On 30 of May 2024 the whole E-BoP team got together for our monthly journal club. We were also joined by several PhD students from Strasbourg University. For this month we wanted to explore the topic of Legal Geography, so we picked the collective book “The Expanding Spaces of Law. A Timely Legal Geography“. In picking this topic, our initial idea was to better prepare ourselves for the session on… Legal Geography which will take place in the context of our Summer School (for which we will have the pleasure of welcoming Andrea Iossa).
However, the more we engaged with the chapters of the book, and with other works in the same field, the more we could see the connection between the research we develop with E-BoP and the central idea advanced by the book, namely that the law, space, and time are constituted through each other. Our focus on the “border of the labour market” and on the nature of “temporariness” of temporary labour migration, made it so that the point of observation proposed by legal geography felt quite natural.
In the subsequent discussion we focused on the areas of our research which we considered as perfectly highlighting the bidirectional relationship between law, space, and time, discussing for instance the role of temporary accommodations erected specifically to house temporary labour migrants (close to the agricultural fields or construction sites where they work), temporary places hosting temporary workers which in their turn have an important impact on their ability to enforce their rights and on their employers’ ability to control their activities.
