A call for papers has been issued by Kent Law School’s £0.5m Bingo Project in advance of its final conference in June 2016.
Entitled ‘All bets are off: Reflecting critically on gambling regulation within and across borders’, the two-day conference on 23/24 June will be a forum for innovative, international and interdisciplinary discussion on gambling regulation. It will also showcase research into the regulation of diverse forms of gambling undertaken by the project team over the last three years.
Full details of the conference’s themes and sub-themes are available on the Bingo Project website. Abstracts for individual papers, or for collections of three papers for a themed panel, are invited by Monday 29 February 2016 and can be submitted online or emailed to bingoproject@kent.ac.uk
Project leader and Reader in Law Dr Kate Bedford said: ‘If you work on any aspect of gambling, or look at the overlaps and boundaries between gambling and play, commerce, speculation, consumption, investment, and so on, please consider submitting an abstract.’
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the project is using four case studies of bingo regulation from across the globe (England and Wales; Canada; Brazil; and online in the European Union), and is the first of its kind to provide a systematic account of how the sector is regulated.
Working with Dr Bedford is a research team at Kent comprising academics with backgrounds in law, politics, and sociology including: Dr Oscar Alvarez-Macotela, an expert in stock market regulation; Dr Donal Casey, a specialist in EU law and regulation; Maria Luiza Kurban Jobim, a scholar working on Brazilian consumer law; and Professor Toni Williams, a leading critical consumer finance law expert.
The team will launch their final report at a public event to be held during the conference in June. The conference, which will be held on Kent’s Canterbury campus, will also feature plenary lectures, short papers, roundtables, and the chance to play a bingo game.
Confirmed keynote speakers include: Professor Julia Hörnle, Professor of Internet Law at Queen Mary University, London; Magnho José, journalist and social media consultant, and a Brazilian authority on gambling regulation policy; Dr Fiona Nicoll, Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia; and gambling policy expert Professor Gerda Reith from the University of Glasgow.
Dr Bedford said: ‘We intend to contribute to ongoing debate in the social sciences and humanities about what can be learnt from gambling – and its edges and boundaries – in our broader studies of social, political, and economic life.’
Anyone interested in finding out more about the project’s critical work on gambling in general is welcome to attend. Registration is free and can be completed now on the Bingo Project website.
Image credit: Redundant Bingo Balls, CC BY 2.0, Greg Clarke