Chapter 1 presents my “alternative fieldwork,” how I make sense of my predecessors’ fieldwork and fieldnotes. I introduce Xia Xizhou in its historical cultural context, including its colonial history and changing kinship, economy, and schooling system. I contextualize the multiple boundaries, identities, and relationships between the researched and the researchers and highlight children's agency. I recover the experience of native research assistants, not just as mediators between anthropologists and children, but as lively characters participating in children’s moral development journey. I expose the challenges of reconstructing this ethnography and the puzzles I encountered. I reveal the inherent ethical dimension of actions and interactions that made ethnographic knowledge possible. I also draw from my own experience and expertise to discern the voices, silences and voids in this archive. Throughout this chapter, I connect my discussion of reinterpreting historical fieldnotes to children's developing social cognition and moral sensibilities, which provides the foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in the original fieldwork and in the making of fieldnotes.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

Chapter 5 is dedicated to the results of the fieldwork on procedural problems in the course of anti-dumping investigations. The fieldwork attempts to uncover the problems that arise in practice. The chapter first focuses on the Chinese exporters who shared their experience of US and EU investigation procedures. In addition, law firms were asked to take part in an online survey regarding their experience with these two jurisdictions. Lastly, officials at the relevant public authority in China, the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (MOFCOM), were interviewed as they take part in anti-dumping investigations to support their exporters. After the procedural problems from the field were identified, additional questions were sent to the investigating authorities in the US and EU. In this part of the book, these complaints and responses are gathered according to empirical data collection methods. Lastly, this chapter evaluates the data on these three jurisdictions.

The chapter author, Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, who uses non-binary pronouns, is a sociologist of law and globalization who studies, among other things, inequality and identity in the legal profession. They identify as “a global south queer with … ‘local north’ advantages.” Their chapter considers how identity and vulnerability – and not merely ideas – build critical legal theory. Specifically, Ballakrishnen argues that complicated legal and social hegemonies create outsider status, but the process of making hidden identities visible creates closeness, camaraderie, and change in our scholarship. Data, like identity, is not neutral, though both are often valorized in that way. And the law, Ballakrishnen writes, is also very much like identity in that both are “predicated on trust, exchange, and power, and each, when moderated with self-reflexive vulnerability, hold within them the capacity to belong, break-open, and build anew.”

The author of this chapter, Lynette J. Chua, is a scholar of law and resistance originally from Malaysia, educated in Singapore and the US, and working in Singapore. She says that across these diverse contexts she has “always been drawn to being, and [has] always been out of place.” Chua reflects on how her out-of-place positionality enabled her to write her first two books. It was her own out of place positionality that she says first drew her to “out-of-place movements,” which allowed her to see “the strength of human agency to forge resistance against [legal] odds.” Being out of place in so many ways is what enabled her to see the importance of emotions and relationships for human rights activists, a central theme of Chua’s work on Myanmar.

The chapter provides a critical reflection on how the author, Leisy J. Abrego, conceptualizes, conducts, analyzes, writes up, and presents her research projects. As a “mestiza from a working-class background,” the author does not have the luxury of deciding to distance from or “intellectualize” oppression. However, she sees colleagues who come from majority groups do this with relative ease. The author is a sociologist who studies how legal violence is perpetrated against migrants and its effects on their legal consciousness. The result is pathbreaking and interdisciplinary scholarship that is “simultaneously humanizing and rigorous,” and that fosters community through an “accompaniment” with immigrants rather than a study of immigrants.

Positionality in research refers to the disclosure of how an author’s self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research article or other publication can enhance the validity of its empirical data as well as its theoretical contribution. However, such self-disclosure puts scholars in a vulnerable position, and those most likely to reveal how their positionality shapes their research are women, ethnic minorities, or both. At this stage of the field’s methodological development, the burdens of positionality are being carried unevenly by a tiny minority of researchers. In this book, we spotlight a group of scholars from around the world who shaped the field of law and society through their intentional awareness of how their self-identifications, experiences of marginalization, and professional privileges influenced their research questions, design, methods, and writing about the law.

