Exploring Law and Time through Lego

The AHRC-funded Regulating Time research network's final international conference will be held this September 8th-10th at Kent Law School. Co-ordinated by Emily Grabham (Kent Law School) and Sian Beynon-Jones (Sociology, York), it represents the culmination of a series of workshops and events which have explored the role of concepts of time in law and regulation. 

A key feature of the final conference is the use of arts-based engagements to generate cross-disciplinary dialogue. An innovative plenary session on 'Visualising Law and Time,' by Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris, will make use of Lego to engage conference participants in reflection on the complex relationships between temporalities and regulation. For full details of the conference, and how to register, see the Regulating Time website.

Changing Conversations about Time and Abortion?

As part of the AHRC funded Regulating Time research network, Sian Beynon-Jones recently organised a workshop, hosted by bpas (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), which aimed to bring academics, health service providers, patient charities, pro-choice activists and health practitioners together to share knowledge and discuss regulatory issues involving time and abortion.

An upper time limit of 24 weeks’ gestation regulates the provision of most abortions in Scotland, England and Wales. Following repeated attempts to lower this limit, public discussion of abortion has become framed in terms of competing claims about the significance of a pregnancy's duration in weeks of gestation.

The workshop explored the possibility of generating alternative conversations about time and abortion. It featured presentations from academics engaged in sociological, historical and legal research which illustrates the hidden, complex, 'times’ of abortion in practice. Representatives of service providers, pro-choice advocacy organisations and patient charities offered their perspectives on the ways in which time and abortion are regulated and debated, as well as their expertise in  supporting women’s access to later gestation procedures. A summary of the key points which emerged from the workshop discussion is now available at the Regulating Time blog.

Call for papers: Regulating Time Conference

 Sara Lando

The AHRC Regulating Time network - a collaboration between the Department (Sian Beynon-Jones) and Kent Law School  (Emily Grabham) - is holding an international conference The New Legal Temporalities: Discipline and Resistance across Domains of Time 8-10 September 2016, University of Kent.

Keynote: Carol Greenhouse (Anthropology, Princeton)

Plenary speakers:

• Michelle Bastian (Philosophy, Edinburgh)
• Sarah Keenan (Law, Birkbeck)
• Dipika Jain (Law, Jindal Global Law School)
• Justin Richland (Anthropology, Chicago)

Writer in residence: Annabel Lyon (prize-winning author of historical novels The Sweet Girl and The Golden Mean)

Law and governance are intimately entangled with time. This international conference will explore time’s fraught relationship with law, governance and ordering: the use of time in projects of discipline, the significance of time to resistance, the creation of new temporal horizons and experiences through technological innovation, as well as other themes.

Deadline for streams and panels: 15 February 2016

Deadline for individual abstracts: 29 February 2016

For full details, please see the network blog

Successful Time and Regulation Workshop

The Time and Regulation workshop organised as part of the AHRC 'Regulating Time' research network was well attended on wednesday 20th January. This event was run by Emily Grabham from Kent Law School and Sian Beynon-Jones, Sociology Department at York and was used to explore the temporal dimensions of law and regulation.

For a summary of the event visit: Blog post for Time, Regulation and Technology

For further details about the network:
Follow on twitter: @regulatingtime
Joint the JISC email list
Visit the blog,

Regulating Time Workshop

On Wednesday 20th January, the Department will host a workshop which aims to unpack the roles of time in the regulation of technoscience. 

Laura Billings. Licence here

Key questions to be explored include: 

·    In what ways do the temporalities of technoscience and regulation converge and diverge?

·    What are the implications of these processes for lived experiences of law and regulation?

·    What methodological challenges are involved in exploring the temporalities of regulation and technoscience?

Invited speakers:

Kevin Birth (anthropology, Queens College, CUNY, US)

Nik Brown (sociology, York)

John Harrington (law, Cardiff)

Iwan Morus (history and welsh history, Aberystwyth)

Sameena Mulla (social and cultural studies, Marquette University, US),

Gethin Rees (sociology, Newcastle).

