Call for Papers
Workshop
Women of Justice
Images of Female Legal Professionals in Popular Culture:
A Transnational Comparison
11−12 August 2022 Münster, Germany
The Arab-German
Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) in cooperation with the University of Münster is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the
international and interdisciplinary workshop
‘Images of Female Legal Professionals in Popular Culture:
A Transnational Comparison’ at
the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Münster, 11−12 August 2022.
Popular culture,
be it literature, cinema, or television, has a long history of imagining
stories around the judicial system,
legal processes, and everyday practices of law. As a result, legal professionals frequently emerge as main characters or important protagonists in different genres
of cultural production. For a long time, however, these characters,
whether lawyers, judges, or law enforcement officers, were overwhelmingly male. Notwithstanding a few notable
exceptions, male legal
professionals dominated almost all cultural productions. This changed near the
end of the 20th century, when a
shift became apparent in the United States, the pioneer of law-related screen productions. Scholarship has argued that
increasing representation in both
plot and casting have corelated with
rising numbers of female legal professionals in real life. Yet, images of women in law-related popular culture
have also been described as ‘appalling’ (Shapiro 1994), ‘disappointing’ (Caplow 1999), or ‘cautionary tales’ (Papke 2003).
Such negative
appraisals criticize stereotypical depictions which frequently come in one of
two guises: Either the women lawyers
experience an allegedly insurmountable conflict between their professional and personal lives
(Grosshans 2006, Banks 2011); or – in marked contrast to their male counterparts – they lack opportunities to emerge as heroes (Corcos
2003). These depictions, in turn, heavily influence how the public imagines, not only
the female pop cultural character, but also women in the real-life
legal profession.
Only recently
have legal and media studies
scholars identified more nuanced portrayals of female legal professionals (see e.g. Foster
et. al. 2009, Banks 2012).
Yet, these studies
again focus almost
exclusively on US-American and, to a lesser degree,
British productions. What is still missing from the analysis
is how female legal professionals are viewed and portrayed in popular culture
outside
the dominant
sites of media production. Has the cultural export of US-American legal drama
or British crime fiction influenced
how law and gender are imagined in other parts of the world? How do the actual participation and
representation of women in the legal profession affect their depictions in different genres of popular
culture? Has popular
culture, both domestic
and imported, altered the way
society thinks about female lawyers, judges, or law enforcement officers? Our international and
interdisciplinary workshop aims to address these questions and, to foster a truly transnational
comparison, is particularly interested in contributions that look at popular
culture in countries
and regions not commonly recognized as creators of globally consumed
media productions.
Topics, themes, and issues to be explored
include, but are not confined to the following:
·
Stereotypical versus realistic
images of female legal professionals in popular culture
·
Audiences/readership and their changing
perceptions of women in the legal profession
·
Women’s access to the legal profession and their representation in real life versus popular
culture
·
Changing portrayals of women in the legal profession and cross-cultural influences
·
Plots, characters, and sociopolitical
critique through female lead
characters
The workshop is organized by AGYA members Lena-Maria Möller (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law) and Shahd Alshammari
(Gulf University for Science &
Technology). Travel costs and accommodation for confirmed speakers
will be covered
by AGYA. Funding
is still subject to approval.
Those interested
in presenting papers are invited to send a tentative title, an abstract of
around 300−500 words, and a
short biography to
Lena-Maria Möller (moeller@mpipriv.de) by 15 February
2022.
Notifications of acceptance will be announced
by 1 April 2022 and draft papers will be due by 1
July 2022. The workshop language will be English. The organizers aim to publish
the papers either as an edited volume or as a special issue of an academic journal.
While we are aiming at holding
the workshop in person, we are happy to accommodate presentations by authors who will not be able to travel because
of restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
About AGYA
The Arab-German
Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) is based at the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and
Humanities (BBAW) and at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT) in Egypt. It was established in
2013 as the first bilateral young academy worldwide. AGYA promotes research
cooperation among outstanding early-career researchers (3−10 years after PhD) from all disciplines who are affiliated with a research
institution in Germany or in any Arab country. The academy supports the
innovative projects of its members in
various fields of research, science policy, and education. AGYA is funded by
the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and various
Arab cooperation partners.
For more information about AGYA please visit www.agya.info
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