When Swethaa Ballakrishnen and Suryapratim Roy first met each other 20 years ago at NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad, Telangana in India, neither of them expected to become transnational academics.
“We were kids, and before we knew it, we were professors!” Professor Ballakrishnen says.
The pair no longer live in the same place—Ballakrishnen is a professor teaching critical theory and ethics courses at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, while Professor Roy teaches regulatory law at Trinity College Dublin. But this hasn’t stopped them from maintaining a robust relationship as both friends and academic collaborators.
Professor Ballakrishnen might balk at this characterization of their relationship, however—the idea that friendship and academic collaboration are inherently separate. When the two of them thank each other in their work (they both feature prominently in each other’s dissertation and article acknowledgements) and send important drafts to each other for comment, do they do so as colleagues? Professional associates? Or friends?
“What does it mean for queer friendships to produce knowledge?” Professor Ballakrishnen asks. “What does it mean for queer amity to produce possibility? We don’t ask questions like this in the academy.”
This line of inquiry is a key consideration in the pair’s new workshop: “Law and the Interloper: Queer Theory in Critical Global Law and Society Scholarship.” Funded through the LSA Global Collaboration Project Grant, the first meeting is scheduled to occur on May 26, 2025, the day after the LSA Annual Meeting in Chicago concludes. Subsequent meetings (the exact number has not yet been determined) will occur adjacent to conferences held by organizations such as the Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics and the Asian Law and Society Conference to make attendance easier for an international cohort. The goal is to “queer” law and society research by approaching it primarily from an outsider perspective—developing theories from the vantage point of minoritized people who, by virtue of their distance from the fortress of legal protection, have a fuller—though still unique–view of law’s big picture.
“That’s the whole idea, right?” Professor Ballakrishnen says. “‘Interloper’ assumes that there is a structure and that someone’s on the outside, and they have to cross a barrier to be on the inside.
“But interloping is also interconnected. There are also different people who are jumping through those peripheries differently, using different tools and for different reasons. Reading them collectively gives us some sense of the nature of what it is they’re jumping towards.”
The inspiration for this workshop, in many ways, comes from the pair’s own experiences on the periphery. Both are immigrants working as academics in the Global North who received their principal legal training from Majority World institutions (a relative rarity); Professor Ballakrishnen is nonbinary. Professor Roy, who studied behavioral law and economics before teaching environmental law and researching constitutionalism and citizenship, found himself alienated from his ostensible community of economists, political scientists, and experimental psychologists.
“In a lot of this work that I was doing, I was implicitly looking to queer theory for comfort, even if I was not researching directly on queer theory,” Professor Roy explains, “and I was relying on it implicitly to find solace in some of the stuff that was bothering me, and more importantly, in finding a language where I could articulate the concerns that were bothering me in areas which you normally wouldn’t associate with queer theory.
“I was looking for a place to talk about the papers I was writing, which were not a fit in mainstream economics or psychology as linked to legal scholarship.”
Professor Roy found that place in the Law and Society Association, where Professor Ballakrishnen, who does research explicitly on queer and feminist theory (see here for their latest, on, aptly, friendship!), had already established an intellectual home.
“All of the mentors that shaped me were very involved in the LSA, and over the years, the spaces that I’ve been in–the American Bar Foundation, UCI now–are all very law and society spaces,” Professor Ballakrishnen says. “I started coming as a grad student, and it became my main safe space to push through ideas. And then I kept going back because I had community, and there’s something really powerful about returning to a space–and I think the LSA meeting every year is a space–to have the same conversations…with a certain cohort of people. Now I have grad students of my own that I encourage to come to LSA.”
To start, Professors Roy and Ballakrishnen plan on conducting the workshops in a roundtable format, where attendees take turns sharing their ideas before a group discussion of how the ideas interact. Crucially, the pair hopes that the workshop attracts applicants with a diverse range of research focuses, rather than only queer theorists focusing on gender and sexuality.
