WUNRN
Conference organizers indicate that there will be limited
grant possibilities for early career researchers from low and lower-middle
income economies (as classified by the World Bank).
Where
The conference will be held in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) at Radboud University
Nijmegen
Theme
Family law organizes issues that are central to people’s
domestic lives, such as marriage, child care, divorce and inheritance.
The study of family law can therefore provide insights on
constructions and norms about parenthood, sexual relations, the transfer of
wealth and the intertwining of the public and the private. European and US
academic writing on Islamic family law seems to be divided between a normative
approach, a legal approach and an empirical social science approach.
Significant differences in questions, methodology and sources make that these
approaches rarely meet. Moreover, the field is also divided by geographical
borders. Academic work on Islamic family law in the “West” and on Islamic
family law in the Muslim world remains largely separated, as is the case with
work by scholars from Muslim-majority countries and studies by scholars from
Europe and the US. This conference will bring together these fields of study to
produce new insights and promote an interdisciplinary and transnational
approach.
In
all three approaches, there is a strong focus on the issues, rights and
position of Muslim women. Muslim women are
sometimes depicted as the victims of patriarchal Islamic family laws that grant
them little claim to legal rights. While Muslim women are at the centre of
academic attention, Muslim men are seldom studied in relation to family law.
This conference aims to go beyond a limited women’s rights perspective and
develop a critical gender perspective, including men and masculinities as well
as women and femininities. Discussing mixed families and transnational
relationships will provide new insights on intersections of gender with class
and ethnicity and legal pluralism.
Subjects
Questions we want to raise in this conference are: what
could an interdisciplinary approach of Islamic family law look like? How can we
integrate the different approaches to the study of Islamic family law, both in
Europe and the US as well as in Muslim-majority countries? How can scholars of
Islamic family law in the West and the Muslim World learn from each other? What
do recent events in the Arab spring mean for family law, both in the Middle
East and in Europe? What can an intersectional approach of gender and other
inequalities contribute to the study of Islamic family law? What is the role of
Islamic family law outside of courts and legal conflicts, in the everyday life
of people in Muslim-majority-countries and in the West? How do debates on
Islamic family law in the West and in Muslim-Majority countries influence each
other and legal practice? How does Islamic family law interact with other State
legal systems in the cases of migrant and mixed families?
Organizing comittee
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We invite abstracts for papers or posters.
Contributions
We especially welcome contributions on: