ACELG Annual Conference

EU Law and Social Justice

The ACELG Annual Conference will explore the role of EU law in enabling the concurrent accelerating ‘social justice crises’, and what it can do to address them. The event will be hybrid so people can join in person or online.

Start date: 18 November 2021
End date: 19 November 2021
Time: 12:00
Organised by: Ivana Isailovic

Update 16 November: Please note that due to the latest government corona measures, the conference will be hybrid on Thursday 18 November. If you wish to attend in person, registration is required. On Friday 19 November, the conference will be fully online. Thank you.

With regards to social justice issues, the European Union is facing a growing number of simultaneous challenges: high levels of poverty and social exclusion, the accelerating climate emergency, the increasing reliance on non-transparent new technologies for decision-making, the mainstreaming of populist conservative parties and their agendas, as well as the persistence of race based, gender and other forms of inequalities in post-colonial/neo-colonial contexts. In addition, it is still too early to assess whether the EU's responses to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis will turn out to be a step forward, backward or neither of these when it comes to social justice.

This conference will explore the role of EU law in enabling these concurrent accelerating ‘crises’, and in addressing them. Other questions which will be explored include: What do EU law’s responses to social-economic-ecological crises say about the values underpinning the EU, and its future directions? What does the relationship between EU law and social justice imperatives look like when issues of racial, gender and class inequalities are placed at the center of legal inquiries? How can issues of social justice be (better) integrated in EU law teaching?

In order to engage with these and other related questions, ACELG will be hosting three roundtables on migrations, economic governance and discriminations, with EU scholars working at the intersection of EU law, distributive justice, gender studies/feminism and critical race theory. ACELG will also host a teaching workshop to give teachers tools and ideas on how to incorporate issues of social justice within the classroom, and two closed workshops to provide a space for early-career scholars to receive feedback on their works-in-progress.

Please click here to see the recordings from the conference