Grand Challenges Lecture Series - 22nd March
Professor Richard Collier - Asking the Law’s ‘Man Question’: Men, Masculinities and the Legal Professions
22 March 2017 | 6.30 - 7.30pm | Keele Hall - The Salvin Room
The Grand Challenges lecture series is delighted to welcome its next speaker to Keele University, Professor Richard Collier.
The Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (ILAS) Grand Challenges Lecture series explores complex questions which confront local, national, regional and global communities. These grand challenges will require creative and innovative interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration to suggest and predict possible resolutions.
About the lecture
Increasingly high profile discussions about poor wellbeing at work have highlighted some of the complex problems that we face in the legal profession around work/life balance. With a focus on the discussions around fatherhood, this talk will consider the political dimensions of studying masculinity within the context of the law and explores ways in which it might be possible to ask the law’s ‘man question’.
Rethinking the relationship between men, law and gender will help to better understand the nature of these challenging problems and move the debate beyond its current narrow terms; for example, the framing of work-time autonomies as no more than individual responsibility, to manage the self, to cope and ‘make it work’. Exploring the gendered practices of men in relation to dominant notions of the ‘ideal’ legal professional and digging deeper into the political economy of work, life and wellbeing and debates about masculinity itself, I propose to interrogate how hyper-masculine cultures associated with neoliberalism, appear to authorise the very practices which are implicated in contributing to the poor wellbeing of many legal practitioners.
About Professor Richard Collier
Professor Collier is Professor of Law and Social Theory at Newcastle University. His primary area of research interests and publications are on the field of law and gender, with a particular focus in the past on issues around men and masculinities.
Refreshments will be available in the Great Hall, adjacent to the Salvin Room from 6pm onwards.
This lecture is free and all are welcome to attend.
For more information and to book, visit the Grand Challenges website