In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores how wine functions not only as France’s national emblem, but also as a myth that helps grasp the ambiguity within French capitalist society. Wine, he argues, is a defining part of France’s experience because it structures the “environment”, serving as the core piece in almost all ceremonies…
The Open University Law School PhD studentships are based on full-time study for three years at the Milton Keynes campus. Students are normally expected to live within commuting distance of Milton Keynes. Studentships cover tuition fees, a generous research training support grant and a stipend (circa £15,285 per annum) for 36 months. The Law School…
Sat 01–Sun, 30. Aug 2020 Subscribe Here where are you today is a new work by Manus Recording Project Collective, continuing the collective’s practice of documenting, sharing and circulating audio recordings from inside Australia’s on- and off-shore detention centres for refugees and asylum seekers. where are you today will comprise a new set of ten-minute…
Workshop for Young Researchers 28./29. January 2021 hosted by Walter Benjamin Archive, Berlin Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin and the International Walter Benjamin Society The contemporary political and legal landscape presents us with an array of situations that speak directly to Benjamin’s writings on law. Over the last year, various forms of the…
We are a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice journal editors. We reject the narrow values of efficiency, transparency and compliance that inform current developments and policies in open access and platform publishing. Together, we seek further collaboration in the development of alternative publishing processes, practices and infrastructures imbued with the values of social and environmental…
Key Concept In the glossary to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), you won’t find raciality under the letter ‘R’. Instead reference to the term is found under ‘A’; analytics of raciality. Before proceeding to explore this term it is important from the offset that we not forget analytics is…
The Direito e Práxis Journal, associated to the Post-Graduate Program in Law at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), invites interested scholars to submit proposals for articles to be published as part of the June 2021 dossier “Critical Legal Studies: debating the anti-liberal tradition of critical legal studies”, organized by the invited editors…
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking. There has been no shortage of debates and controversies within Marxist political…
“We need Covid Trials. In an international court,” is Arundhati Roy’s “post-lockdown reverie”. She wants the Indian government to be held accountable for its treatment of migrant workers as refuse and the ongoing assault on the civil rights of dissenters in the wake of Covid-19. Roy’s wishful faith in an international justice delivery mechanism to…
The silent 20th century consensus was that philosophy was Western, which then was split into ‘continental’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’. In recent decades we have seen the assertive presence of non-White philosophers including Achilles Mbembe, Anthony Appiah, Divya Dwivedi, and Shaj Mohan. Shaj Mohan is the philosopher who has been “forsaken”[i] by philosophical traditions as his work…
On behalf of the Editorial Committee of Law & Critique, Special Issue Editors Dr Ben Golder (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Dr Sara Ramshaw (University of Victoria, Canada) invite expressions of interest from scholars interested in submitting a proposal for an upcoming special issue of the journal honouring and reflecting upon the work…
On June 10, author JK Rowling published an article on her website, ‘JK Rowling Writes About her Reasons for Speaking Out about Sex and Gender Issues’ which offered a rationale for her public interventions opposing legislation in the UK designed to legally recognise transgender rights and identities. While the article began by minimising Rowling’s interventions,…
Key Concept Human communication is multi-layered, as our language relies on complicated systems of signification; for example uttering a given statement using specific terminology might indicate the ideological tendencies of the speaker. And like any other communicative system, law is also multi-layered. This multi-layered nature is born at the moment of drafting or passing a…
COUNTERSIGN is a podcast hosted by Stewart Motha, Professor of Law at Birkbeck. Stewart and guests discuss books, films, and other materials from across disciplines which open new perspectives on law, difference, and plural existence. Subjects covered include the post-human, history, empire, migration, belonging, ecology, and technology. These conversations draw on philosophical and political theories so they…
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking. The concept of security has significant implications for a Marxist theory…
We get the metaphors we deserve. Metaphors are indispensable tools for making sense of reality, including the ongoing reality of systemic colonial relations—or to obfuscate it (to deflect the need to enact substantive decolonisation agendas, for example). In times of crisis they perform a crucial role in translating and interpreting a rapidly changing world. Viral…
I read for a PhD under Peter’s inimitable supervision at Birkbeck from 2005 until late 2008, at which point I told him that I had to return to Australia to finish the dissertation because the birth of my first child, Phoebe, was imminent. It sounds like I took drastic evasive action to avoid the difficult…
The Guardian’s 29 May article (‘Soas to slash budgets and staff as debt crisis worsens in a pandemic’) has brought attention to a worrying development, which risks seeing losses of livelihoods and expertise at a unique and world-renowned institution. The danger is that framing SOAS’s financial difficulties in isolation obscures the fact that this is…
The unravelling developments in the United States of America (USA) amid the death of George Floyd are unsettling. The terminology ‘public order’ is used by popular political narrative to host and then employ a variety of techniques to deflect from the justified concerns surrounding social and racial justice. Frantz Fanon said: “When we revolt it’s…
I write this at great distance from the uprisings now taking place across the US sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. I am thousands of miles distant and witness police repression, and the anger of the protestors, via old and social media. I am a white Oxford professor, whose efforts at understanding events…