About JGLR:
Founded in 2009, Jindal Global Law Review is the faculty-edited flagship journal of the Jindal Global Law School. JGLR is published twice a year, with each issue curated as a themed dossier on a specific area of both historical and contemporary significance to law. We publish peer-reviewed interdisciplinary and critical legal scholarship — with a focus on the Global South — by academics in law and cognate disciplines that take the conventional and the creative seriously. JGLR is especially interested in publishing works that expand and reimagine the boundaries of the
legal discipline through innovations in method and form. We understand ‘law’ expansively as an assemblage of ideas, theories, methods, concepts, norms, traditions, politics, moralities, aesthetics, doctrines, policies, pluralities, and life practices.
JGLR is indexed in the SCOPUS database
Theme: Law and Disabilities
What is the relationship between law and disability? Conventionally, the law can be understood as a discourse of order, and in contrast disability is about experiences that are out of order. In metaphorical terms, disability is marked by lack whereas the law makes claims to restoration and
completeness. The material experience of living with a disability is calculated by the law (in collaboration with the disciplines of medicine, psychiatry, and economics) to recognise and protect human rights and enable infrastructural and intellectual access. Yet, the law carries authority to identify and disidentify bodies as disabled in order for them to be biopolitically managed and disciplined. The law (as an extension of socio-cultural ableist structures) pathologizes disabledbodies and minds as unproductive and thus in need of institutionalisation and/or upliftment, where removal from the community is justified by both the state and the family through the rhetoric of care, charity or pity. Law qualifies degrees of disability to legitimise declarations of capacity and incapacity to consent and contract — to vote, work or have sex.
The relationship between law and disability is thus at once vexed and intimate. This relationship rehearses ideas germane to the construction and constriction of citizenship in political, cultural, and social terms. The relationship can also exceptionalise or invisibilise disabled experiences in ways that do not attend to the affective and intersectional dimensions of embodiment, instead advancing ways of understanding disability only through lenses of cognition and mobility. Such an approach to the law’s understanding of disability risks producing a hierarchy of disabilities calculated through the matrices of productivity, capacity, culpability, and monstrosity. At the same time, the law profoundly shapes our normative experience of the world and produces its material conditions, and so contains within its own authoritative and exclusionary discourse the possibility of change.
For its Fall 2021 issue (Vol.12 Issue 2), the Jindal Global Law Review (JGLR) invites contributions that explore and investigate the relationship between law and disabilities from a range of critical and creative disciplinary vantages. How does the law fulfill its emancipatory and regulatory roles
for persons living with disabilities? What do normative conceptions of citizenship, justice, and equality mean in the context of disability? Do legal discourses on identifying and defining disability necessarily produce hierarchies and exclusions? Is there a Southern disability? Can the disabled
body be read as a dissenting body? Can identities be disabling? How can an epistemology of disability help reimagine consent and capacity? Are there synergies between the rise of the carceral state and practices of institutionalization? What are the relationships between ableism and ageism, casteism, racism, and heterosexism? These are some of the questions that contributions could address, but it is by no means an exhaustive list.
As a law review with a critical and inter-disciplinary orientation, we welcome contributions across disciplines, jurisdictions and forms, with a particular interest in academic works that critically examine current events with historical traction. We are also very interested in contributions that are not jurisdiction-specific but explore questions of law and disability at a comparative or a conceptual level. Along with full-length academic articles, we also welcome other forms such as case-notes, book reviews, review essays, long-form interviews, photo-essays, and field reports.
Please submit a 300-word abstract by 1 February, 2021. Decisions on accepted abstracts will be announced by 15 February, 2021. Complete articles will be due on 15 June, 2021.
Please send your abstracts and any queries to [email protected] with carbon copies to [email protected] and [email protected].
