This is the first workshop in the AHRC Regulating Time network. It will take place 15-17 April 2015. We hope to explore a number of themes arising from recent work, across disciplines, on law, regulation, time and temporality in order to scope emerging themes. Themes and questions include:

1. What can the analysis of time and temporalities add to critical and feminist research on law and regulation?
2. Conversely, in the context of a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship on time, what is specific or distinct about legal approaches to time? Where does law emerge? How is law shaped by, or productive of, temporalities?
3. What theories or perspectives on time provide useful vantage points, from which to analyse and account for law and time? For example, what challenges to current critical legal theories of time are posed by recent work in feminist theory, history, postcolonial theory, critical theories of value, science & technology studies, and theories of vital materialism, for example?
4. How can we use this network over the next two years to advance fruitful new research and collaboration on regulation and time?

We hope that the event will provide us with a vibrant, interdisciplinary moment to reflect on recent incarnations of law and time scholarship and also to think about where it might go next.

Confirmed speakers:

And for the project itself more generally, could you add the following as their website is also under construction:

Regulating Time: New Perspectives on Regulation, Law and Temporalities

This research network has been supported from its inception by SOCRIL. Regulating Time investigates how law and regulation are shaped by dominant understandings of time. Funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, the network runs from 2015 to 2017 and is co-ordinated by Dr Emily Grabham (law, University of Kent) and Dr Sian Beynon-Jones (sociology, University of York). Regulating Time features academic workshops, public engagement events, and an international conference (to take place in autumn 2016).

Questions relating to time are implicated in some of the most compelling contemporary political and social issues. Scholars from a range of disciplines have analysed, for example, the impact of new technologies on how people understand time; how our expectations of the ‘life course’ have changed with new family forms; and how clinical ideas of time influence decisions in the medical sphere. Similarly, reflecting on temporal concepts and their effects is very important when we think about law’s potential in tackling pressing political and social concerns. Yet time remains relatively under-explored in scholarship on regulation and law. In these disciplines, research on time has, to date, been concentrated in only a few key areas, such as labour law (e.g., legal struggles over the working day and ‘work-life balance’) and environmental law (the question of what regulation can do to help mitigate climate change beyond our own lifetime).

Featuring workshops, collaborative public engagement events, an international conference, and an edited book, this network will support a wider sustained conversation about how regulation and law shapes our experiences of time and how concepts of time influence law and regulation.

Guiding research questions for the network will include:

1. How do concepts of time shape regulation, and vice versa?
2. How do concepts of time affect experiences of regulation, and vice versa?
3. In what ways can interdisciplinary approaches to time improve our understanding of the relationship between time and regulation?
4. What can academic research on regulation and time learn from stakeholders? How might collaborations between academics and stakeholders in this field engage with, and shape, wider public perspectives on time and regulation?