About
The association aims to foster a common ground in cultural understandings of law. It nurtures humanities-inflected legal scholarship, seeking innovative forms of legal knowledge and analysis. ‘Humanities’ and ‘cultural studies’ are broadly understood as involving trans-disciplinary engagements with ‘culture’ (deliberately undefined), incorporating insights from fields such as film, theatre, art, and media studies, philosophy, theology, literary studies, feminist studies, queer and gender studies, rhetoric, critical theory, race studies, history, and postcolonial studies, amongst many others.
The Association encourages an open and non-instrumental approach to law and legal knowledge. It aims to move beyond sedimented doctrinal assumptions about the nature of law and society, to inspire enriched critical approaches, and new creative or heterodox practices and spaces of encounter. Drawing from diverse traditions, genealogies, legacies, and histories, it aims to connect and generate new research agendas and methodologies and support intellectual experimentation. It will nurture reflexive critiques of existing methods and knowledge, and be a space for the exploration of alternative legalities, prefigurative politics, utopian projects, speculative horizons, possibilities for thinking otherwise, and for pure enjoyment.
The Association will be a home for scholars, research students, and practitioners working across law, humanities, and cultural studies areas. It also aims to including those who do not feel they have a place for their work within orthodox disciplinary scholarship or traditional law schools. It will provide a space to connect diverse individual scholars, research clusters, centres, and schools. Events will provide meeting places for collegiality and scholarly community. The Association will produce a newsletter with the latest publications, reviews, and other community matters, and will publicise and support relevant work.
Seeking to generate opportunities for creative and critical encounters, the Association will be a nurturing space, developing fresh disciplinary training and supporting scholarly development across all career stages. It will develop accounts of how humanities-inflected scholarship is conducted for a broad audience, inspiring new forms of scholarship, building and connecting research communities, and providing institutional legibility. The Association will facilitate a range of activities, including: major thematic and general conferences; smaller specialist workshops; collaborative encounters and research, bringing different kinds of expertise and interests together; reading and discussion groups; work-in-progress sessions; amongst other activities.
The Association is now open for individuals to join as inaugural members, ahead of the nomination and election, by members, of a Governance Committee.Â
About the Interim Committee
The Legal Humanities Association has been developed by an interim committee of volunteers, drawn from the law and humanities academic community. This committee was created through the distribution of an open call, with all respondents to that call making up the committee’s membership. The interim committee’s sole task is to establish the Association and then dissolve itself. This group has thus drafted and approved the constitution, established the name of the association, and is overseeing the practical implementation of the association’s manifestation (primarily consisting of administering inaugural membership and the election by that membership of the inaugural Governance Committee). The interim committee will dissolve itself as soon as the first Governance Committee is in place.Â
Interim Committee Members
- Nour Benghellab (European University Institute)
- Henrique Carvalho (University of Warwick)
- Stephen Connelly (University of Warwick)
- Maria Drakopoulou (University of Kent)
- Katherine Ebury (University of Sheffield)
- Julen Etxabe (British Columbia University)
- James C Fisher (Australia National University)
- Julia Gaunce (University of Tromsø)
- Thomas Giddens (University of Dundee)
- Robert Herian (University of Exeter)
- Gavin Keeney (ZRC SAZU)
- Bárbara Lobo (Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa)
- Angus McDonald (Staffordshire University)
- Shaun McVeigh (Melbourne and Kent)
- Susy Menis (Birkbeck College, University of London)
- Fred Motson (Open University)
- Amanda Muniz Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Juiz Fora)
- Connal Parsley (University of Kent)
- Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster)
- Mitch Travis (University of Leeds)
- Andrew Ventimiglia (Illinois State University)
- Illan Wall (University of Galway)
- Ekaterina Yahyaoui (University of Galway)
- Ceylan Yildiz (University of Sussex)
- Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent)
A Note on Process
Once an initial membership has been established, an inaugural general meeting will take place (online) at which members will nominate and elect the LHA’s Governance Committee. All members will be eligible to put themselves forward to be elected members of the Governance Committee, with no preference given to members of the interim committee. This will include the various officer roles (e.g. Chair of the Association, Secretary, etc). See the LHA Constitution for more details.