Law and Humanities has blossomed from the margins of the Anglophone legal academia into a vast field encompassing diverse jurisdictions, disciplinary practices, linkages, and methods of enquiry, in a span of a few decades. From law and literature to law and humanities, cultural legal studies, and legal humanities, the field has increasingly added new media and emerging technologies to its earlier focus on literature. In addition, the field has expanded its repertoire of interdisciplinary methods for studying the law, most recently through law and film, law and music, law and the visual, and law and theatre and performance. During this time, we have witnessed the creation of thematically focused academic journals, book series, workshops, associations, and annual conferences dedicated to its sustenance and vibrancy. The past decade alone has seen a period of introspection with the publication of a dozen different handbooks staking out the contours and variety of approaches. At the same time, questions have emerged on the scope and general orientation of a deliberately capacious “field without a canon”.^[1] What are the new directions of law and humanities and where is it headed?

New Directions in Law and Humanities (Anthem Pres) is an invitation to emerging and established scholars to pause and reflect on the past directions taken to arrive where we are and the new directions open, to collectively think about its trajectories and avenues, the ramifications of its capacious undertaking, as well as its future lives. What does it mean to be a law and humanities scholar today? Where do you see (or hope to see) the field heading? What role this new or revamped law and humanities can play in legal education, or the world at large? These are some of the questions that we hope to engage with.

In addition to these introspective questions about the field, there are also questions of the field’s responsiveness and responsibility to the demands of our times, from the unfolding climate disaster to the development of artificial intelligence, from the external attacks to the humanities in higher education to their perceived irrelevance, from increasing conflict and wars to the spread of techno-feudalism and fascism. If the field we now call law and humanities began as a response to the entrenchment of economic and rationalist approaches to law within legal education, research, and practice, then what kind of response or responses might be required of us today and moving forward? How is the field responding and imagine itself capable of responding? And what are our responsibilities to reorient the field in relation to the challenges that the world faces? 

Lastly, the volume also enquires about how to understand law in the new instantiations of law and humanities. Given the plurality of jurisdictions, traditions, forms and modes of law that are now studied in the field, is it at all useful to devise a shared sense of “law” that could anchor the interdisciplinary encounter between law and humanities? If no such shared notion of law can be provided, is there a distinctive jurisprudence that emerges from the interdisciplinary encounter that may be distinguished not just from law and economics or doctrinal approaches to law, but less obviously from critical legal studies, socio-legal studies, law and political economy, or others? What might the encounter with the new directions in the humanities bring to the known methods of law? 

We welcome contributions from both emerging and established scholars, who identify themselves as law and humanities scholars or see their work as contributing to the field broadly understood. We are particularly interested in reflective essays and contributions that address these questions through a personal lens, including first-person narratives, visual imagery, soundscapes, and innovative pedagogies. For example, how does your work or practice stimulate or invite new directions in the field?  What has been your experience working within the field, or with the tools of, law and humanities? What are the challenges you have encountered (institutional, disciplinary, methodological …) and how do you propose we might overcome them towards the future? The Handbook is aimed for students and researchers who want to deepen their understanding of the field and to learn about the new directions the field affords. We hope to open conversations between academic scholars and students by curating accessible and engaging contributions. We invite abstracts of 300 words to be submitted by the 7^th of December to Julen Etxabe (etxabe@allard.ubc.ca), Shane Chalmers (chalmers@hku.hk) and Sabarish Suresh (ss21346@nyu.edu). 

Potential new directions include: 

• The Performative turn; theatre/theatricality; embodiment; dance; movement.
• The turn to affect; senses and the sensorial;
• Law and Sound: the audible/ auditive or sonic jurisprudence;
• Law and the visual; image and imagery; law & the imaginary; images of law;
• Law and film; documentaries; 
• New methodologies of teaching; pedagogies for learning and teaching
• New Technologies for thinking law and humanities; 
• Law and the (in)human; posthuman literatures
• Alternative judgments projects; Prefigurative legalities;
• Speculative fiction; comics; graphic novels
• Colonial/ Postcolonial/ Decolonial and Indigenous Imaginaries;
• The Spatial Turn: Law and Space 
• New Geographies of Law and Humanities? (ie, “in Asia”, “in Africa”, “in Latin America” – decentring from Europe/North America?)  
• Law and Time; New temporalities; Alternative histories/ futures/ Utopias/distopias

^[1] Sara Ramshaw, ‘Law and Humanities: A Field Without a Canon’ 19 (1) Law, Culture and the Humanities (2019); Hyo Yoon Kang, ‘Is There (Should There Be) a Law and Humanities Canon’ 19 (1) Law, Culture and the Humanities (2019).