The Middle East Centre Library, St Antony’s College

(a light lunch will be available on a first-come, first-served basis)

Topic: The seminar will consider some aspects of family law reform as examples of policy-making in authoritarian states and how the processes of such reform create meaning and establish new “practices” that then become the new state of the art. In Morocco this development has led to family law becoming a “field” of its own with its own rules and “experts” and thereby more and more a technical rather than as previously a purely religious issue. Family law reform has thereby contributed to a wider political development—i.e. the secularisation and feminisation process has affected other fields such as the religious and the judicial fields.

The Women’s Rights Research Seminars at Oxford was founded in 2009 with the initial aim of directing interdisciplinary scholarly attention to the legal status of women in Iran. Since then, the research group has broadened its purview to the rights of women in the Middle East, covering topics such as the politics of fertility, women in ethnic minorities, and the treatment of women in states governed and influenced by Islamic law and jurisprudence. WRRS welcomes seminar and paper proposals from any discipline. Enquiries: Binesh Hass(binesh.hass@law.ox.ac.uk)