Deadline: October 25, 2019
This panel focuses on the problems researchers may confront as they design and conduct meaningful qualitative legal research. We are interested in papers that focus on the doing of research in socio-legal spaces, including those which may be hard to access, tense, politicized or restricted. We solicit panelists whose work broadly address the following questions: what are the methods one uses to conduct legal research, study legal spaces, and gather information (Braverman, 2014)? What issues, debates, and solutions surround the practice of engaged qualitative socio-legal research?
Contributions may include:
-Methods to understand whom law affects (Dixon and Marston, 2011).
-Methods to answer particularly difficult socio-legal questions.
-Methods to address the ethical questions and problematics of socio-legal research.
-Methods to confront difficult fieldwork site scenarios, including but not limited to:
Prison/criminal justice access
Courtroom observation
(Im)migration
Interacting with legal personnel
Participant observation
Politically sensitive fieldwork
Dangerous fieldwork
Belonging/exclusion
Activist scholar considerations in legal research
Interested participants are asked to submit their abstracts to Christian Pettersen (cpetters@uga.edu) or Leanne Purdum (leannekp@uga.edu) by Friday, October 25, 2019. Selected participants will be notified by Tuesday, October 29, 2019.
Works cited:
Braverman, Irus. 2014. “Who’s Afraid of Methodology? Advocating a Methodological Turn in Legal Geography.” In The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, edited by Nicholas K Blomley, David Delaney, Alexandre Kedar, and Irus Braverman. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Dixon, Deborah P., and Sallie A. Marston. 2011. “Introduction: feminist engagements with geopolitics.” Gender Place And Culture 18, no. 4: 445-453.