I felt anxiety deep in my stomach as I entered the law professor’s office for my tenure-track job interview.Footnote ¹ It was 2008. I had recently completed my doctorate, and this meeting with a full professor who was also a leading scholar in my field would be pivotal. A “no” vote from him would end my candidacy. I sat across from him, an older white man, ready to discuss my research on human rights. He peppered me with questions about my background, the circumstances surrounding my immigration from Sudan to the United States (US), my childhood experiences, the languages that I spoke growing up, the places that my parents or I had lived, and other personal matters. By the time the interview ended, I had been invited to speak neither about my qualifications – my reasons for applying, my teaching experience, my job talk, my book manuscript – nor about my research and leadership plans were I to be hired. As a lawyer, I knew his direct questions about ethnicity, language, and national origin were prohibited by US employment law and fair hiring practices,Footnote ² but because I was new to the field, needed a job, and wanted to make a good impression, I answered all of them. Alone later that night, I cried – not only because I had not wanted to talk about personal matters with this man, but also because I had felt powerless to assert my rights. My vulnerability and fear of not being accepted and not getting a job had replaced my academic preparation and legal training. Though austerity measures led the law faculty to stop this search without hiring anyone, my experience at the interview taught me how scholars exert authority over one another. Asking questions may be a benign way to get to know people in ethnically diverse societies, but it can also spotlight the class and racial privileges that sustain intellectual, socioeconomic, and cultural hierarchies.

Some of us feel like outsiders in our research sites and in academia; both are places dominated by people who do not share our backgrounds. We may find ourselves “out of place” by virtue of our social marginality, unique professional privileges, or both. As this book shows, being out of place – and reflecting on this subject position transparently – provides benefits to law and society scholarship, but it also places burdens on the researchers themselves.

Out of place scholars are typically minorities – through their class background, ethnicity, gender, physical ability, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and so on. These scholars may find law’s power dominated or usurped by able-bodied, gender-normative, heteronormative, and/or majority ethnic or religious populations, often backgrounds and identities to which they do not belong. Feelings of isolation in fieldwork sometimes grow stronger in the academy. Being or feeling different from the majority in a research site or an academic field can compel out of place scholars to think carefully about how their personal backgrounds and experiences shape their research.

Consider the influence of a US Supreme Court nominee’s background – their class, gender, race, upbringing, or schooling – in debates over their appointment. Taking a judge’s personal background into account is a recognition that factors related to identity and unrelated to legal doctrine shape judicial decisions. Likewise, good lawyering involves using skills learned from law school – such as interpreting precedent, evaluating evidence, and following procedures – and skills learned from life experience. Lawyers unable to recognize how clients, judges, and jurors perceive them are going to struggle. In law and society scholarship, bringing the personal to bear on the research clarifies – or entirely blurs – the boundaries between law, politics, and power.

Academic writing, particularly in the social sciences, was built on the idea of outsiders looking in. However, due to structural inequalities, some people never had the privilege of joining academia because of their class, gender, race, or other minority status, and some of the people who became successful scholars could not share their outsider status. The social theorist Robert Merton, for instance, was born Meyer Schkolnick; he anglicized his name in the early twentieth century during a time when Jewish immigrants faced exclusion from American universities, businesses, and social institutions (Snell Reference Snell2006). Decades later, a cultural turn in American writing led journalists and scholars to give greater attention to positioning their self-identifications, experiences of marginalization, or professional privileges. The prevalent term for this is “positionality,” though several other terms, including “reflexivity” and “standpoint,” are also used to refer to similar concepts. While these terms have different genealogies, I see them as interchangeable ways of naming the phenomenon of opening up one’s self-identifications – rather than only one’s ideas – to criticism.

