising that legal borders are often not clearly defined or static, we invite papers that examine social practices falling within grey areas, as well as papers that trace the development of norms and concepts within or across legal borderlands, or which trace the movement of the borders themselves through social agency. In this panel we wish to showcase empirical and interdisciplinary methods of socio-legal research. We welcome applications from scholars at all stages of their academic careers - including graduate students - and from diverse backgrounds - including scholars whose research focuses on foreign socio-legal issues.
Critical Perspectives on Security and Migration invites papers that critically challenge the migration and security nexus in search of fresh and intellectually stimulating approaches that engage with security, insecurity, migration and everyday life from historical and contemporary perspectives. Whilst the securitization of migration is not new, and migration has been framed as a security and risk issue since long before 9/11 or even the Cold War, the nexus of security and migration has - in the face of arguably unprecedented refugee and migration crisis in Europe - experienced something of a global revival. Whilst the empirical evidence points to a renewed relevance of a security framework, the conveners of this panel share serious reservations about its analytical utility. We encourage papers on the diverse, often nuanced forms of securitisation that exist alongside the more familiar securities embedded in public law, social welfare, and human rights in the way that they illuminate transactional, economic and livelihood (in)securities.