Call For Chapters: Communication and Legal Practice

 From Susan Heinzelman, University of Texas, Austin:

Call for Chapters: Communication and Legal Practice

Editors:

Dr Tatiana Grieshofer, Reader in Language and Law, Birmingham City University, tatiana.grieshofer@bcu.ac.uk

Dr Kate Haworth, Senior Lecturer, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University, k.haworth@aston.ac.uk

 

We are seeking submissions for an edited collection on Communication and Legal Practice, intended to be submitted to Cambridge University Press. At this stage, we are inviting submissions of abstracts on any aspect related to communication and legal practice with a direct link to legal processes and procedures. The selected abstracts will be included in the proposal for the edited collection. Upon the acceptance of the proposal by the Cambridge University Press, the authors will be invited to write the chapters for the edited collection. The publication schedule is as follows:

 

28th February 2023 – submission of 250-word abstracts by email to tatiana.grieshofer@bcu.ac.uk

31st May 2023 – editorial decision communicated to authors

31st December 2023 – submission of 6,000-word chapters, including the bibliography

31st March 2024 – feedback communicated to authors

30th June 2024 – final submission of chapters

 

Please find more information about the proposed edited collection below:

 

Communication and Legal Practice

 

The edited collection focuses on the currently underexplored yet crucial research area on the interface of communication and legal practice. It presents the state-of-the-art research in applied linguistics directly relevant to procedural and administrative law and practice, with an emphasis on how legal procedure is constructed, negotiated and implemented through language. What is unique about the collection is its focus on the applied aspects of linguistic theory, methodology and implementation in the context of legal practice. The collection covers different aspects of communication in its widest sense: interpersonal and institutional; written and spoken; communication processes involved in elicitation, comprehension and formulation of arguments; communication at the heart of negotiation, mediation, decision-making and legal reasoning; communication throughout different stages of legal proceedings.

 

The chapters in the collection will thus relate diverse communicative aspects to legal practice, focusing specifically on procedural aspects of criminal proceedings, non-criminal proceedings (family, civil, tribunal proceedings) and judicial decision-making. The selling point of the edited collection is that it will showcase methodological approaches from linguistics which can enrich legal reforms and procedural change as well as promote ground-breaking interdisciplinary research.

 

This volume goes beyond the current published work on related topics (courtroom discourse, language and law, forensic linguistics) in its broad conceptualisation of communication, direct applicability to day-to-day legal practice, clear link to procedural aspects, and methodological interdisciplinarity. A unique strength of this collection is its foregrounding of the institutional and procedural, which tends to be backgrounded to the linguistic focus in much of the current literature. This collection will therefore find an audience with legal academics and professionals, as well as linguists, social scientists and critical theorists across a range of disciplines.

 

 

Call For Chapters: Reader on Cultural Expertise

From the mailbox:

Reader on Cultural Expertise - Call for Chapters Cultural expertise is an emergent concept defined as special knowledge provided by various fields in the social sciences for conflict resolution in the form of cultural expert witnessing or cultural argumentations that help deciding authorities for better decision-making (Holden 2011 and Holden 2019).*

Cultural expertise connects with the great debates of anthropology regarding the concept of culture, race, ethnicity, gender and allows for a new scrutiny of the potential of social sciences, in particular anthropology, to problem solving. I am planing a collection of essays designed as a trajectory starting from theory to praxis and using socio-legal and critical studies for a reader on cultural expertise whose target audience is undergraduate students in the social sciences. This reader connects with the collaborative design of a course on cultural expertise within the framework of EURO-EXPERT.

Contributors to this reader may be invited to participate to the upcoming workshop to be held on the first week of October in Oxford.  5000 words chapters are solicited on the following non-exhaustive list of topics: current representations of culture and law, race and ethnicity, gender, regulations concerning cultural expert witnessing and mediation from a national and comparative perspective, patterns of litigation involving a sample of multicultural-settings, and more (other topics can also be proposed). Both theory and praxis oriented contributions will be accepted. Theory-chapters should provide a state-of-the-art survey of one of the great debates in the social sciences and highlight how the notion of cultural expertise connects with those as umbrella concept including anthropological experts witnessing, mediation in court and out of court, cultural defence, and more. Praxis-chapters should focus on the application of cultural expertise to a particular field (such as gender rights, migration, indigenous rights, detention, education, health, and more) and offer quantitative and/or qualitative data that support the analysis. Both theory- and praxis- chapters should be accompanied by a list of further readings and can include boxed contents for exercises, multiple choice questions, definitions, and long extracts from leading scholarship. 

Prospective authors are requested to send a 800 words proposal and a 250 words BIO to Livia Holden at livia.holden@csls.ox.ac.uk by the 3rd June 2019. Preliminary enquiries are welcome. Readings on cultural expertise are available on request.  Holden, L. ed. (2011) Cultural Expertise and Litigation, Aldershort: Routledge.Holden, L. Ed. (2019) Cultural Expertise and Socio-Legal Studies, Bingley: Emeraldinsight.