Scholars of literary theory have labeled this intimate connection between one’s lived experiences and theoretical contributions as “autotheory.” To them, autotheory is about expressing something that was once inexpressible, including about one’s physical body – “the personal made public,” as Maggie Nelson discusses it in The Argonauts (Nelson Reference Nelson2015, 60). Writing with the self, to Nelson, is both a form of protection and a signal of belonging. For the postcolonial and critical race theorist Vilashini Cooppan, turning to our most intimate sources of knowledge – thinking autotheoretically by connecting ourselves to the arguments that we make – allows us “to think with the I, not merely as the I” (Cooppan Reference Cooppan2021, 587). For Cooppan, recognition of the self is a form of reparation for longstanding social and legal inequalities. It is a starting point for long-run social and legal change in which “a long debt of nonrecognition, historical unseeing, political unresponsivity, closed ears and eyes and hearts, is coming due” (602). Consider the legal scholar Patricia Williams, whose first-person accounts of social marginalization based on gender, race, and class shaped a generation of critical race theory on law’s shortcomings (Williams Reference Williams1991). Consider also the literary historian Saidiya Hartman, who argues that using autobiographical examples as data “is not about navel gazing, it’s … about trying to look at … one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them” (Saunders Reference Saunders2008, 5). Conveying personal experiences puts scholars in a vulnerable position, making research and writing more difficult. Such exposure also sparks a rebellion against academic traditions built on a pretense of neutrality – and legal rules built on a pretense of impartiality.

Understanding the conditions under which research creates useful knowledge, and how researchers themselves influence their research, are questions that are as old as the social sciences themselves. This book adds to these questions a distinct and powerful dimension of positionality: one’s marginal social position, and the benefits and burdens associated with it. One’s sense of marginality may change across places and times. A scholar’s ethnic identity may be minoritized in some contexts but not in others, or a working-class immigrant kid may grow up to become a celebrated intellectual employed by a wealthy university. Feeling marginal even in one context of our lives, as all of us do to varying degrees, has important consequences for our research anywhere. Centering a researcher’s marginality – their “outsider within status” – adds “excitement to creativity” and enriches academic debate (Collins Reference Collins1986, S15). My own study (Massoud Reference Massoud2022) of positionality statements appearing in law and society journals found that researchers who occupy marginalized social positions are the most likely ones to be sharing positionality; moreover, many of these marginalized researchers’ positionality statements explain how their privileges, and not their marginalization, influenced their research.

To address the connections between positionality, research methods, and law’s power, this book brings together a globally diverse group of law and society scholars who share a marginalized, or out of place, positionality in their research. In the chapters that follow, they explain how their identities, backgrounds, and experiences transformed their research and themselves, during and after fieldwork, and across sometimes decades-long careers. They discuss what they learned about the law by virtue of being and working out of place.

Out of Place offers an antidote to those who see law as a set of abstract rules. Positionality shifts attention from the rules to the people who create, enforce, and are subjected to them. This transformation – putting people first in legal studies – increases empathy for research subjects and other researchers. The authors of the chapters that follow have honed these skills. They share their experiences to help early career scholars who are embarking on empirical projects and established scholars who are retooling their own research. Out of Place is designed to encourage collective and transparent self-reflection on positionality and, specifically, marginalization – and to give hope to a rising generation of law and society scholars who may be different from the field’s founders in fundamental ways.

A Field Born Out of Place

If there is any canon that the field of law and society has created since the mid-twentieth century, it is a methodological one. This is because law and society researchers study how the law shapes society often by borrowing or enhancing research methods found in the disciplinary traditions of the humanities and social sciences. Grounded research – traveling to a place to conduct fieldwork, historical research, or interviews – shaped much of our interdisciplinary field’s foundation.Footnote ³ But this kind of research also shapes law and society scholars as teachers, colleagues, and mentors.

The interdisciplinary field of law and society was born of efforts to connect empirical data with legal studies, often alongside a commitment to addressing inequality. In the US, law and society began as a field of outsiders who felt marginalized by their academic disciplines. The field also grew separately, and earlier, outside of the US. Founded in the 1940s, Japan’s law and society association may be the first of its kind. Scholars in Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and the UK, among other places, have also been producing decades of law and society scholarship. The field’s pioneers worked around the world in rapidly changing legal, political, and economic contexts. They distinguished themselves from their law faculty colleagues who were making their careers studying legal doctrine. In other words, law and society scholarship began as an effort by people from different disciplines and in different parts of the world who were professionally out of place and who promoted the benefits of leaving their offices – going out of place – to conduct research.

In the US, many in the first generation of law and society scholars were motivated by a shared desire “to create a more humane, egalitarian society” (Kennedy and Klare Reference Kennedy and Klare1984, 461). But they also did not write of themselves as fundamentally a group of white men who held significant professional privilege. As the law and society scholar Laura Gómez noted, the field’s “founding generation included no people of color and only three White women – at least partly a reflection of the gender and racial makeup of the professoriat at the time” (Gómez Reference Gómez2012, 222–3). Similarly, nearly all of the twenty-one foundational, “well-known and well-regarded Law and Society research projects” featured in a recent textbook were conducted by white men (Halliday and Schmidt Reference Halliday and Schmidt2009, 7). In this context, explicitly reflecting on positionality would perhaps be too obvious; as Gómez explained, the field’s composition meant that US-based scholars of law and society were largely presumed to be white and cisgender male.

