This collection explores the development of socio-legal/law and society approaches within and across Europe, focusing self-reflexively on academic and legal cultures, institutions, kinship, and scholarly agency.
What makes a socio-legal approach socio-legal? How does it differ across legal cultures, countries, or regions? How do scholarly identities develop and change in academia's places, spaces, and contexts? This collection features contributions from socio-legal scholars who engage in a critical examination of their own work. They delve into the underlying motivations behind their research questions, as well as the methods and theories they employ. This process involves reflecting on these aspects within the broader legal and academic landscape in which they operate, taking into account their personal journeys and the historical trajectories of their research fields. The chapters not only contextualise individual socio-legal research within intellectual, institutional, and political frameworks but also explore national and transnational developments, influences, networks, and conversations.
With an emphasis on exploring the link between contextual structures and scholarly agency, underpinned by self-reflection, the contributions provide a fresh and fascinating comparative perspective on contemporary socio-legal studies.
What are the different institutional, intellectual and biographical trajectories in socio-legal studies, and how can they be compared?
This book brings together scholars from across Europe to reflect on the socio-political, legal and academic contexts in which they became the academics they are today. The chapters link individual scholars to the historical and contemporary factors that have shaped or influenced their work and careers - a novel approach that combines scholarly self-reflection with a historical perspective on the development of socio-legal studies between law and the social sciences.
The editors provide a heuristic framework for comparing and making sense of these different, dual trajectories, and show how professional scholarly biographies can be both contextualised and analysed with a view to shedding light on broader academic fields, both nationally and internationally.