“Of course that’s important…those are the people we want to be in conversation with,” says Professor Ballakrishnen, whose methodology is informed by Critical Race Theory as well as queer theory. “But…I hope this is a way to newer communities for us, and maybe the hyperspecialization we’re looking at is at how, on the outside, we feel or experience the world.”
This interdisciplinarity lies at the heart of the project. By challenging the invisible barriers that can often silo researchers in different fields, the professors hope to encourage attendees to adopt a more expansive approach to their research. Engaging with seemingly unrelated subjects, they believe, can help attendees view their own work in relation to different contexts and perspectives, developing unexpected insights and ideas in the process.
“Academia now is such that you have to hyperspecialize,” says Professor Roy. “You need to concentrate on a particular area of research in order to build a name. Which means if you don’t belong to that subject matter, then you think, ‘What’s the point of building a community or a bond if I am not researching on that area?’”
And this is where the concept of friendship comes into play. Professional and career-based relationships are valuable in many ways—but they are also goal-oriented. Such connections, while often sincere and fulfilling, are based on an exchange of social, experiential, and intellectual capital. People walk into such relationships with specific hopes and expectations that both parties can mutually benefit from each other in ways that enhance the substance of their work and the trajectory of their careers. Many types of human relationships work in a similar way.
Friendship, however, is different. There are ebbs and flows, periods of intense togetherness and periods of separation. Some friends move into and out of our lives like water, while others are sturdier, like boulders on the shore—but most people would agree that all of those friendships have value. Lifelong friendships, like the one that Professors Ballakrishnen and Roy share, do require intention to withstand varied chapters of life. But the bonds of friendship are inherently flexible, and free of any preconceived expectations outside of the enjoyment of each other’s company. Friendship, in other words, is nonlinear, shapeshifting—and therefore, some might say, inherently queer.
“We don’t talk about friendship enough in these spaces,” Professor Ballakrishnen says. “We don’t talk about bonds like that because that feels like, almost uncouth to mention in professional spaces. But part of queering the academy is to remember that at the core of knowledge production is actually the capacity to build sustainable bonds. And friendship does that in these important ways.”
The two professors clearly enjoy being around one another, frequently interspersing serious conversation with teasing and banter. This foundation of joy and connection seems to inform most of their conversations—even those that otherwise may not have held the interest of one party or the other.
“So when I have an idea, if it’s on something Swethaa finds incredibly boring, and Swethaa finds climate law incredibly boring,” Professor Roy teases, “…one of the ways I would try to make it interesting to Swethaa is if I introduce queer theory into it, and argue that already existing vulnerable people in the Global South are deprivileged compared to the unborn in the Global North via constitutional discourse… I think my work on Queering Climate Law is coming about because I wanted to make it remotely interesting to Swethaa…That’s really how it was.”
“That’s not true!” Professor Ballakrishnen responds. “It is totally untrue.”
“This is really how it was.”
When the call for papers for the LSA Global Collaboration Project came out, Professor Ballakrishnen had, as usual, just sent Professor Roy a paper draft, this one exploring the prospect of using queerness as a foundation for legal analysis. The concept resonated with Professor Roy, and they decided that the call offered a great opportunity to explore the idea of bringing a diverse group of scholars together under the umbrella of queer theory.
“How do we get more people who are not thinking about something as queer to think about queerness beyond sexual choice? Like, that is the project, right?” says Professor Ballakrishnen. “And so we started just jamming about that, and I think the proposal came together in like hours, like it was overnight. Surya sent a note, I sent notes back, and we didn’t think we would have a shot at it, to be honest.”
The latter sentiment has colored both professors’ career trajectories. Professor Ballakrishnen, in particular, felt that an academic career was something that they didn’t have the right to hope for. Because of this, they didn’t approach their career with anything like a five- or ten-year plan.