Law and society scholars are, of course, more diverse than the pioneering generation, inside and outside the US. Among this new generation are scholars who occupy marginal social positions and who are sharing their positionality. Doing so provides many benefits. It can establish an author’s credibility in cases where insider knowledge may be of particular value, such as when a person from a given place, who speaks the local dialect, studies its legal history or legal system. Reflecting on one’s positionality can also be a form of knowledge production. It can help scholars to find their inner wisdom, and it can build community among researchers and between researchers and their research subjects, particularly among scholars who identify as members of under-represented or minoritized groups. It can facilitate more open discussion about how racial oppression, gender-based discrimination, and socioeconomic privileges shape research methods and career paths, which creates space for a more diverse generation of scholars to participate in law and society, and to influence the field’s development.

However, while positionality provides significant benefits, it comes at a price. When an author consciously blurs the boundaries between the personal and the professional by inserting their experiences into their scholarly work, they open up their ideas and themselves to criticism and harm (Medzani Reference Medzani2021; Miled Reference Miled2019; Galam Reference Galam2015). That harm may include the devaluation of the scholarly content of the work because, for example, it is therefore presumed not to meet social science standards of neutrality or objectivity. Positionality also requires emotional labor. In some cases, scholars communicate painful memories to their research subjects, reviewers, and readers (Gustafson Reference Gustafson2011; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2008). Doing so may cause discomfort or – when a scholar is regularly asked to represent and speak about their gender identity or ethnic background rather than their scholarship – exhaustion. At the extreme, researchers who have experienced physical or psychological trauma may retraumatize themselves by retelling their suffering. These harms disproportionately affect historically marginalized groups in academia, including women and people of color.

Moreover, these harms do not merely accrue when marginalized scholars speak about their own positionality; they also accrue when scholars from majority populations do not speak about theirs, because that omission renders positionality peripheral to mainstream law and society scholarship. Normalizing positionality, especially out of place positionality, will involve all scholars in law and society considering how their identities, class backgrounds, and professional privileges shape their motivations, questions, methods, and findings.

In the field of law and society, out of place scholars who are women, ethnic minorities, or both have unevenly carried the burdens of positionality. To provide evidence for this argument, this Introduction proceeds as follows. First, I discuss the benefits of open and principled discussion of positionality, drawing on existing law and society scholarship, including my own. Second, based on a longitudinal empirical study I conducted of positionality in two of the field’s oldest journals, I assess who has written about positionality and how and why they have written about it. Third, I reflect upon the costs, particularly for marginalized populations, of disclosing the influence of identities on research and writing. Fourth, I provide an overview of this book and give attention to how an out of place positionality has been building hope for a new generation of law and society scholarship. I conclude by encouraging law and society scholars of all backgrounds to adopt a “position sensibility” by examining and explaining how their own self-identifications, privileges, or experiences shape and challenge research methods.

The Benefits of Positionality

Law and society researchers who use empirical methods – particularly qualitative methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews – often invite vulnerable persons to share their backgrounds, emotions, and experiences. Empirical research may therefore involve unequal power relations, especially if researchers reveal little to nothing about themselves while their subjects share intimate stories in order to help the researchers (Rios Reference Rios2011). Becoming self-aware about their own positionality is a first step that researchers can take towards rectifying this imbalance and building stronger social science methods.

As scholars, our class, educational training, group experience, and membership in minoritized or non-minoritized groups create “cultural frames” through which we ask questions and analyze data (Bell Reference Bell2016, 320, citing Goffman Reference Goffman1974). Feminist and critical race scholars have argued that it is fundamental to consider how the standpoints of scholars who are members of non-privileged groups influence their approaches to studying law’s systemic inequalities.Footnote ⁴ Scholars of intersectionality have shown how people experience multiple, overlapping forms of marginalization – which create privilege in some ways but not in others – depending on their citizenship, class, educational attainment, gender, gender identity, physical abilities, professional position, race, and sexual orientation (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2011, Reference Crenshaw1991). Building on this feminist and intersectional scholarship, this section outlines five primary benefits of communicating an out of place positionality: establishing connection and credibility, challenging structures of oppression, opening up social science, empowering communities, and communicating privileges.

