SLR Editorial Board
In his celebrated memoir Out of Place, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said excavates accounts of growing up in the Arab world and moving to America as being important influences on his pathbreaking work. In a somewhat similar vein, editors Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud have compiled a wonderful set of nine essays in an open-access volume titled Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (Cambridge University Press 2024). This volume brings together a group of scholars who have conducted research in around 20 countries around the world and shaped socio-legal studies 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” (p xiii). This interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution in socio-legal studies by calling our attention to the importance of positionality and reflexivity in law and society.
In the same spirit, the Editorial Board of the Socio-Legal Review is delighted to present a series of nine essays responding to, building upon, departing from each of the nine chapters in the volume. In this book round-table, we bring together authors working in diverse disciplines such as socio-legal studies, Asian-American studies, Latin-American studies, social and cultural anthropology, ethnography and activism, social and political psychology, comparative studies, and international law. These authors draw from their own research and life experiences to comment critically on the issues of positionality, reflexivity, identity, research ethics, comparison, legitimacy, harm, relationality, dislocation, and insider/outsider that populate the edited volume. These essays are meant not simply as reviews of the chapters in the volume but as critical commentary on what “out of place” means in different contexts and from different vantage points. This Editorial Introduction presents short overviews of each of these nine essays.
In the first essay titled Taking Some Positions On Positionality, Ashley Rubin responds to co-editor Mark Massoud’s introductory chapter by underscoring the increasing importance of positionality in research methodology. However, Rubin importantly pushes back against the tendency to associate positionality with categorical identity categories such as race, caste, gender, religion, etc., asking us to consider “more important factors than haves and have nots.” Emphasising the distinction between positionality and reflexivity, Rubin argues that positionality statements are simply “one small part of the larger reflexivity process.” She suggests that in order to truly transform the manner in which we research and write, scholars must be deeply reflexive of their research, including being reflexive about positionality, and in doing so, move beyond identitarian categories.
The second essay, authored by John Park, is titled Feeling Out of Place, Fighting to Belong. Drawing on his own experience as a Korean immigrant scholar in the United States, Park highlights the intellectual and political potential of Leisy Abrego’s chapter “Research as Accompaniment” and her larger work, especially in the context of the increasing legalized violence against immigrant communities in the United States. In this essay, Park argues that the disposition of “research as accompaniment” which is marked by being with and studying professionally people of one’s own community who have suffered harm, while being emotionally exhausting, is also liberatory. It inaugurates, in Park’s words, “a new way of writing and thinking”; indeed “a new way of being.”
In the third essay Epistemic Privilege, Gender Violence, and Care in Empirical Sociolegal Research, Rachel Sieder engages with Sindiso Mnisi Weeks’ chapter “Pretty and Young in Places where People get Killed in Broad Daylight.” She uses this essay to talk about the dangers and vulnerabilities of carrying out research as an “embodied person in a particular time and place.” Seider reflects on her own work on gender violence with indigenous women in Latin America to highlight the multiple challenges of writing about trauma and violence—the paralysing nature of survivor’s guilt, the imperative of avoiding the pornographies of violence, and the necessity of self-care. Finally, in approaching the possibilities of decolonising socio-legal scholarship through empirical approaches, Sieder remarks: “Ultimately, we need to be reflexive not only about our positionality, but about law itself.”
Jo Krishnakumar authors the fourth essay titled Navigating Insider-Outsider Relationalities with Sex Workers in China’s Sex Industry in response to the chapter by Margaret Boittin. In this essay, Krishnakumar asks us to think of how positionality and relationality work on field and in real life through relationships of power, especially when interacting with communities that suffer harm on a daily basis. Reflecting on their own experience of working with sex workers in India, Krishnakumar argues that one is never fully an insider or outsider, but rather continues on in a “spectrum of outsider and insider.” They also ask some critical questions of Boittin, in particular, her use of words such as “prostitution” and “pimp” and the differential treatment of police and sex workers in the chapter. Krishnakumar’s ultimate provocation is to work towards research relationships that empower researched communities and are “relational, human, and centred on care.”
Pallavi Ramanathan begins the fifth essay entitled You Don’t Belong: Understanding the “Out of Place” Refugee with the crucial question: “What does it mean to be ‘out of place’?” Interestingly, Ramanathan identifies herself as being potentially out-of-place in writing for this series on socio-legal studies being a social psychologist. However, her essay fiercely defends out-of-placeness as a “place of its own”, as a “critical space for reflection, resistance, and identity negotiation.” In making this claim, Ramanathan uses her own work on resistance and collective action among the Tibetan refugees in India to comment on Lynette Chua’s discussion of out-of-place movements in Singapore and Myanmar among others.
