AMHERST, Mass. – The Law and Society Association is excited to announce its 2026 Advance Grant Program recipients!
The Advance Grantees, who received a total of $265,000 this year, will foster new programming opportunities for members beyond the flagship Annual Meeting and Early Career Workshops, enhancing LSA’s efforts to promote sociolegal scholarship as a global field. The recipients will develop conferences, seminars, and workshops that will facilitate collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge production among participants across the globe.
Congratulations to all of the 2026 grant recipients, and thank you to everybody who submitted proposals to enrich the LSA community. Program news and applications will be available in our monthly newsletters, on our blog, and on our various social media channels. To support future LSA grant funding initiatives, please contribute to the LSA Endowment Fund here.
2025 LSA Advance Grant Recipients:
Catherine Albiston and Pamela Erickson | University of California, Berkeley
Penelope Andrews| New York Law School
Atieh Babakhani and Javiera Araya-Moreno | Ramapo College of New Jersey
Tugba Basaran | University of Cambridge
Melissa Crouch | University of New South Wales, Sydney
Deepa Das Acevedo and Kenneth Carter | Emory University
Cynthia Farid | Global Young Academy
Julie Ham | Brock University, Rashmee Singh | University of Waterloo, and Menaka Raguparan | UNC Wilmington
Mark Fathi Massoud | University of California, Santa Cruz
Robert Nelson | Northwestern University, American Bar Foundation and Mark Suchman | Purdue University, American Bar Foundation
Natalia Niedmann Alvarez | University of Chicago and Maj Grasten | Copenhagen Business School
Gabriel Pereira | National University of Tucuman, CONICET and Leigh A. Payne | University of Oxford
Jamie Rowen and Paul Collins | University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Eraldo Souza dos Santos | University of California, Irvine
Nkatha Kabira | University of Nairobi and Chantal Thomas | Cornell University Law School
Program Descriptions:
Catherine Albiston & Pamela Erickson, “Meeting to Establish the International Consortium of Socio-Legal Centres”
Most law and society scholars recognize the importance of cultivating strong international connections among faculty and students, not just to facilitate exchange and cross-national collaboration, but also to pool and leverage resources—financial, intellectual, and otherwise—to support shared goals. The steps necessary for doing so, however, such as gathering information, identifying interested colleagues, and finding institutional support for visits and programming, are often prohibitively challenging.
Catherine Albiston and Pamela Erickson, Faculty Director and Executive Director (respectively) of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, are taking the first steps to address this by holding a meeting to establish an International Consortium of Socio-legal Centres. Shortly after the LSA 2026 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA, ten or more representatives from established law and society centers and institutions will convene to develop a consortium structure and agreement, with the goal of formally launching in advance of LSA’s Global Meeting on Law and Society in 2027. By institutionalizing the consortium and providing a template of materials for interested scholars to form law and society centers at their own universities, Professors Albiston and Erickson expect to see greater expansion within the field.
Penelope Andrews, “Challenges to the Rule of Law and Democracy: A Series of Constitutional Conversations in International Perspectives”
Rule of law and democracy have been increasingly threatened in recent years, with electoral integrity, judicial independence, and institutional trust particularly under attack. These global challenges pose an existential and physical threat for those who are economically, politically, and socially marginalized, as well as anybody who values the existence of recourses to address human rights abuses. Law and society scholars, with their critical and interdisciplinary methods and outlooks, are uniquely positioned to examine these circumstances—which is why New York Law School Professor Penelope Andrews is developing a series of symposia and individual lectures for the fall 2025 and spring 2026 semesters. By highlighting LSA scholarship and engaging both emerging and established academics in the field, Professor Andrews seeks to both deepen and expand the foundation of sociolegal knowledge necessary for understanding and transforming the modern world.
Atieh Babakhani & Sangha Padhy, “Reviving the Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association”
Nearly a decade after its last conference in 2015, the Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association (MALSA), a regional network of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of law and society, is reviving the event on October 4, 2025. Approximately 100 participants, including undergraduate and graduate students, early career researchers, and legal professionals, will meet to present their works-in-progress, network, and workshop ideas. The smaller, more approachable environment is perfectly suited for students and young professionals hoping to prepare for larger-scale conferences like the LSA Annual Meetings. Ramapo College of New Jersey Professors Atieh Babakhani and Sangha Padhy intend to turn the MALSA conference into an annual event, establishing the mid-Atlantic United States as a regional hub for collaboration, programming, and fellowship for law and society professionals seeking social and professional support, especially during periods of political pushback. By lowering financial and logistical barriers, Professors Babakhani and Padhy aim to sustain a more inclusive and dynamic law and society community.