Who Is Out of Place?

The scholars who wrote the chapters that follow have done the hard work of expressing positionality. They draw on their experiences of marginalization, making their vulnerability into a strength. They have placed their trust in Chua and me as the volume editors and in you as the reader. Given the benefits that accrue to the field when scholars disclose their self-identifications, marginalization, and privileges, it would seem to make sense for scholars to do so regularly in their published work. However, this is not yet the case. In fact, as this section will show, at least on the pages of the field’s two oldest academic journals, only a small minority of socio-legal scholars actually risk revealing themselves in this manner. Kathleen Blee’s assertion that positionality “is often erased from written accounts” of research findings is as empirically true in the 2020s – at least in the field of law and society, one that connects law and social science to social justice – as it was in the 1990s when she wrote it (Blee Reference Blee1998, 383, cited in Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann2007, 326). Even more troubling is that the scholars who do write about positionality are overwhelmingly women and ethnic minorities – in other words, those who are also the most likely to be marginalized in the field.

To find direct reference to positionality, I analyzed the first fifty-six volumes of the Law & Society Review (LSR) from 1966 through 2022, and the first forty-nine volumes of the Journal of Law and Society (JLS) from 1974 through 2022. Together, these are two of the oldest English-language socio-legal studies journals in the world. The LSR is the oldest; it is the flagship journal of the LSA. The JLS is the longest-established law and society journal in the United Kingdom (UK); it has connections with the UK-based Socio-Legal Studies Association. The results of my study of these two journals provide a baseline for assessing positionality in other law and society journals as well as in books, which necessarily have more space. What I found testifies to the fact that nearly all authors writing for these journals over half a century – to echo the searing words of Edward Said – “were or tried to be cut from the same cloth” (Said Reference Said1999, 274).Footnote ⁷

I searched across all digitized articles from both journals for prominent words used to identify positionality (Table 1.1, see also Wasserfall Reference Wasserfall1993; Roberts and Sanders Reference Roberts and Sanders2005; Huisman Reference Huisman2008).Footnote ⁸ In total, I found 28 articles, by 36 authors, that discuss researcher positionality.Footnote ⁹ The authors’ racial and gender self-identifications are striking: 22 of the 36 authors identify as white women, nine as women of color, three as men of color, and two as white men. That is to say, women and people of color authored all but two of the 28 articles discussing positionality. Many of them are also minoritized as working class, disabled, immigrants, queer persons, non-native English speakers, or first-generation university graduates.

While I conducted iterative searches and developed a systematically generated sample, the dataset is limited by the search terms and the journals. However, it is likely true that most of the scholars who have published in the JLS and the LSR, especially in the early decades of both journals, were or are white men, so the proportion of women and minorities who talk about positionality is much higher than the proportion of white men who do so. This effect is compounded by the fact that our field has historically been dominated by white men.

While the concept of positionality is younger than both journals, the term is at least a generation old, having gained prominence in the early 1990s in feminist and critical race scholarship (England Reference England1994; Awkward Reference Awkward1995). However, about a third of the twenty-eight articles that refer to positionality or the related search terms were published since 2020. While this suggests a rising trend, especially in LSR where most of these articles appeared, it is also a trend that remains profoundly limited.

In nearly all of these articles, positionality statements focused on how the researcher’s background and identity may have influenced access to people and places, including by prompting suspicion or trust. For example, in the oldest article, published in 1978, the author mentioned her positionality as a woman in order to dismiss the effects of her gender on her research (Crowe Reference Crowe1978, 226). Many of the more recent articles discussed power relations between researchers and subjects, including how the privilege of holding a university-based appointment influenced the methods (Cownie Reference Cownie2015, Massoud Reference Massoud2015, Powell and Phelps Reference Powell and Phelps2021). One of the authors discussed how his identity as a heterosexual male facilitated access to police officers working in a “heteronormative environment” (Sierra-Arévalo Reference Sierra-Arévalo2021, 80). Other authors focused on their marginalization, including one survivor of trauma and another who reported having an “outsider positionality” in the field of law and society because of her professional writing on critical race theory (Houh Reference Houh2006, 482). One white male author discussed positionality in the context of his race helping him to access white police officers but blocking his access to their Black colleagues. Across all published articles in the JLS and the LSR, only two have sub-headings on positionality: one of these is titled “Methods and Positionality” (Statz Reference Statz2021, 16) and the other is “Positionalities” (Gonzalez, Simon, and Rogers Reference Gonzalez, Simon and Rogers2022, 485). The paucity of these direct references to positionality suggests that the overwhelming majority of scholars writing in our field’s leading journals, including minoritized scholars, do not discuss their positionality, an imbalance that this book tries to redress.Footnote ¹⁰

