Positionality statements – reflections about how a researcher’s class, gender, race, experiences, and/or privileges shape research design and findings – improve research transparency. Positionality in research is also a practice that strengthens the credibility and validity of research and can provide interpretive clarity for readers. In law and society research, positionality statements are – however – historically rare. The few scholars who do practice and write about positionality in research are largely women and/or from historically minoritized backgrounds.
Biases that presume that scholars are male, white, cis-gendered, and economically secure are eroding, but they have also left an imprint resulting in some privileges and backgrounds still being unarticulated and thereby invisible. This imprint also shapes an implicit understanding that research focused on majority populations, and on law beyond those marginalized by it, is objective by default.
In this lecture, Professor Mark Fathi Massoud (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA) will discuss these assumptions and the explicit and implicit benefits and burdens of positionality practices within law and society scholarship. Massoud calls on law and society scholars to embrace a “position sensibility” that acknowledges how we are all informed by our personal and disciplinary backgrounds, experiences, and privileges.
About the speaker
Professor Mark Fathi Massoud is the Chair of Politics and Director of Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.
Massoud studies how people build and destroy nations, why and how they create legal systems, and why religion matters in law and politics. His primary methods include historical and archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews.
His award-winning books Shari‘a, Inshallah and Law’s Fragile State, examine the role of law and religion in the (re)building of nations. This lecture will draw on his co-edited collection, Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (2024) available open access at Cambridge University Press.
Program
13:45 Doors open, refreshments
14:00 Welcome & introduction
- Katja Franko, Head of the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo
- Anette Bringedal Houge, Chair of Research Group on the Sociology of Law, University of Oslo
14:15 Out of Place: Positionality in the Sociology of Law
- Professor Mark Fathi Massoud, Chair of Politics and Director of Legal Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
15:00 Break
15:15 Prepared comments
- Peter Scharff Smith, Professor of Sociology of Law, University of Oslo
- Thomas Duke Labik Amanquandor, Researcher in the Sociology of Law, University of Oslo
- Monika Grønli Rosten, Research Professor in Social Anthropology, Department for Youth Research, NOVA / OsloMet.
15:45 Q&A and reflections from the audience
16:30 Closing
Practical matters
The lecture is open to everyone but requires registration for the purpose of refreshments. Please register before noon, September 1.
Please note that interested PhD candidates can attend the lecture as part of the PhD-course with the same title – a 1.5-day course that begins with the lecture given by Prof. Massoud. More information can be found here.
Funding
This seminar has received funding from DEGLOBAL - Legal regulation in an era of deglobalization: Socio-legal perspectives on technology, migration, democracy, and war, The Research Council of Norway.