Sara Lando, creative commons licence here

… time arises not from the ethnographic ground on which it is played out as a relative question but from the temporal assumptions embedded in specific state practices – bureaucratic administration, taxation and the regulation of economic life, and through a variety of executive, legislative and judicial powers.  (Carol Greenhouse A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures 1996, 73)

Carol Greenhouse provocatively argued in A Moment’s Notice that we should trace the construction of time through law and social ordering. Intertwined with rhythms, social disciplines, instruments, and texts, law and legal technicalities assist in the fabrication of time. Not only is the common law fundamentally oriented around the temporal conundrum of precedent, but time limits, commencement dates, eligibility periods, and sunset clauses structure the technical operation and social experience of law.

Across the social sciences and humanities, there is growing interest in how time is co-produced with law and regulation. Ranging from analyses of pre-emption in security studies (de Goede and Amoore, 2008) to queer temporalities (Freeman, 2010), critiques of temporality in post-colonial studies (Scott, 2014), to the conceptual promise of utopias (Cooper, 2014) and chronotopes (Valverde, 2015), scholars are increasingly motivated to develop new tools for investigating time and regulation.

This edited collection seeks to explore and engage with emerging themes in the field. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions on any of the following:

• time and legal form; material cultures of time and legality; archiving; documents
• science, technology and time; temporalities in actor-network theory; assemblages
• global times; the Anthropocene; time zones; Greenwich Mean Time
• postcolonial legal temporalities; colonial uses and constructions of time; violence
• feminist and queer engagements: gendered time/s, the heteronormative life course, reproduction, temporal ‘drag’
• political economies of time: property, labour, value, work, Fordism and post-Fordism, revolution, resistance, invention
• legal histories and philosophies of law; equitable engagements with time; kairos
• temporalities and spatialities: space, spatiality, scale, jurisdiction, chronotopes
• regulatory modes: transition, risk, uncertainty, possibility, speculation
• social ordering: the racialised politics of disinvesting in hope (Muñoz, 2009), chrono-normativity, temporal mechanisms.

Please send:

– An abstract of 500 words maximum for a 6,000-7,000 word paper, and
– A brief biography (max 250 words)

to Emily Grabham (e.grabham@kent.ac.uk) with ‘Law and Time edited collection’ in the subject line by no later than Wednesday 30 September 2015. Decisions will be communicated to contributors by Friday 27 November 2015, with completed papers due in July 2016.

Enquiries to Emily Grabham or Siân Beynon-Jones (sian.beynon-jones@york.ac.uk).

This edited collection is part of the activities and publications of the Regulating Time network, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Social Critiques of Law research cluster at Kent Law School and the Science and Technology Studies Unit at the University of York. The network is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For further information, visit our website, join our JISC email list or follow us on twitter (@RegulatingTime).