Some of my own empirically based articles do not discuss positionality, favoring instead an objective, neutral, or dispassionate scholarly voice (Massoud Reference Massoud2020; Reference Massoud2014; Reference Massoud2011). Reflecting with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps I had wanted to foreground the stories of the people whom I had met and the theories that my work had generated. Perhaps I had also not wanted to risk exposing myself to criticism, either for being excessively interested in myself or for “going native” – a disparagement that I received from some senior scholars when starting my doctoral dissertation on human rights activists in Sudan, the country of my birth. As a young scholar hoping to enter and influence a large scholarly field, I adhered to the writing conventions that I had seen in the leading journals.Footnote ¹¹ However, the empirical writing of a new generation of more diverse scholars is eroding these traditions.

In some cases, the absence of positionality statements may reflect non-qualitative methods since no socio-legal journal exclusively publishes qualitative work. However, there is nothing to suggest that only scholars who use qualitative methods should consider positionality. Class, gender, and racial privilege or marginalization may influence research design, textual interpretation, and quantitative data analysis just as they may influence qualitative research (Soedirgo and Glas Reference Soedirgo and Glas2021). Even so, women and people of color – who presumably have not written the majority of articles published in our field’s journals – are vastly over-represented as authors of articles that discuss positionality in both the JLS and the LSR.

The Burdens of Positionality

The intentional choice to discuss positionality may elevate a researcher’s authority, but it requires emotional energy, hard work, and skill to overcome significant challenges. Building on the empirical data presented above – which shows that very few articles in two leading journals make reference to positionality, and that those that do are authored almost entirely by women and people of color – this section explains some of the burdens associated with positionality. To paraphrase Emily M. S. Houh’s (Reference Houh2006) blistering critique of an introductory law and society reader that failed to incorporate a feminist or critical race perspective, if the field’s leading journals are meant to create a canon of law and society scholarship, what messages are these journals conveying through the glaring absence of explicit reflection on positionality? And, as Houh concludes, more importantly, do we care? (491). I care, for one, because the burdens placed on those who disclose positionality are disproportionately carried by the field’s minorities.

Overview of the Book

I have underscored the importance of balancing positionality’s costs and benefits. The remainder of this book proceeds with a sense of hopefulness about the place of positionality in the field’s methodological development. In the chapters that follow, eight socio-legal scholars consider and connect with their own positionalities. Given the personal nature of their experiences, they each write in their own styles. What unites their chapters is that they each explain how they found themselves to be out of place, how they confronted, understood, and adopted that subject position, and how they shaped their understanding of the law and their contributions to the field by virtue of being out of place. They explain positionality across the lifespan of the research process (Abrego) and its constituent steps, including fieldwork within a specific research site (Mnisi Weeks and Boittin), fieldwork across multiple projects (Chua), long-term fieldwork in courtrooms (Baxi), building theory (Ballakrishnen and Eslava), and multi-sited fieldwork across a multi-decade career (von Benda-Beckmann).

Their work provides three broad lessons about an out of place positionality. First, they never took their identities for granted at any point in the research process. This lesson is important for everyone precisely because, as Ballakrishnen explains in Chapter 7, some of us do not have the luxury of not thinking about our identities. Scholars who write about and discuss positionality, especially those unaccustomed to doing it, must thus do so with care and consideration.

Second, they did not shy away from hybridity and confusion whenever they considered their positionality. Identities and subject positions are conditional. The scholars in this book who used qualitative methods found themselves inside and outside of place in a multiplicity of ways, often simultaneously, and at different points in the research process, all of which is hard to compartmentalize. This can lead to ambiguity and discomfort. However, as their writing shows, being out of place, and accepting that positionality with gratitude, can also create a growing sense of confidence and authority. While being vulnerable is not easy, it is a significant part of the research and writing process.