“I think that kind of capacity for linear plan making is incredibly privileged,” they share. “Like I think at every stage we knew enough to know what we wanted to do next and gave it a shot, but we could never be sure that shot would land.”
The shots that did land—an LLM from Harvard Law and a PhD from Stanford for Professor Ballakrishnen; an MA from University of Vienna, an LLM from University of Hamburg, and a PhD from University of Groningen for Professor Roy—paved a path, not only to fruitful careers for themselves, but for Indian law students interested in sociology or other social sciences to reference.
“Swethaa is one of the first people from an Indian law school who ventured to do a PhD in sociology,” Professor Roy gushes, “which was not, and is still not, a very common thing, but now it’s at least heard of. And since Swethaa’s, you know, several years older than I am—”
“–I am not–”
“–they have been an inspiration for quite a few of us.”
“Right now it seems like a very clear predicted trajectory,” says Professor Ballakrishnen, “but at the time that we were doing it, we didn’t really have a set up or clear idea of what to do.”
This speaks to, not just the possibilities inherent in nonlinearity, but the role of belonging in determining what is possible in the first place. For someone with more privilege, each education and career step might be mere items on a to-do list; for someone not accustomed to seeing people like themselves in certain environments, those steps become “leaps of hope,” as Professor Ballakrishnen characterizes it. Many people don’t have the luxury of taking chances that feel unrealistic; a sense of belonging, of acceptance and entitlement within certain environments, could make such pursuits feel more attainable, and therefore worthwhile.
Such belonging also facilitates authenticity—a luxury many marginalized professionals must forego to gain access to certain spaces. Speaking on his pre-academic legal career, Professor Roy says, “I didn’t like the way I sounded when I spoke and when I wrote when I was in the firm.”
Though he is able to bring more authenticity to his academic career, there are still roadblocks—especially in legal scholarship.
“If you look at the way legal articles are written you normally don’t say ‘I, this is what I think,’” Professor Roy explains. “You say, ‘it is this researcher’s opinion.’ You are trying to distance yourself from the research…a lot of legal scholarship even today, especially in Europe, if you read a legal article, it’s written in a very neutral, objective, scientific fashion where you don’t feel your way into what you’re talking about, but you talk about it based on the subject.”
Professor Roy admits that removing, or at least distancing, “self” can be a useful strategy for analysis. “But at the same time, there is an assumption…which is that if you do not address the positionality issue, then the ‘neutral’ space is a privileged position that is being passed off as a neutral perspective.”
Such “neutrality,” then, doesn’t offer scholars a complete, unbiased understanding of a given topic; rather, it offers an understanding that is still bound by one specific perspective—not the researcher’s perspective, but the perspective of those in a position of power. Many efforts to address this in recent years, in Professor Roy’s opinion, have not gone far enough.
“We were also a little upset by traditional edited collections and journals. They would have people who belong to the periphery as a chapter towards the end…like, ‘this is…property rights from a black perspective,’…so it would be attributing an identity as a sort of afterthought to the central analysis, which left the alienation intact.”
If one were to attribute a goal to this workshop series—“these things can be substantive and evaluative even if we don’t have an outcome”—it would be twofold. In the shorter term, the professors envision a potential book project. In a more distant future, they would love to develop a journal centered on the concept of legal affect.
“The whole idea would be that you approach a legal issue based on your positionality, or what you feel rather than what you think,” Professor Roy explains. “It’s based on that that you realize that the law shapes our lives in strange ways, and therefore you have a hold on the law literally, because you arrive at it via your positionality rather than, let’s say, contributing to the life of the law…I do think that queer theory is the best, or at least a substantive way, to create the groundwork for a journal like this.”
Professor Ballakrishnen concurs. “Law is such a rigid construction for so many reasons that considering who interlopes and how they intermingle with such transgression is a subversive project and is a queer project and is a critical project…we come to it from different positionalities. So in a sense, we too are interloping into the subject differently. But I hope there’s something we can build from such interloping.”