Drawing upon interview data from a yearlong study with fourteen children of Latinx immigrants applying to college, I explore how students’ visions of their futures shape their college decision-making processes. I utilize possible selves theory as a guiding framework, which speaks to how people imagine who they may become in the future and can guide their actions (Markus & Nurius, 1986). I explore the following research questions: (1) how do children of Latinx immigrants conceive of their possible futures, both within higher education and beyond?, (2) what is the connection between student and familial pasts in the conceptualization of educational futures, and (3) how do students’ conceptualizations of the future shape their higher education decision-making? What I find is that students think about various possible versions of themselves simultaneously in their decision-making. This chapter contributes to current research on college choice/decision-making, the application of possible selves theory to postsecondary education, and increased insight on the role of immigrant origins in the construction of higher education aspirations among the children of Latinx immigrants.

The chapter author, Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, who uses non-binary 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.”

The author of this chapter, Lynette J. Chua, is a scholar of law and resistance 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 her first two books. 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.” Being out of place in so many ways is what enabled her to see the importance of emotions and relationships for human rights activists, a central theme of Chua’s work on Myanmar.

The chapter provides a critical reflection on how the author, Leisy J. Abrego, conceptualizes, conducts, analyzes, writes up, and presents her research projects. As a “mestiza from a working-class background,” the author 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. The author is a sociologist who studies how legal violence is perpetrated against migrants and its effects on their legal consciousness. 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.

Positionality in research refers to the disclosure of how an author’s self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research article or other publication can enhance the validity of its empirical data as well as its theoretical contribution. However, such self-disclosure puts scholars in a vulnerable position, and those most likely to reveal how their positionality shapes their research are women, ethnic minorities, or both. At this stage of the field’s methodological development, the burdens of positionality are being carried unevenly by a tiny minority of researchers. In this book, we spotlight a group of scholars from around the world who shaped the field of law and society through their intentional awareness of how their self-identifications, experiences of marginalization, and professional privileges influenced their research questions, design, methods, and writing about the law.

The chapter 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. The author, Margaret 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. Embracing this outsider status also became the source of her strength during fieldwork and later in the academy. 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 – who felt comfortable with her precisely because she was an outsider.

In the final chapter, the legal anthropologist Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1946–2022) reflects on 45 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 doing research and the children.” Von Benda-Beckmann 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 different times and places.

The chapter is a reflection on the “unsafe” and “painstaking work” of observing rape trials. The author, Pratiksha 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 non-lawyer and as a woman led various people in the courtrooms where she conducted fieldwork to “scold” her for studying rape trials. The out-of-place feeling from fieldwork followed her long afterward, like a trauma. Though her fieldwork took place two decades earlier, the “anger and grief” never went away. 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.”

The chapter reflects on the tension that the author, Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, 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.”

Massoud discusses in the Introduction the benefits and costs of open and principled discussion of positionality. He draws on a longitudinal study he conducted of major law and society journals to argue that scholars who are women, ethnic minorities, or both unevenly carry the burdens of positionality. Massoud encourages 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 chapter builds an “out of place” theory for international law. The author, Luis Eslava, a scholar of international law and development, draws on postcolonial legal theory, history, and ethnographic research in Colombia 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 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.

We turn to the problem of choosing between going “wide” and going “deep”: between seeking a little bit of information on a large number of cases versus studying a smaller number of cases intensively. We outline a simulation-based approach to identify the optimal mix of breadth and depth. Simulations suggest that going deep is especially valuable where confounding is a concern, for queries about causal pathways, and where models embed strong beliefs about causal effects. We also find that there are diminishing marginal returns to each strategy and that depth often provides the greatest gains when we have cross-case evidence on only a modest number of cases.

This chapter shows how to use causal models to inform the selection of cases for intensive analysis. We outline a procedure in which we predict the inferences that will be made when future data are found and use these predictions to inform case-selection strategies. We ask: Given a set of cases on which we already have data on X and Y, which cases will it be most advantageous to choose for more in-depth investigation? We show that the optimal case-selection strategy depends jointly on the model we start with and the causal question we seek to answer and draw out the implication that researchers should be wary of generic case-selection principles.

This chapter is the first of three in which we investigate how causal models can inform research design. In this chapter, we draw out the implications of the causal-model approach for clue-selection strategies, for figuring out which pieces of evidence are likely to be most informative about a question of interest. We demonstrate procedures for assessing which clues minimize expected posterior variance and how to construct an optimal decision tree for determining a dynamic clue-gathering strategy.