Third, the authors in this book embraced fluidity, multiplicity, and ambiguity not just in their personal and professional lives but also in the law. Reflecting on identities and experiences created space for these authors to understand how the law constrains or opens identities. Law and society research has long shown that the law does not exist simply in courts or their official records. It exists in people’s ordinary consciousness and behavior (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998). The power of positionality comes when out of place scholars welcome themselves into spaces where they initially may not have felt welcomed.

The scholars in this book are early career, mid-career, and senior scholars in the field of law and society. We hold different advanced degrees in anthropology, law, political science, socio-legal studies, and sociology. Collectively, we resist the urge to see “outsiderhood [as] a characteristic way of inventing … Americanness” (Moore Reference Moore1987, ix). We come from and work in at least ten countries on four continents, and we do fieldwork in other places too. Most of us are also immigrants, living and working in countries different from those of our births. Four of us self-identify as women of color, two as white women, two as men of color, and one as a gender nonbinary person of color. Some of us come from the working class or rural areas. We all hold faculty appointments at major universities. The privileges of our faculty appointments have given us the time and resources to do what we love – research, teach, and write – and to reflect upon positionality, which contributed to making this book a reality.

Chapter 2, Leisy Abrego’s “Research as Accompaniment,” provides a critical reflection on how she conceptualizes, conducts, analyzes, writes up, and presents her research projects. As a “mestiza from a working-class background,” Abrego does not have the luxury of deciding to distance from or “intellectualize” oppression. However, she sees colleagues who come from majority groups do this with relative ease. Abrego is a sociologist who studies how legal violence is perpetrated against migrants and its effects on their legal consciousness. She is also an advocate for refugee rights. In her chapter, she explains her identity as both an immigrant in the US from Central America and a scholar of immigrant rights and experiences. She feels called to commit herself to the rigorous standards required for social science and moreover to the rigorous standards required for meaningful empathy with her study participants and readers. Although much of her work is qualitative, she has chosen, for instance, not to interview migrants languishing in US border detention facilities but instead to draw attention to their plight by obtaining and analyzing government documents that provide evidence of US imperialism. Abrego writes that she welcomes “the grainy truths that arise in … embodied research and people-centered analysis.” This perspective also influences how she studies immigration law. Being an out-of-place scholar empowers Abrego “to eschew any false premise of the law’s objectivity and to view multiple angles of a law, its creation, and implementation, while also understanding how it shapes people’s public and more intimate behaviors.” The result is pathbreaking and interdisciplinary scholarship that is “simultaneously humanizing and rigorous,” and that fosters community through an “accompaniment” with immigrants rather than a study of immigrants.

Chapters 3 and 4 bring us into the experience of being out of place in the specific context of fieldwork. Chapter 3, “‘Pretty and Young’ in Places Where People Get Killed in Broad Daylight,” by Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, turns on its head Abrego’s notion of closeness and proximity. Specifically, Mnisi Weeks reflects on the tension she felt when other scholars identified her too closely with her study participants, who like her are Black South Africans. Their shared background seemed to taint or decrease her scholarly credibility, she writes. While this perspective of being a young African woman studying other young African women gives her some insider status, it also shapes how other academics see her, how study participants see her, and how she has come to see herself. Mnisi Weeks is a scholar of gender, Indigenous rights, and constitutionalism in South Africa, as well as race in the United States. However, her marginalized identity in the law sapped her authority in the centers of patriarchal power where the law resides – both in the communities she has studied and in the academy whose “default representative is a white, middle-aged, European and/or American male locked in a single discipline.” Adding to this for African scholars is the fact that “the formal law’s understanding of the customary law of … African people has been based on articulations of such by white, male anthropologists of European or American nationality or ancestry.” Mnisi Weeks’s intersectional identities and positionality, however, are precisely what allowed her to study and show how social and legal injustice are never far apart, as they weave their way into and out of the rural courts and traditional justice forums that she studied in KwaZulu-Natal.

