AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is excited to announce its recipients for its 2024 Grant Programs.
The recipients of LSA’s two grant programs will foster new programming opportunities for members beyond the flagship Annual Meeting and Early Career Workshops, and will enhance LSA’s efforts to promote sociolegal scholarship as a global field. The recipients will design seminars and workshops to facilitate collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge production amongst participants.
Congratulations to all of the 2024 grant recipients and thank you to everybody who submitted proposals to enrich the LSA community and enhance sociolegal scholarship. Program news and applications will be available in our monthly newsletters, on our blog, and on X/Twitter @law_soc.
2024 LSA Programming Grant Recipients:
Ari Ezra Waldman | University of California, Irvine
Danielle Rudes | Sam Houston State University
Karina Ansolabehere | Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Javiera Araya-Moreno | Concordia Ethnography Lab
Salvador Andrés Millaleo Hernández | Law School at the University of Chile and João Vitor Cardoso | Universidad Santo Tomás
2024 Global Collaboration Project Recipients:
Suryapratim Roy | Trinity College Dublin and Swethaa Ballakrishnen | University of California, Irvine
Program Descriptions:
Ari Ezra Waldman, “Building the Theory and Practice of Law, Technology, and Society”
Law and technology researchers don’t always see their work through a sociolegal lens, but Professor Ari Waldman wants to challenge that. After all, law and technology are two of the most potent mediums for the creation of economic, political, and social environments. The recent LSA Article Prize co-winner’s new collaborative will unite sociolegal scholars interested in technology to establish the first methodological and theoretical framework for the study of law, society, and technology. Through a series of workshops centered on peer feedback and facilitated discussions, participants will clarify law’s unique potential to mediate the human impact of technology in a constructive, rather than destructive, way.
Danielle Rudes, “LSA’s Qualitative Methods Workshop Series”
Law and society are ultimately a reflection of human behaviors, structures, beliefs, and experiences, which makes qualitative analysis critical to well-rounded sociolegal research and analysis. Unfortunately, qualitative methods are severely undervalued and underrepresented in criminal justice, sociology, political science, and empirical legal studies graduate programs. Professor Danielle Rudes is stepping up to change that by giving LSA community members what they have been asking for: a workshop series dedicated to the fundamentals of and innovations in qualitative methods and practice. Through pre-recorded lessons, live virtual sessions featuring experts, and in-person LSA Annual Meeting gatherings, participants will grow their network of qualitative mentors while benefitting from one of the only concentrated methodological training programs offered by comparable professional organizations.
Karina Ansolabehere and Javiera Araya-Moreno, “Seminar: Methodological Challenges for Studying Legal Bureaucracies in Latin America”
Professor Karina Ansolabehere and postdoctoral fellow Javiera Araya-Moreno will be convening 8-10 scholars to explore legal bureaucracies in Latin America and the methodological challenges—and opportunities—they create. Participants will include an even mix of native and non-native English speakers, based in institutions in both the Global North and Global South. The cohort will hold four virtual public lectures and paper workshops exploring legal bureaucracies in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Chile with a cultural approach, situating them in conversation with bureaucracies in other Global South regions in Asia and Africa. By focusing on what the law is, rather than what the law does, scholars will expand the portrait of Latin American bureaucracies beyond one of contingency and instability.
Salvador Andrés Millaleo Hernández and João Vitor Cardoso, “The Chilean Law and Society Mentoring Program”
Professor Salvador Andrés Millaleo Hernández and Associate Professor João Vitor Cardoso are ready to promote constructive South-South dialogue about the historical roots of Chile’s law and society movement. Their semester-long biweekly workshop series will discuss legal disputes and legal arenas, indigenous legal thought, post-colonial studies, and justice-seeking social movements, preparing graduate researchers to infuse law and society methods and perspectives into their projects. Contributions from the program will be compiled into a book about the history of law and development in Chile, laying the foundation for increased sociolegal capacity amongst Global South scholars.
Suryapratim Roy and Swethaa Ballakrishnen, “Law & the Interloper: Comparative Projects and the Potential of Queer Theory”
Professor Swethaa Ballakrishnen and Assistant Professor Suryapratim Roy will be holding three scoping workshops to kick off the creation of a space in legal scholarship for which the starting point is experience, rather than a claim to neutrality. The Global North’s centre states play an overwhelming role in developing understandings of equality and agency, using discrete legal categories such as federalism, free movement, and citizenship, (in Europe) and race and gender (in the United States). Ballakrishnen and Suryapratim’s workshops will use Queer Theory as a basis for exploring peripheral states in relation to such legal categories while challenging the sociolegal tendency to see legal systems as self-contained. This program will establish the foundation for an edited collection of papers, and eventually a new law journal using periphery as an analytical category.