Introduction to special issue: practising activist socio-legal scholarship: navigating tensions and crafting approaches

Abstract

The question of how to pursue politically relevant and engaged scholarship has been an ongoing theme within socio-legal scholarship. In the United States of America, Presidential Addresses of the Law and Society Association have consistently urged greater political engagement (Lempert 2001; Seron 2016; Scheppele 2023). In the United Kingdom, journals such as Social & Legal Studies have placed critical and engaged scholarship at the core of their mission (Editorial 1992; Editorial 1998). In the Majority World1 – where the socio-legal field is less institutionalised – scholars have often been more directly involved in political action, re-imagining colonial law and using it as a tool for social change (Shivji 2018; Sieder, Ansolabehere and Alfonso Sierra 2019). These scholars have not only inspired calls for activist scholarship in the Minority World (Munger 2001) but have also unsettled the very dichotomy between scholarship and activism (D’Souza 2009)