In the sixth essay, Sneha Bhambri responds to Pratiksha Baxi’s chapter Out of Place in an Indian Court. Bhambri asks whether much has changed on ground for researchers without a background in law, specifically, women researchers. She draws from her own courtroom ethnography researching domestic violence cases in Mumbai’s lower courts to show the daily negotiations of understanding the spatiality of the court complex, withstanding the pressure of being constantly watched, interacting with dismissive or authoritative lawyers, and so on. These experiences raised important questions of ethics and legitimacy during her research. She shows, for example, how the western methodological insistence on full disclosure often creates access barriers in different contexts. Bhambri argues that it is essential to confront these questions to work towards dismantling barriers that persist in the field to this day.
The seventh essay in the series, Out of Place in Italy, is authored by David Nelken who picks up from Swethaa Ballakrishnen’s contribution to comment on positionality from the “position of the comparativist.” Nelken’s treatment of “out of placeness” is inspired from his changing places—he recounts in detail his experiences of moving to Italy from the United Kingdom and the challenges it presented. Nelken warns us against the tendency of comparison turning into commensuration where peoples and places are judged according to a so-called common standard. Positionality, Nelken argues, teaches us that in “finding one’s place in the world,” one realises that there exists neither a “view from nowhere” or a “view from everywhere.”
Following Nelken’s essay on comparative law, Shubhangi Aggarwala turns our attention to the dislocating effects of international law using Luis Eslava’s chapter on “Trigueño International Law.” Placing Eslava’s ideas into an Indian context, Aggarwala shows that India’s indigenous communities exist in a “state of perpetual dislocation” as a result of colonial and postcolonial governance as well as the universalising global discourse on indigeneity. Aggarwala argues that Eslava’s assessment of out-of-placeness not being a static identity but a dynamic condition allows us to hold space not simply for narratives of marginalisation but also for possibilities of agency, resilience, and creativity by diverse communities across the globe.
In the final essay of this series titled Of Routine Scrutiny: Insider And Outsider, Narmala Halstead picks up from Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s chapter on familiar outsiders to trace a longer genealogy of reflexive work in anthropology. Halstead argues that in the past, issues of positionality and reflexivity, although less visible, were not wholly absent. To this end, she carries out a comprehensive literature review of the insider-outsider debates in anthropology, focussing, in particular, on the heightened critical examination of self and other subjectivities. Ultimately, Halstead draws our attention to the periodic theoretical shifts that take place in the discipline owing to a constant processes of critical self-scrutiny and processes of anthropological knowledge-making.
Together, these nine response essays add to the nine chapters of the edited volume in generating a self-critical discourse on positionality in law and society fieldwork. In this series, Park, Seider, and Krishnakumar show us the complexities involved in researching and working with communities that suffer harm. While they attune us to the necessity of developing methods of relationality and care with such communities, they also warn us against fetishising violence, harm, and marginalisation, and uncover the liberatory potentialities of vulnerability. Similarly, Nelken and Ramanathan creatively interpret the researcher’s out-of-placeness as being neither a view from nowhere nor from everywhere but a place of immense possibility in and of itself. In their essays, out-of-placeness emerges, importantly, as a vantage point of doing context-informed, critical socio-legal work. Conversely, Aggarwala shows us what out of placeness means for communities that find themselves at the inflection point of global discourses and local contexts, and argues that interpreted as a perpetual condition in the making, out of placeness is a site of resilience and creativity by marginalised communities. Bhambri’s and Halstead’s essays offer us reflexive accounts of the discipline itself—while the former comments on the implications of a western ethic of disclosure and fieldwork, the latter brings to fore the processual evolution of anthropological debates on the insider-outsider dyad.
Finally, something that persists throughout this series and resonates deeply with the contemporary moment in identity politics is Ashley Rubin’s provocation to move beyond identitarian categories in understanding positionality. The question this series poses is how we may understand, with care and criticality, the diversity of human differences and vulnerabilities without reducing incommensurable, singular human beings into neat categories of equivalence? We thank our authors for offering their own carefully considered reflections, and we invite you to offer yours.
To access all the essays included in this book round-table, click here.
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