The University of Leeds School of Law and Emory Law are convening a workshop on October 27-28, 2017, in Leeds, United Kingdom, titled A Workshop on Professionalism and Vulnerability. For this initial workshop the conveners are particularly interested in three bedrock professions – law, medicine, and business.
This workshop will use the lens of individual and institutional vulnerability to examine historic, comparative, and contemporaneous depictions of professionalism. This new approach is proposed at a point at which core features of professionalism have been undermined by the pressures of neo-liberal market imperatives, alongside a post-modern cultural skepticism about professions’ claims to expert knowledge. The workshop will explore the ways in which contingent and complex conceptions of professionalism may be understood and enacted by professional actors within a range of organizations. Thus, is it possible to conceive of a vision of professionalism which can serve as a form of “protection” or source of resilience for professionals as managing the diverse, often conflicting, demands of those who employ them, institutional norms, codes of conduct, and the law – at the very moment when notions of ‘professionalism’ are challenged and undermined?
Deadline & Submission Procedure: Email a proposal of several paragraphs as a Word or PDF document by July 31, 2017 to Rachel Ezrol, rezrol[@]emory.edu. Decisions will be made by August 7, 2017 and working paper drafts will be due September 22, 2017 so they can be duplicated and distributed prior to the Workshop.