The event is one in a series organised as  part of the AHRC 'Regulating Time' research network  (co-ordinated by Emily Grabham, Kent Law School and Sian Beynon-Jones, Sociology, University of York), which explores the temporal dimensions of law and regulation. 

For further details about the network please see the blog, follow the network on twitter (@regulatingtime) or join the JISC email list.

Catriona Macleod, Sexuality and Reproduction

We were very fortunate to have a visit from Professor Catriona Macleod last week - a distinguished South African academic, who is simultaneously a SARChI Chair, head of a vibrant programme of Critical Studies in Sexuality and Reproduction, Professor in Psychology, and editor-in-chief of the International Journal, Feminism & Psychology.  Professor Macleod visited the Department of Sociology at York as part of a British Academy International Partnership and Mobility award, held jointly with Dr Merran Toerien and Dr Sian Beynon-Jones (both lecturers in Sociology at York).  Her visit included running a workshop on Research as a Social Activity, delivering a seminar entitled 'Adolescent Pregnancy': Feminism and Reproductive Justice, and taking part in a spirited discussion group about the promises and pitfalls of combining various forms of discursive psychology with conversation analysis.   

We are delighted to have had this opportunity both to learn from Catriona's extensive research experience and to be inspired by the way she goes about being an academic - combining intellectual rigour, careful empirical work, a critical voice and a host of strategies for getting that voice into the world beyond academia.  And despite her very busy schedule, she remains an enormous amount of fun!  

For a great commentary on the workshop from one of our recent graduates, see:

http://snippetsofasmilingsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/

For more on Catriona's work, see: https://www.ru.ac.za/psychology/people/academic/professorcatrionamacleod/

For more on the Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction programme, see:

https://www.ru.ac.za/criticalstudies/

Catriona is also helping to organise the forthcoming International Society of Critical Health Psychology Conference, at which Dr Clare Jackson and Dr Merran Toerien (from Sociology at York) will be speaking.  See: http://ischp2015.co.za/  

Watch this space for more on that!

Grant Success - Brian Loader and Sian Beynon-Jones

Congratulations to Sian Beynon-Jones who is CoIlaborator on a newly awarded AHRC network 'Regulating time: New perspectives on law, regulation and temporalities', starting in February.  

The project is led by Emily Grabham at Kent Law School.

  

Congratulations are also offered to Brian Loader who has been awarded a British Academy small research grant to run the following symposium, 'Streets to Screens: Mediating Conflict Through Digital Networks' on 7th November.

York is active with events and reports

The Department of Sociology has been featured in this month's edition of the British Sociology Association Network magazine highlighting all the events and activities that have taken place in the past few months.

Every event and seminar is posted on the Sociology blog at http://uoysociology.blogspot.co.uk/  Do keep up with us all by bookmarking this link

• Research students organised an annual sociology postgraduate researcher conference, entitled Access and Opportunity, which focused on multi-disciplinary research and international collaboration. 
• The department and the Centre for Urban Research (Curb) hosted a one-day symposium entitled 'Marxism with soul: Marxist humanism after Marshall Berman'. The event was organised by Dr Gareth Millington 
• The European Sociological Association's PhD summer school 'A sociological imagin-ation for the 21st century' is taking place at York from 27 to 29 July. It is directed by the Head of Department, Professor Ellen Annandale.
• Dr Rowland Atkinson has published the edited collection Shades of Deviance: A Primer on Crime, Deviance and Social Harm, with accounts of war, murder, paedophilia, human experimentation, stalking, sexting and other issues.
• Dr Nathan Manning, with Dr Anna Barker, University of Bradford, and Dr Ala Sirriyeh, Keele University, has published a report based on research on Bradford's City Park.
• Dr Merran Toerien facilitated a week-long workshop 'Conversation analysis: a hands-on workshop' at Rhodes University, South Africa, funded by a British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Award.
• Dr Sian Beynon-jones presented her research on temporalities and abortion at the BSA Yorkshire Medical Sociology group inaugural meeting in Sheffield