2005 DIDACTIC WORKSHOP OPPORTUNITY
For a fourth year, the Law & Society Association is offering Didactic Workshops on the day prior to the Law and Society Meeting at the J.W. Marriott Las Vegas Resort. The purpose is to provide a seminar on a topic or method that members may not have encountered in their scholarly training but now find related to their current work. For a nominal fee, participants may take an intensive workshop from experts in the field and receive feedback on their individual research projects. The workshops will meet from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with lunch included. The leaders and workshops this year include:
TO REGISTER FOR A WORKSHOP:
1. Complete the Annual Meeting registration, including the workshop fee of $75 (includes lunch) and indicating which workshop you wish to attend.
2. By April 12, submit a short description (up to one page) of your research interest or project. Please include your institution and discipline and send by email to Lissa Ganter at the LSA office, ganter@lawandsociety.org.
Workshop Descriptions:
Prisoners of War and Culture seeks a deeper understanding of the use of military detention in the United States campaign against terrorism. The workshop will explore the historical and legal context of military detentions in American military law and in operations from the Vietnam War to present; the evolution of court-martial procedure; the involvement of military lawyers in recent armed interventions; and the place of the current war detentions within a larger narrative of post-World War II U.S. military action and legal reform. Themes will include the legalization of military justice; professionalization of the judge advocate generals' corps; legal and political issues that complicate detention operations; extra legal influences in military culture, including the norms of military life (emphasis on hierarchy, physical courage, aggression, and conformity); and the ways in which assumptions about racial difference, gender characteristics, and sexual behavior have affected military prison cultures.
Elizabeth Hillman is currently associate professor of law at Rutgers University-Camden. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and is a veteran of seven years on active duty as an Air Force officer. Her forthcoming book is Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Princeton University Press, 2005).
Introducing Institutional Ethnography. Dorothy E. Smith developed institutional ethnography as a feminist methodology that begins from the standpoint of people’s everyday life. This research strategy is gaining increasing popularity and has been used by scholars in a variety of fields, from sociology of health, to poverty research, to law and society. It was recently the focus of a dedicated issue of the journal, Social Problems. Institutional ethnography is a sociology that replaces theory with inquiry – hence, its description as ethnography. It is designed to explore institutional, or the "ruling," relations from the perspective of people involved in them in whatever capacity. The workshop will introduce the general ideas and methods of institutional ethnography using multiple examples, including specific law-and-society topics. Additionally, the workshop will show how institutional ethnography has been used as a critique to direct attention to concrete, specific change and as a method to bring participants together to examine their own work-text-work organization. The workshop will also discuss how institutional ethnography can be developed as a skill that people working in institutional settings can learn and use.
Dorothy E. Smith received her doctorate from the University of California – Berkley and is now Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Smith has written numerous works, including Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations (1999) and in 1999 received the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award.