Shifting forensic science focus from means to purpose: A path forward for the discipline?

Forensic science is facing a persistent crisis that is often addressed by organizational responses, with a strong focus on the improvement and standardisation of means and processes. However, organisations and processes are highly dependent on the political, economical and legal structures in which they operate. This may explain why most proposed solutions had difficulties in addressing the crisis up to now, as they could hardly be applied transversally to all forensic science models. Moreover, new tools and technologies are continuously developed by a quasi-infinite number of different scientific disciplines, thus leading to further diversity and fragmentation of forensic science. In this paper, it is proposed to shift the focus from means to purpose and consider forensic science current challenges in terms of discipline, before addressing organisations’ specific issues. As a distinct discipline, forensic science can refocus research and development on shared principles and purposes, such as reconstructing, monitoring, and preventing crime and security issues. This focus change will facilitate a better understanding of the trace as the object of study of forensic science and eventually lead to a more impactful and long-lasting effect. This approach will also foster the development of a forensic science culture (instead of a primarily technological culture) unified by purpose rather than means through more relevant education and research.     

Socialisation to interdisciplinary legal education: an empirical assessment

This article provides novel empirical survey evidence on socialisation factors leading lecturers to implement interdisciplinary teaching in law. Recent debates on legal scholarship and higher education legal institutions advocate the introduction of interdisciplinary approaches to legal studies. Nevertheless, there is still little evidence of how this lecturing philosophy might be affected by socialisation with other disciplines. To address this, we analyse the case of external lecturers in the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who constitute the majority of the teaching staff in this institution. To explain the adoption of interdisciplinary teaching, we rely on socialisation factors connected to their former higher education and socialisation in research and multidisciplinary environments.     

iFairness – Constructing fairness in IT (and other areas of) law through intra- and interdisciplinarity

As information and communication technologies have gradually invaded every aspect of our daily lives, the body of law that we call IT law has not only expanded, but it also pushes traditional areas of law to become more tech-savvy. This article makes a plea for a more intra- and interdisciplinary approach towards developing the future IT law, on the one hand, and towards educating the future IT lawyer, on the other hand. It substantiates the need for lawyers from different fields and non-lawyers to engage in a constructive dialogue when determining, interpreting and enforcing fairness standards in contemporary and future IT law, and outlines directions for integrating such dialogue in university curricula.     

Only Contradictions on Offer

Segal addresses feminism's future at a time when political energies are apparently in decline. She explores the contradictory models of feminism operating in political and media representations: the dominance of gender questions and gender anxieties, including the marked concern with models of 'proper' masculinity, inevitably implicates feminists in the political arena. The decline in political engagement among feminists is in any case disturbing, because women without power have been made the central targets of neo-conservative social policies in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, with the female 'welfare dependent' becoming particularly demonized. The failure of feminists to address such issues results from the decline of socialist feminisms, and a general failure within feminism to make class and race differences, and the inequalities that result from them, the central plank of its theories and politics. Segal calls attention to the divorce between feminist theory and feminist activism, and argues that the politics of the academy have largely contributed to a disciplinary specialization which militates against feminism's productive interdisciplinarity. While the literary paradigms that now dominate feminist thought have produced rich models for subjectivity and identity, the decrease in social science contributions to the field has led to a lessening of attention to existing social relations. Segal insists upon the necessity of a continuing engagement with cultural questions, but argues that these need to be combined with a commitment to radical social transformation if feminisms, in all their complexity and multifariousness, are to have a future.     

Families, Foreignness, Migration

Introducing the special issue on ‘Families, Foreignness and Migration. Now and Then’, this essay starts from the observation that in Western Europe migrating with or without one's family in the last century was increasingly shaped by state policies. As a result, migrants' identities and family experiences not only depended, and still depend, on their cultural backgrounds but also on very time-specific politics of foreignness and citizenship. The essay's main argument is that comparing and deconstructing perceptions, policies and practices of ‘family’ and migration help to overcome the limited attention given to age and kin in the study of gender and migration. From an overview of contributions to this interdisciplinary issue, it is clear that deconstructing ‘family’ in migration studies should be developed further along three axes: child migration, the multi-level analysis of family and migration, including societies of origin and migrant organizations, and the comparison of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ migrants, which contributes to uncovering the relationship between foreignness, gender and age.     

Families,Foreignness, Migration

Introducing the special issue on ‘Families, Foreignness and Migration. Now and Then’, this essay starts from the observation that in Western Europe migrating with or without one's family in the last century was increasingly shaped by state policies. As a result, migrants' identities and family experiences not only depended, and still depend, on their cultural backgrounds but also on very time-specific politics of foreignness and citizenship. The essay's main argument is that comparing and deconstructing perceptions, policies and practices of ‘family’ and migration help to overcome the limited attention given to age and kin in the study of gender and migration. From an overview of contributions to this interdisciplinary issue, it is clear that deconstructing ‘family’ in migration studies should be developed further along three axes: child migration, the multi-level analysis of family and migration, including societies of origin and migrant organizations, and the comparison of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ migrants, which contributes to uncovering the relationship between foreignness, gender and age.