Tugba Basaran, “Spatial Justice in the Americas”
CRN 35 (Critical Legal Geography) and the CLG Collective are joining forces to develop two programs aimed at advancing spatial justice in the Americas. Under the leadership of University of Cambridge Professor Tugba Basaran, the 2026 International Conference of Critical Legal Geography, which will take place at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile in March of 2026, will unite approximately 100 scholars to center and amplify Latin American legal geographic thought, focusing on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and spatial legal pluralism. The 2027 Summer School on Indigenous Legal Geographies will convene 15 to 25 academics, early-career researchers, and graduate students for intensive training and support, with a focus on topics related to Indigenous legal traditions, geographies, environmental relations, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and posthumanism. With their grounding in respect for epistemic pluralism, these two programs will open pathways for collaborative research, teaching, and public engagement.
Melissa Crouch, “The Military as a Legal Actor: Sociolegal Approaches and Perspectives”
While the military is a subject of focus across the social sciences, the ways that militaries use law, and the implications of this for civilian legal institutions, have received less attention from law and society scholars. To address this, UNSW Professor Melissa Crouch is leading the creation of a three-day workshop about the role of the military as a legal actor. Early/mid-career LSA members who are from the Global South and based at universities in Asia and the Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia will use the workshop to engage in exploratory discussions and generate preliminary research on the militarization of legal institutions and processes widely assumed to be civilian. In addition to presentations and peer feedback sessions, attendees will participate in one-on-one mentor sessions and explore the challenges of doing qualitative sociolegal field work in authoritarian and militarized settings.
Deepa Das Acevedo & Kenneth Carter, “LSA Talks! Public Scholarship Program”
Law and society scholars conduct research and produce knowledge with the potential to improve communities at the local, regional, and national levels. But sharing that knowledge with non-academic audiences—and making them care—is an entirely different skillset. To address this, Emory University Professors Deepa Das Acevedo and Kenneth Carter are launching the “LSA Talks” program. The yearlong, mostly virtual project will equip participants to engage productively with wider audiences through a series of workshops and exercises about concepts related to credibility, persuasion, concision, clarity, and information formatting. The program will conclude with an in-person, intensive capstone session at the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Cynthia Farid, “Knowledge Under Threat: Scholar-Activism, Risk, and the Architecture of Support and Knowledge Mobilization in the Global South”
Critical scholarship and activism often go hand-in-hand, but the lived realities of engaging in such work are challenging, especially within repressive and authoritarian contexts. Scholar-activists, or “scholactivists,” especially those in the Global South, face political repression, institutional fragility, structural exclusion, academic surveillance, travel/funding expenses, and digital suppression. Global Young Academy member Cynthia Farid is spearheading a workshop series to lay the groundwork for a permanent, decentralized network of Global South scholactivists to conduct grounded, context-sensitive conversations, support collaborations and mentorship, and develop alternative models of knowledge production and mobilization. The workshops will connect scholars, activists, institutions, and communities in rural and marginalized areas to discuss topics such as burnout, surveillance, care ethics, risk-mitigation strategies, formalism vs. activism, southern epistemologies, and institutional gatekeeping.
Julie Ham, Rashmee Singh, & Menaka Raguparan, “Cultivating Community-Academic Collaborations with Sex Worker Communities”
CRN 06: Sex, Work, Law and Society Co-Chairs Julie Ham (Brock University), Rashmee Singh (University of Waterloo), and Menaka Raguparan (UNC Wilmington), are holding their Annual Day of Dialogue on May 27, 2026, immediately before the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. This year’s event will feature an Action Research Xchange, where sex worker rights organizers will hold discussions and build the foundation for ongoing academic-community collaboration. In particular, participants will discuss urgent issues facing California sex workers, including ICE crackdowns, legislation on loitering and eviction, structural violence, and the threat of neighborhood displacement due to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. They will also discuss mentorship for sex work researchers and sustainable futures for sex worker rights organizations.
Mark Massoud, “Building the Disciplines with Law and Society”
University of California, Santa Cruz Professor Mark Massoud’s LSA 2025 thematic panel, “Building the Disciplines with Law and Society,” united scholars from multiple disciplines in a discussion of law and society’s impact on other fields. Given the panel’s success, Professor Massoud is expanding the project, calling upon scholars of anthropology, economics, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, religion, and women’s/gender studies to discuss how law and society has benefited from and contributed to their fields and predict trends in the upcoming generation of scholarship. Researchers will meet for a two-day workshop immediately before the 2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Hong Kong, after which the conversation will be maintained through publications and online thematic workshops.