Chapter 4, Margaret L. Boittin’s “Out of Place when Studying China’s Sex Industry,” explains how being out of place can paradoxically put one back in place – or exactly where one needs to be to achieve their research goals and values. Boittin is a lawyer and US-trained political scientist who works in a Canadian law faculty. She explains how being out of place is relative. She may not be out of place in North America as “a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes,” but she was obviously out of place when she was studying sex workers in China. While being out of place in China was “draining to the core,” she writes that embracing this outsider status also became the source of her strength during fieldwork and later in the academy. Like Abrego’s “accompaniment,” Boittin found empathy with her study participants during her fieldwork, not only with the sex workers who navigated assault and harassment but also with the police officers and public health agents who found themselves “in positions of surprising precarity and weakness as they navigate their professional responsibilities to implement prostitution policies.” But being a woman studying sex work also shoved her into a “methodological and substantive periphery” of law, political science, and China studies. This made not just her research but also herself face higher levels of scrutiny. Boittin’s scholarship, however, has successfully traversed the disciplinary boundaries that she had been taught to avoid crossing. Boittin concludes with a reminder about the exhaustion of being out of place but also with gratitude to the many respondents – sex workers, their clients, and police officers – who felt comfortable with her precisely because she was an outsider.

Chapter 5 is Lynette J. Chua’s “Feeling at Home Outside: Embracing Out-of-Placeness in the Study of Law and Resistance.” Chua is a scholar of law and social movements originally from Malaysia, educated in Singapore and the US, and working in Singapore. She says that across these diverse contexts she has “always been drawn to being, and [has] always been out of place.” Chua reflects on how her out of place positionality enabled her to write two books. For both books, Mobilizing Gay Singapore and The Politics of Love in Myanmar, Chua embraced her own status ambiguity by holding in balance both an insider status (as an Asian person who had lived and worked in Southeast Asia) and an outsider status (not being Singaporean or Burmese, nor part of the gay rights movement in either place). It was her own out of place positionality that she says first drew her to “out-of-place movements,” which allowed her to see “the strength of human agency to forge resistance against [legal] odds.” While being out of place in so many ways “can become wearisome,” it is also what enabled her to see the importance of emotions and relationships for human rights activists, a central theme of Chua’s work on Myanmar.

Chapter 6, “Out of Place in an Indian Court: Notes on Researching Rape in a District Court in Gujarat (1996–1998),” by Pratiksha Baxi, is a reflection on the “unsafe” and “painstaking work” of observing rape trials. Baxi, a leading sociologist of gender, learned Indian law and medical jurisprudence on her own during her fieldwork, through conversations with lawyers, observing trials, and reading books. However, her outsider status as a nonlawyer and as a woman led various people in the courtrooms where she conducted fieldwork to “scold” her for studying rape trials. She witnessed how sexism gave the law its power. The “judicial hierarchy was foundationally sexist,” she writes, because “male desire was inserted in the place of law” in legal arguments and judgments. The out of place feeling from fieldwork followed her long afterward, like a trauma. Though her fieldwork took place more than two decades earlier, the “anger and grief” never went away. They were instead “deferred to writing.” She writes that after her fieldwork she “was not in my own skin. I was out of place in the university and home felt unfamiliar … Law had interpolated the intimate.” However, she concludes, that “If law’s attachment to cruelty continues to mark the self, then the ability to love and be in solidarity is the necessary condition for living with the field.”

Chapters 7 and 8 turn to the ways that an out of place positionality builds socio-legal and cultural theory. Chapter 7 is Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen’s “At Odds with Everything Around Me: Vulnerability Politics and Its (Out of) Place in the Socio-Legal Academy.” Ballakrishnen, who uses nonbinary pronouns, is a sociologist of law and globalization who studies, among other things, inequality and identity in the legal profession. They identify as “a global south queer [with] ‘local north’ advantages.” Their chapter considers how identity and vulnerability – and not merely ideas – build critical legal theory. Specifically, Ballakrishnen argues that complicated legal and social hegemonies create outsider status, but the process of making hidden identities visible creates closeness, camaraderie, and change in our scholarship. Data, like identity, is not neutral, though both are often valorized in that way. And the law, Ballakrishnen writes, is also very much like identity in that both are “predicated on trust, exchange, and power, and each, when moderated with self-reflexive vulnerability, hold within them the capacity to belong, break-open, and build anew.”

Chapter 8, Luis Eslava’s “Trigueño International Law: On (Most of the World) Being (Always, Somehow) Out of Place,” uses the framework of this book to build an “out of place” theory of international law. Eslava, a scholar of international law and development, draws on postcolonial legal theory, history, and ethnographic research in Latin America and elsewhere to show how the field of international law produces and is produced by “out of placeness.” The result is an international legal order that has, for five hundred years, “continually wrecked and disciplined” people and places, especially in the Global South. Eslava sets up his “out of place” theory of international law by analyzing three moments in which he has come to understand how international law wreaks so much havoc on global culture. First, he uses the idea of a trigueño identity (“part-Indigenous, part-African, and part-Spanish”) to explore, autoethnographically, the fluidity of life in the South. Second, he explains how international law cannot adequately account for the disorder that it produces in the Global South and the Global North. Finally, he points scholars towards seeing that being out of place is fundamentally about dislocation, which is both a global reality and a sensible ethical position for contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship.

