Call for Papers
Workshop details
Organisers: Caitlin Biddolph (University of Technology Sydney) and Adrienne Ringin (La Trobe University)
Date: Thursday 29 October – Friday 30 October 2026, 9.30am - 5.00pm (AEST)
Place: Online (via Zoom)
Theme
In this time of global uncertainty and crisis, resisting militarist, colonial, capitalist, ecocidal, and cisheteropatriarchal violences is an ongoing challenge. When faced with the intersecting violences of this current moment, placing care and care work at the core of international law narratives is a radical proposition. It is also a vital one. As scholars across international studies have shown(1), building upon the everyday care activism and practices of Indigenous, Black, decolonial, feminist, queer, socialist, and crip communities, care is what sustains relations and underpins international practices. For example, academics such as Roxani Krystalli and Philipp Schulz are disrupting peace and conflict studies by studying the resilience of care and love in times of conflict(2). But While questions of care, broadly understood, have been the subject of international legal scholarship, only recently are scholars articulating an explicit research agenda for ‘centring care in international law’(3). Inspired by Catherine O’Rourke’s work, such an agenda ‘aims to reshape international law, putting care, not just harm, at its heart’(4). Putting care at the centre of international legal thinking offers opportunities to examine the pervasive structural inequalities and inequities that operate beneath the narrative of harm, demonstrating that harm prevention does not equate to liberation.
Motivated by these provocations, this call asks: what is possible when we shift dominant narratives of international law and enliven alternative accounts which focus on the structures and imbalance that underpin them? This workshop will explore these questions by bringing together papers and reflections on themes including but not limited to:
- Conceptual approaches to care and centring care in international law
- The political economy of care, including but not limited to care and social reproduction, care labour, violence and carelessness in global supply chains and neoliberal capitalism
- Care and international law beyond the human: post-human, other-than-human, more-than-human, multispecies, ecocentric, planetary, blue, and wild law approaches
- Rewriting care into legal judgements, decisions, and processes
- Prefigurative feminist legal projects and alternatives to justice and international law that centre care as a basis for lawmaking
- Practices of care within the international legal profession and academy, including care in teaching international law
- Practices of care, love, pleasure, and dignity in times of genocide, authoritarianism, and crisis
- Queer and trans approaches to care, including queer kinship and care in international law
- Care as forms of resistance, mutual aid, and survival, including from abolitionist and decolonial approaches
- Caring and care-full methodologies for the study and practice of international law
- The paternal and colonial violence of international law invoked through narratives of care
- Care and health in international law, including women’s health and reproductive and sexual health rights
- Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing care in and beyond international law
- Care and disability justice in international law
Submissions
We welcome submissions from doctoral researchers, established scholars, and practitioners. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and biographies of up to 200 words to gsilig@anzsil.org by 31 August 2026. Please indicate your time zone in your submission.
Successful applicants will be expected to submit draft papers of between 6,000 and 8,000 words by 1 October 2026. Our aim is for the workshop to result in an edited collection or journal special issue. All papers will go to peer review prior to publication.
This Workshop is organised by the ANZSIL Gender, Sexuality and International Law Interest Group.
(1) See for example: Maggie FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics. Bristol: Bristol University Press (2022); Shirin M. Rai, Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring. Oxford University Press (2024); Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations. Boulder: Westview Press (1999)
(2) Roxani Krystalli and Philipp Schulz, ‘Taking Love and Care Seriously: An Emergent Research Agenda for Remaking Worlds in the Wake of Violence’, International Studies Review (2022): 10.1093/isr/viac003
(3) Catherine O’Rourke, ‘Centring Care in International Law’, Horizon Europe Grant, European Research Council, https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101171364
(4) Ibid.
