LSA EARLY CAREER WORKSHOP 2010

The Law and Society Association is pleased to announce the second Early Career Workshop to be held May 25-26, immediately preceding the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Chicago, Illinois, USA. We invite applications from scholars in the early stage of their careers (first three years of initial appointment or in a post doc) in any field whose scholarly interests include sociolegal studies. The Association strongly encourages applications from scholars who have not participated in LSA meetings before, in addition to scholars who have participated one or many times before.

The Early Career Workshop encourages new faculty to move their research and writing toward law-and-society topics and encourages people who are already comfortable with one methodological approach to consider others.  For those trained as lawyers, social science may seem a bit daunting. For those trained in one social science, other methodologies from other fields may seem foreign. But for all concerned, it might be useful to know these other methods. In this Early Career Workshop, we will help people to make transitions to new kinds of law-related work with a focus on questions of methodology.  As a result, we will ask: How do law-and-society scholars do their work?  And how can newcomers to the field increase their methodological range?  

This workshop will offer insight into three different streams of research methodology and will allow participants to start to come to grips with methods that they have not tried before.  The three streams are:

 The sessions within each stream will consider questions such as:

In addition, participants will be asked to submit a current working paper or project description in advance of the workshop and will be given individual feedback from faculty in individual meetings (with one or two faculty) during the workshop. The workshop will be structured to allow for informal discussion and networking over meals and during breaks.

This year’s planning committee is chaired by Eve Darian-Smith (University of California, Santa Barbara) and includes Ben Fleury-Steiner (University of Delaware), Jon Goldberg-Hiller (University of Hawai’i), Alexandra Huneeus (University of Wisconsin), Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont), Sara Parikh (Leo J. Shapiro & Assoc.), and Mariana Valverde (University of Toronto).

Twenty scholars will be selected to participate in the Workshop. Applications must be received by January 15, 2010. Applications should contain the following four items:

1.       cover sheet, which can be downloaded HERE and completed in MS Word,

2.       current CV,

3.       1-2 page letter describing research and teaching interests, and

4.       2 page description of a current research project.

These documents should be combined into a single file, in the order listed above, named for the applicant as follows: “LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_ECW.file-type”  File type should be .doc, .wpd, or .pdf. Send the file as an attachment in an email to ECW@lawandsociety.org.

The program will begin at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 25  and will end at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 26.  For those not reimbursed by their home institution, LSA will offer up to $250 for participants within North America and $450 for participants from outside North America toward the costs of travel and accommodations. If you have questions about the submission format, please get in touch with Lissa Ganter, ganter@lawandsociety.org, tel. 413-545-4617.