This is a call for written papers for a collection that is to be edited by Thomas Giddens and Luca Siliquini-Cinelli. Once abstracts are confirmed the collection will be proposed to a leading publisher, initially Routledge.
Over the past few decades, legal scholars have consistently debated the challenges facing Western and Western-based models of legal education. Among the central and pervasive themes that have come to define this intense debate, of peculiar interest are those concerning how legal education, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, can become more ‘human’. A recurring claim in this literature is that under the dictates of the capitalist and bureaucratic logics of efficiency and profitability, law schools have become mere sites of knowledge-production where the human being is turned into a commodity. It is further maintained that it is this self-referential, dehumanising approach to teaching and learning that informs various academic malpractices and increasingly affects student experience in all its declensions. Hence the need for more student-focused elaborations of higher education’s functions in, and impact on, society as well as for a humanising rethinking of the educational environment broadly understood.
This edited collection of essays approaches this delicate subject from a strictly biopolitical perspective of inquiry, offering new and much-needed reflections which reconsider established assumptions while also paving the way to further analysis on it. Understanding biopolitics as that branch of political-philosophical thought which places life and its social expressions at the centre of intellectual considerations concerning how identities are construed, shaped, constrained, voided, and freed, it aims to show why and how the scholarly discourse on the place of the human in legal education is inherently biopolitical.
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
- The artificiality of legal education
- The spread of the Western model of legal education in non-Western countries
- Capitalist/bureaucratic logic and its impact on staff and student well-being
- Law and technology
- Subjectivities in the classroom
- The apparatus of higher education
- Gender and race inclusion and exclusion
- Decolonisation of the teaching curricula
- Global South
- Post-humanist knowledge
- The role of emotions
- Outside the classroom: biopolitics in the legal profession
Submissions and queries: t.giddens@dundee.ac.uk or l.siliquini-cinelli@dundee.ac.uk
Deadline for abstracts (250 words, 3 keywords): 7 February 2020
Indicative final chapter length: 8,000-9,000 words (notes/references included)
Other Important Dates:
28 February 2020 Deadline for feedback to authors on abstract submission
7 April 2020 Submission of book proposal to leading publisher (initially Routledge)
31 October 2020 Submission of chapters
30 November 2020 Feedback to the authors
15 January 2021 New submission of chapters
28 February 2021 Submission of chapters after internal assessment
30 March 2021 Deadline for return of chapters by reviewer(s)
15 May 2021 Deadline for authors’ comments on reviewers’
31 July 2021 Submission to the publisher
Please notify me as I would like very much to participate on the project.