Chapter 9, “Becoming a Familiar Outsider: Multi-sited and Multi-temporal Research in Plural Legal Contexts,” concludes the book. In it, the legal scholar Keebet von Benda-Beckmann reflects on forty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork on legal pluralism in Indonesia and the Netherlands. In her fieldwork, and across her career, von Benda-Beckmann writes, she would begin as a “total stranger” and then slowly turn into a “familiar outsider.” She felt out of place as a lawyer in social science and as the descendant of a Dutch colonial sugar plantation administrator. She often conducted fieldwork with her husband, which meant that “We came as a family and had to divide our time between research and the children.” Von Benda-Beckmann, who died before this book’s publication, reminds us all that across a long and successful career, simply “being there” is ultimately what shapes our relationships and our ability to find “remarkable continuity” in the law across times and places.

Good, interdisciplinary research and fieldwork are not easy. Writing for an interdisciplinary audience is even more challenging. I learned from the contributions in this volume about the importance of not ignoring the place of the self during the research and writing process. Paying attention to our own lived experiences, marginalization, and privileges may help us to understand or own outsider status to our research subjects, and the ways that we also render our research subjects into outsiders. When we appreciate the power of positionality, we retrain our lens onto how law acts rather than what law says. We can see more clearly the imperfect and sometimes dangerous processes by which any person, powerful or weak, claims authority. It is important, then, for each of us to ask what hard places our experiences and our research have taken us to, and how those hard places have shaped the meanings and work of the law.

Conclusion

Drawing on empirical research and professional experiences in the field of law and society, including my own, this Introduction has described the benefits and burdens associated with communicating positionality, particularly an out of place positionality. While the benefits – establishing credibility, promoting diversity, and empowering marginalized scholars – accrue to the global law and society community, the burdens – increasing anxiety, shifting attention away from theoretical contributions, and reproducing dominance – are disproportionately borne by a small minority of scholars. Correspondingly, the scholars for whom articulating positionality may have little to no cost are also those who do not do it.

Law and society scholars would do well to adopt what I call a “position sensibility” by recording privileges and vulnerabilities throughout their research and writing processes, as the authors do in the chapters that follow. A sustained inquiry into positionality in law and society reminds scholars that humans, not abstract rules, are the heart of a legal process, and that balancing rules and personhood improves scholarship as it does adjudication (Noonan Reference Noonan2002). Regularly considering positionality also helps to frame theoretical contributions, which renders positionality statements a more structured and integrated part of our methods. For some scholars, this could mean explaining how their marginalization overlapped with that of their research subjects, which helped or hindered their study in distinctive ways. For others, this could mean exploring how privilege – for instance, being a well-paid professor employed by an elite university – provided them with the space, time, and resources to perform a certain kind of research.

Positionality can be a primary motivator of some scholarship, so it is important for those in a majority to consider it with care and to avoid co-optation. Transgender persons and those who identify as gender-fluid or gender nonbinary often advocate for the regular sharing of personal pronouns (such as they, she, and he) even when a cisgender person’s pronouns may seem obvious. Likewise, disclosing positionality is not only a part of the conversation; for many people, it “is a conversation” in itself (Ballakrishnen and Dezalay Reference Ballakrishnen and Dezalay2021, 22).

Understanding identity and group experience is more crucial now than ever when studying the systemic pressures facing our societies. I write this Introduction to Out of Place during a time of roiling social change: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and renewed struggles against settler colonialism in North America, populism in Europe, and human rights abuses across all continents. As these social movements have shown, a counter-hegemonic productivity comes from exposing people to worlds other than their own. Such contemporary struggles have also created enemies in high places. In the US, for example, a remarkable effort has begun to stop the teaching of critical race theory, a field that intersects with law and society.Footnote ¹⁴ The adversarial legal framework and its reverence for an impartial or “blind” justice may be hostile to the expressions of positionality at the heart of contemporary social movements. However, the long arc of the law – as much law and society scholarship has shown – can and does bend towards justice.