Kent legal academic Dr Emily Grabham has secured a grant of more than £30,000 for a two-year collaborative research project that will explore the interrelationship of time, law and regulation.
The grant has been awarded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Networking Scheme with research work due to begin in February 2015.
The money will fund a new network, called ‘Regulating Time: New Perspectives on Regulation, Law and Temporalities’, which will explore how regulation and law shapes the experience of time and how concepts of time influence law and regulation. Dr Grabham, Reader in Law at Kent Law School, is leading on the network with Dr Sian Beynon-Jones from the University of York. The project is an initiative of the School’s newest research group, Social Critiques of Law (SoCriL).
Dr Grabham said: ‘Interrelationships between time and regulation are central to a wide range of pressing social issues. Concepts of time are critical, for example, within labour regulation (through ‘work-life balance’ laws) and in the regulation of women’s access to abortion, as well as in areas as diverse as climate change and security.
‘We want to create a formal international network of scholars engaging with interdisciplinary research on regulation and time. Our aim is to establish “regulation and time” as a sustainable interdisciplinary field of research within the humanities in collaboration with existing networks and research clusters and to initiate and support dialogue between academic researchers, practitioners, and the wider public about the role of time in pressing social and political debates about regulation.’
Over two years, the network will feature workshops, collaborative events with Non-Governmental Organisations and health service providers, an international conference, and an edited book.
Dr Grabham and her research team will make use of print, broadcast and social media to share knowledge as the project develops: ‘Through collaborative events co-organised with the Terrence Higgins Trust and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, as well as publications and media appearances, we will map how academic research on regulation and time is relevant to current legal and policy challenges.’
The network team will be working with an experienced legislative drafter from the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, and engaging with the Cabinet Office’s Good Law project, to initiate debate about how time is written into legislation and to consider the implications this has for legal clarity.
Dr Grabham said: ‘Our intention is for the network to long outlive the funding, encouraging the next generation of researchers to continue engaging with questions of regulation and time in thoughtful and innovative ways.’
In her book, Doing Things with Time: Law, Matter, Temporalities, Dr Grabham explores how concepts of time influence our understanding of law in three key areas: work-life balance, the law relating to HIV and disability, and transgender rights.
Dr Grabham has published widely on law and time and on sociological theories of time, and won the Canadian Law & Society Association 2011 English Article Prize for her article ‘Doing Things with Time: Flexibility, Adaptability, and Elasticity in UK Equality Cases’. Dr Grabham also has research interests in interdisciplinary approaches to gender and labour; precarious work and gender; and feminist legal theory. For more details of her research and publications, please visit her staff profile page.