Call for Papers: Feminism, Debt and Assets: feminists@law

feminists@law invites submissions for a themed issue on Feminism, Debt and Assets.

Feminist scholarship has long examined the gendered dynamics of income inequality and the ways in which debt shapes and reproduces unequal social relations. More recently, assets and asset-holding have also become central to understanding how economic security, autonomy, and power are structured.

In contemporary life, debt and assets play an important role in organising gendered, classed, racialised and ableist hierarchies across households, labour markets, housing, welfare systems, and financial infrastructures. This themed issue seeks work that examines how debt is produced, distributed, enforced, and experienced. It also seeks work on how assets are accumulated, protected, taxed, transferred, and withheld. Contributions that analyse law’s role in defining and governing “debt” and “assets”, and that consider what feminist legal analysis contributes to debates on financialisation, assetisation, rentierisation, exclusion, and inequality, are welcome too.

We invite submissions from a wide range of perspectives, including socio-legal, historical, empirical, comparative, and theoretical approaches as well as work that engages with feminist political economy, critical race and postcolonial scholarship, disability studies, queer and trans studies, migration studies, and approaches grounded in non-Western and non-Anglophone traditions. Submissions may focus on any jurisdiction or adopt transnational perspectives.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Consumer credit, payday lending, buy-now-pay-later, and digital finance.
• Student debt, medical debt, and other forms of “social debt”.
• Housing, mortgages, rent, and the legal making of property wealth.
• Legal pluralism, customary law, and the gendered governance of debt and assets.
• Informal credit systems, rotating savings schemes, and mobile money.
• Household political economy, shared borrowing, and intimate liability.
• Land rights, collateralisation, and gendered property regimes.
• Cohabitation, informality, and the legal invisibility of intimate financial life.
• Family law, separation, maintenance, inheritance, and intergenerational transfers.
• Welfare conditionality, sanctions, debt recovery, and the privatisation of risk.
• Insolvency, bankruptcy, and debt advice.
• Care, unpaid labour, and the role of debt in sustaining social reproduction.
• Financial abuse, coercive control, and economic safety.
• Pensions, taxation, and wealth inequality.
• Climate disaster, insurance gaps, and indebted recovery.
• Sovereign debt, development finance, and gendered austerity governance.
• Debt, violence, and social ordering.

We particularly welcome submissions from early-career academics. We also encourage co-authored pieces and contributions that bring practitioner, activist, or policy-facing insights into conversation with feminist legal analysis. Shorter pieces and commentaries will also be considered. Please indicate in your abstract proposal if you wish to submit in one of these formats.

All submissions following provisionally accepted abstracts will be subject to peer review.

Please send an abstract of up to 500 words and a short biography. The abstract deadline is 30 November 2026, with selection of abstracts and communication of outcomes in December 2026. The full paper deadline is 31 May 2027, with publication in March-May 2028.

Queries may be directed to Asta Zokaityte at A.Zokaityte@kent.ac.uk; Donatella Alessandrini at D.Alessandrini@lboro.ac.uk or Toni Williams at gaw44@cam.ac.uk