Robert Nelson & Mark Suchman, “Emergency Funding for the ABF/LSA Doctoral Fellowship Program”
For the last 17 years, the American Bar Foundation (ABF) has partnered with the Law and Society Association to support emerging sociolegal scholars through the ABF/LSA Law and Social Science Fellowship and Mentoring Program on Law & Inequality. After five rounds of successful grant renewals, however, the National Science Foundation (NSF) abruptly canceled funding mid-award with no warning, no explanation, and no opportunity for remedy. Thanks to swift action from Professors Robert Nelson (Northwestern, ABF) and Mark Suchman (Purdue, ABF), LSA will be able to provide emergency grant funding to fill in the gap, allowing fellows to continue developing dissertations and disseminating urgent, cutting-edge research on law and inequality.
Natalia Niedmann Alvarez & May Grasten, “Establishing the Global Law & Social Reproduction Network”
Just before the 2025 LSA Annual Meeting in Chicago, 20+ scholars of feminist legal theory, feminist economics, political economy, legal history, and sociology convened for a workshop on how law and legal institutions influence the organization and valuation of social reproduction. The enthusiasm and intellectual energy was so palpable, fostering connections across jurisdictions, disciplines, and theoretical traditions, that University of Chicago Professor Natalia Niedmann Alvarez and Copenhagen Business School Professor May Grasten decided to replicate the event, albeit in a more structured, enduring form. Two conferences, one in Copenhagen in 2026 and the other in Chicago in 2027, will launch the establishment of the Global Law and Social Reproduction Network. The timing could not be better, with current demographic shifts, austerity policies, labor market precarity, and gendered/racialized inequalities contributing to a deepening care crisis that, among other things, poses a threat to sustaining formal economies. The Network’s long-term scholarly infrastructure will support early-career development and ongoing intellectual exchange about how legal frameworks, political economy, and social norms shape the recognition, regulation and distribution of reproductive labor.
Gabriel Pereira & Leigh A. Payne, “The Right Against Rights: An International Workshop on Legal Countermobilization in Latin America”
Over the last two decades, Latin America has seen the growing use of legal strategies by conservative actors to resist, reverse, and redefine recent human rights gains. Legal mechanisms that once advanced inclusion are increasingly being repurposed to reassert social hierarchies and reverse rights expansion, forcing legal scholars to rethink law’s role as a terrain of resistance and reaction in the Global South. National University of Tucumán and CONICET Professor Gabriel Pereira and Oxford University Professor Leigh A. Payne are hosting an international workshop to understand this critical, underexplored phenomenon, known as Right-Wing Legal Mobilization (RWLM). Four closed virtual workshops, two open-access online public lectures, and a collaborative writing process will give participants the opportunity to map and compare empirical cases across different Latin American contexts, while facilitating dialogue on fieldwork and research methodologies and generating conceptual tools for theorizing RWLM strategies.
Jamie Rowen & Paul Collins, “2026 Northeast Law and Society Retreat”
Inspired by the success of regional law and society retreats in the western and mid-western United States, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Professors Jamie Rowen and Paul Collins have decided to host a one-day Northeast Law and Society Retreat at their home institution in October of 2026. More accessible due to its location and size, the retreat will serve as an opportunity for underrepresented minorities in the field to learn more about law and society, participate in breakout mentorship sessions, and learn more about pursuing sociolegal careers. In the afternoon, public plenary sessions will address public engagement, as well as pressing issues related to democracy, authoritarianism, and rule of law.
Eraldo Souza de Santos, “Critical and Interpretive Methods in Law and Society: A Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars”
Upon joining the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law and Society department, Professor Eraldo Souza de Santos was surprised to learn that his students were primarily training in interviewing and/or causal methodology, with other methods, especially interpretive ones, considered secondary for success. Upon learning that his peers at other institutions faced the same issue, he developed the idea for a virtual, monthly, nine-session workshop series, where graduate students and early-career scholars will supplement their methodological toolkit to include critical approaches rooted in decoloniality, feminism, and black studies, potentially addressing the longstanding divide between social sciences and the humanities.
Chantal Thomas & Nkatha Kabira, “Gender, Law, and Political Economy in Comparative Perspective”
When Cornell University Professor Chantal Thomas and University of Nairobi Professor Nkatha Kabira started the Gender and Political Economy International Research Collaborative in 2020, it was with the goal of developing an international dialogue on urgent issues of gender inequality, law, and politics, while supporting collaboration and research with a global/interdisciplinary consciousness and scope. Their upcoming African Regional Conference on Gender, Law, and Political Economy in Comparative Perspective will support these efforts by uniting 50-75 participants, from both academia and civil society, for 2 ½ days of presentations and workshops on in-progress research, pedagogy, and reform efforts in Kenyan and African contexts. This conference will establish the foundation, not just for a potential special journal issue featuring papers from the event, but also a regional conference model to be replicated in other regions of the Global South.