Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Mariana Prandini Assis and Matthew Canfield

• Attend the seminar online via Zoom

The question of how to pursue politically relevant and engaged scholarship has been a recurring theme in socio-legal scholarship. Although there is broad agreement across geographies on the need to confront power and injustice, questions remain over how best to do so– whether through critique, reform or activism. Authors in the recent Special Issue, “Practising Activist Socio-Legal Scholarship: Navigating Tensions and Crafting Approaches”, in the International Journal of Law in Context, illustrate a variety of forms of activist-scholarship. They reveal how scholar activism is not simply a matter of engaged scholars ‘wearing many hats’ at different moments in their work. Rather, scholar activists continuously navigate and negotiate across multiple, often conflicting, social fields, including universities, civil society organisations, social movements, media spaces, and state institutions. In this presentation, editors Mariana Prandini Assis and Matthew Canfield will discuss the emerging practice of activist socio-legal scholarship and their own contributions to the Issue.

Assis, together with Luis Eslava, writes about the practice of “Investigación Militante”, inspired by Latin American intellectual traditions. Canfield describes the promises and challenges of participatory socio-legal action research as a mode of activist research.

Anna Lundberg and Emma Söderman will share their work with the article “Border Work as Socio-Legal Activist Research”. They analyse two distinct examples. While both examples depart from feminist methodology, the differences are stark: Noor, excluded from democratic processes, faced deportation risks, while the authors, with institutional support, engaged in public mobilisations without such threats. Despite these differences, the concept of border work is used to understand and analyse both examples, highlighting their commonalities.