Rethinking Law, Society And Governance: Foucault’s Bequest (Oñati International Series In Law And Society)

Description

This set of essays engages with some aspects of Foucault’s notion of governmentality,particularly at the junction where law/regulation meets ‘the social’. ‘The social’, as a special sphere of government, is a special area of concern for those working within broad intellectual spaces of the ‘governmentality approach’. Is it the basis of modern liberal systems of government? Is it dead, or even feeling unwell? Has it spawned hybrid forms of government like neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, or even neo-socialism?

In making their presence felt in the debates that have flourished around such questions, especially by highlighting the subtleties of the roles played by law and regulation in the governance of the social, the authors of the essays – David Brown; Jo Goodie; Russell Hogg and Kerry Carrington; Jeff Malpas; Pat O’Malley; George Pavlich; Annette Pedersen; Kevin Stenson; William Walters – range widely. There are pieces on liberal government and resistance to it, some on particular targets of this government, like unemployment, crime, ‘law and order’, even Australian geography, environment and cultural products, and some that delve into philosophical/methodological issues.

Editors Biography

Gary Wickham is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

Rosemary Hunter FacSS is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Founding Head of Law at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. She is a feminist socio-legal scholar with particular interests in family law and family justice processes, judging and the judiciary, and access to justice. She has published widely on these topics in both Australia (where she began her academic career) and the UK. With Anne Barlow, she was a member of the ESRC-funded Mapping Paths to Family Justice project, which resulted in their prize-winning book, Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times (Barlow, Hunter, Smithson and Ewing, 2017). Rosemary has been the Academic Member of the Family Justice Council since 2016 and leads the Council’s Domestic Abuse Working Group. She is also a member of the Private Law Working Group and the Ministry of Justice’s Expert Panel on Harm in the Family Courts. She is a former Chair of the SLSA and a former Council member of JUSTICE.

George Pavlich is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

David Nelken is Professor of Comparative and Transnational Law and past Vice-Dean for Research at King’s College London, UK. Widely published in sociology of law and in criminology, he has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the International Sociological Association, and the (USA) Law and Society Association. He has twice been a Trustee of the LSA and Vice-President of the RSCL.