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Other Events
The ESRC Gender,
Sexuality and Law: Theory and Practice Workshops
A joint venture of Keele, Kent and Westminster Law Schools:
Legal Constructions of Unpaid Caregiving
Tuesday 28 June 2005 @ Kent Law School
This workshop is the fifth in a series of six workshops
on the theme of Gender, Sexuality and Law: Theory and
Practice, funded by the ESRC. The workshop aims to bring
together researchers working within the broad field of
law, gender and sexuality and with a particular interest
in issues relating to the treatment, depiction and positioning
of unpaid caregiving in law and legal discourse.
A core object of the workshop is to explore the legal
construction and positioning of unpaid caregiving, within
the UK and in a broader global context, to ascertain firstly,
the role and significance of unpaid caregiving in regulation
and policy-making; secondly, the distributive consequences
of particular legal constructions of unpaid caregiving;
and finally, the progressive possibilities posed by challenging
or disrupting current/prevailing understandings of unpaid
caregiving in law.
Research questions include:
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How is unpaid caregiving constructed and positioned
in different contexts in legal discourse (e.g., labour
law, family law, social security law, international
law and development)?
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(Relatedly), to what extent do legal conceptions
of unpaid caregiving converge/diverge across different
sub-disciplines of law? For example, how does the depiction
of unpaid caregiving in marital property law (broadly
construed) correspond with its positioning in legal
discourse around labour or social welfare? Is there
a detectable and coherent narrative of unpaid caregiving
in law or a set of subnarratives? How far are they in
tension/conflict with one another and to what effects?
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How and why are legal narratives of unpaid caregiving
changing? How do changes in this context correspond
to perceived or actual changes in the gendered allocation
of the labour or in (hetero)sexual constructions of
the family?
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To what extent is the legal depiction of unpaid caregiving
dependent upon the invocation of dichotomies - work/family;
public/private; male/female; emotion/reason - and what
are the implications of /possibilities posed by challenging
or dislodging these dichotomous forms from an equality-seeking
point of view?
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Can gender, sexuality and law scholarship help to
illuminate the conceptual and legal difficulties which
characterise understandings of unpaid caregiving in
a legal-political context?
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In what ways can a focus on unpaid caregiving inform
current understandings/analyses of gender, sexuality
and law issues, in particular in relation to the family?
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How are current legal and political strategies to
redress gender and other inequities affecting traditional
legal conceptions of unpaid caregiving and the work/family
dichotomy?
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What is the relationship (theoretical, functional,
ideological, legal) between unpaid caregiving and policies/discourses
of social welfare?
-
What is the role, actual and potential, of unpaid
caregiving in the discourse and politics of development?
-
How is unpaid caregiving depicted and positioned
in the context of the emerging policies of international
financial institutions and accompanying discourses?
Please direct queries to Joanne Conaghan (j.a.f.conaghan@kent.ac.uk)
or fill out the registration
form.
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Fathers’ Rights Activism
and Legal Reform
9 September 2005 @ Keele University
Venue: Wedgewood Room, Keele Management Centre
This workshop brings together participants from a number
of countries in the aim of providing a critical analysis
of the work of fathers’ rights activists and the
role which law has played in their campaigning. To what
extent has law been the focal point of their activities?
How have these groups deployed legal strategies? What
success (or otherwise) have they enjoyed in achieving
legal reform? What commonalities and points of difference
exist between fathers’ rights groups and other social
movements, such as the women’s movement? And what,
if anything, have these groups learnt from other social
movements?
More
information about this event is available on the Keele
University GSL research group website
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