feminists@law is a new, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal of feminist legal scholarship. All are invited to visit the website at http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/index and to pass it on to your networks. The following is an edited version of feminists@law’s announcement.
In the first issue
The first issue features an article on the association between feminist and open access movements by Carys Craig (a member of IP Osgoode), Joseph Turcotte and Rosemary Coombe (also a member of IP Osgoode); reflections by Drucilla Cornell on the 20th anniversary of the publication of Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law; thoughts on current and future agendas for feminist legal studies from Africa, Europe, North and South America and Australia; and a video of a roundtable discussion with Brenna Bhandar, Julia Chryssostalis, Elena Loizidou and Janice Richardson on the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ of feminist legal scholarship.
One of the highlights of the issue is the thought-provoking article by Carys Craig, Joseph Turcotte and Rosemary Coombe addressing the parallelism between feminism and an open access approach to intellectual property issues. The article challenges the traditional masculine viewpoint towards ownership and control of information resources in order to meet a new reality brought on by technological advancement and shows how, as our cultural landscape evolves, intellectual property reforms are desperately needed. Relational feminism provides a bridge between liberalism’s individualism and communitarianism’s social constructionism. It also illuminates how the growing number of open access initiatives work toward challenging the status quo guiding traditional industries through fresh competition. The article is a revealing look at how critical feminist scholarship and the open access movement can work in tandem to confront ingrained norms that support the current dominant intellectual property paradigm and the resulting power imbalances it creates.
About the journal
feminists@law aims to publish critical, interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged scholarship that extends feminist debates and analyses relating to law and justice (broadly conceived). It has a particular interest in critical and theoretical approaches and perspectives that draw upon postcolonial, transnational and poststructuralist work. feminists@law intends to publish material in a range of print and multimedia formats and in English and other languages. It is committed to an international perspective, to the promotion of feminist work in all areas of law and justice, and to making that work widely available through open access publishing. It plans to publish two issues per year, but each issue will be built incrementally, meaning that new articles will be posted as soon as they are ready for publication.
Register your interest
Registration with the journal will enable you to submit articles for consideration, to receive automatic email updates when new issues are published, and to indicate an interest in acting as a reviewer for the journal. You can also receive journal updates via RSS, facebook and twitter. The hope is its readers will enjoy reading the first issue, comment on the articles, register on the site, submit articles for publication, and provide feedback on the journal.