A new short-form book series from Glasshouse
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
NEW TRAJECTORIES IN LAW
Edited by Adam Gearey (Birkbeck) and Colin Perrin (Routledge)
This series of short-form books intends to define a new direction in legal studies. Challenging the assumption that legal education is just about training students for commercial careers, the series aims to articulate a more progressive idea of law. Borrowing from the academic publishing tradition of a key concepts or ideas series, its aim is to map a new legal terrain: facilitating and encouraging the use of law to protect and enhance communities, and so to provide the conceptual tools for those who are interested, or participating, in social struggles for equality and social justice. Its aim, then, is to push the study of law and the delineation of legal concepts in a direction that is able to contest the self-evidently divisive and destructive consequences of global capitalism.
The series maintains that the key contemporary issues are: a critique of the market and its merciless reproduction of inequality – local and global; the exploitation of the environment; the rising tide of market nationalism; corporate power and its supporting technological and ideological structures; the future of work; and the increasing governance of other areas of life. As such, it aims to renew and to reinvigorate the ideas that run through feminist, post/de-colonial and poststructuralist thinking; queer theory, critical race and critical disability approaches; as well as ecological, neo-Marxist, and other critical perspectives on global political economy.
Books in the series will not respect the narrow conventional divisions of the syllabus, but will pursue cross cutting, and broad, legal themes, intended to appeal to those working in a variety of areas. The series will contain two interlocking strands. First, titles that take up less conventional, but increasingly pressing, themes of legal interest and importance – such as nonhumans, decolonisation, big data, materialism, the body, ecology, money etc. Second, titles on more orthodox legal issues – such as rights, sovereignty, pluralism, refugees, judgement, property, etc. – but that approach these in ways that reframe and reconfigure their contemporary significance.
The books will be 25,000-45,000 words in length, with each focusing on a single idea or concept. Drawing on the insights of other disciplines where appropriate, books in the series will include: a contextualised account of its meanings, a consideration of its situation in relation to other fields, a discussion of the contribution of relevant authors and thinkers, and an argument for its contemporary importance. The aim is that the books will be student-friendly, but without being simplistic. They will each have a minimum number of footnotes, as well as recommendations for further reading. If ideas are tools, each book offers a kind of user’s guide – the best way to make sense of an idea is to try and use it!
Above all, we want books in the series to be lively, thought-provoking and accessible, with each elaborating its particular theme as a resource for a potentially creative and critical engagement with more orthodox legal perspectives.
We invite proposals for books on a wide range of potentially relevant topics. To discuss a possible contribution to the series, please contact the series editors:
Adam Gearey: a.gearey@bbk.ac.uk
Colin Perrin: colin.perrin@tandf.co.uk