An article by Kent Law School Reader in Law Professor Emily Grabham has been shortlisted for a prize by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA).
‘Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26-week qualifying period’, published in Volume 45 of the journal Economy and Society, follows the ‘legal lives’ of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights.
Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, the article focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable.
Professor Grabham’s article is one of three that has been shortlisted for the 2018 SLSA Article Prize.
Last year, Professor Grabham was awarded the Socio-Legal History and Theory Prize for her book ‘Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form and the Enactment of Law’ (University of Toronto Press, 2016). She was one of three academics from Kent Law School to be shortlisted for a prize in 2017 and one of two who were subsequently awarded a prize (Professor Helen Carr was the recipient of last year’s SLSA Article Prize).
This year’s SLSA prize winners will be announced at the organisation’s annual conference in Bristol in March.
Professor Grabham‘s research interests include labour law, law and time, labour and value, and feminist legal theory. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to legal analysis, drawing on methods and perspectives from feminist legal theory, social anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies.
Together with Dr Sian Beynon Jones from the University of York, Professor Grabham co-ordinates the scholarly network Regulating Time: New Perspectives on Regulation, Law and Temporalities. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the network investigates how law and regulation are shaped by dominant concepts of time.
Her three-year research project Balancing Precarious Work and Care, investigated how women in precarious work experience ‘work-life balance’. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under its Future Research Leaders scheme.
Professor Grabham has published in a wide range of journals including Australian Feminist Studies, Body & Society, Social & Legal Studies, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Canadian Journal of Law & Society.