The chapter explains how being out of place can paradoxically put one back in place – or exactly where one needs to be to achieve their research goals and values. The author, Margaret Boittin, is a lawyer and US-trained political scientist who works in a Canadian law faculty. She explains how being out of place is relative. She may not be out of place in North America as “a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes,” but she was obviously out of place when she was studying sex workers in China. Embracing this outsider status also became the source of her strength during fieldwork and later in the academy. Boittin concludes with a reminder about the exhaustion of being out of place but also with gratitude to the many respondents – sex workers, their clients, and police – who felt comfortable with her precisely because she was an outsider.

In the final chapter, the legal anthropologist Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1946–2022) reflects on 45 years of ethnographic fieldwork on legal pluralism in Indonesia and the Netherlands. In her fieldwork, and across her career, von Benda-Beckmann writes, she would begin as a “total stranger” and then slowly turn into a “familiar outsider.” She felt out of place as a lawyer in social science and as the descendant of a Dutch colonial sugar plantation administrator. She often conducted fieldwork with her husband, which meant that “We came as a family and had to divide our time between doing research and the children.” Von Benda-Beckmann reminds us all that across a long and successful career, simply “being there” is ultimately what shapes our relationships and our ability to find “remarkable continuity” in the law across different times and places.

The chapter is a reflection on the “unsafe” and “painstaking work” of observing rape trials. The author, Pratiksha Baxi, a leading sociologist of gender, learned Indian law and medical jurisprudence on her own during her fieldwork, through conversations with lawyers, observing trials, and reading books. However, her outsider status as a non-lawyer and as a woman led various people in the courtrooms where she conducted fieldwork to “scold” her for studying rape trials. The out-of-place feeling from fieldwork followed her long afterward, like a trauma. Though her fieldwork took place two decades earlier, the “anger and grief” never went away. However, she concludes, that, “If law’s attachment to cruelty continues to mark the self, then the ability to love and be in solidarity is the necessary condition for living with the field.”

The chapter reflects on the tension that the author, Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, felt when other scholars identified her too closely with her study participants, who like her are Black South Africans. Their shared background seemed to taint or decrease her scholarly credibility, she writes. While this perspective of being a young African woman studying other young African women gives her some insider status, it also shapes how other academics see her, how study participants see her, and how she has come to see herself. Mnisi Weeks is a scholar of gender, Indigenous rights, and constitutionalism in South Africa, as well as race in the United States. However, her marginalized identity in the law sapped her authority in the centers of patriarchal power where the law resides – both in the communities she has studied and in the academy “whose default representative is a white, middle-aged, European and/or American male locked in a single discipline.”

Massoud discusses in the Introduction the benefits and costs of open and principled discussion of positionality. He draws on a longitudinal study he conducted of major law and society journals to argue that scholars who are women, ethnic minorities, or both unevenly carry the burdens of positionality. Massoud encourages law and society scholars of all backgrounds to adopt a “position sensibility” by examining and explaining how their own self-identifications, privileges, or experiences shape and challenge research methods.

The chapter builds an “out of place” theory for international law. The author, Luis Eslava, a scholar of international law and development, draws on postcolonial legal theory, history, and ethnographic research in Colombia and elsewhere to show how the field of international law produces and is produced by “out-of-placeness.” The result is an international legal order that has, for five hundred years, “continually wrecked and disciplined” people and places, especially in the Global South. Eslava points scholars towards seeing that being out of place is fundamentally about dislocation, which is both a global reality and a sensible ethical position for contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship.

Paul Rae concludes the volume by reflecting on why it is so hard for performance scholars to write about method and methodology. He proposes that the inherently aesthetic and performative dimensions of research practice mean that performance scholars can struggle to articulate a discourse on method that exists independently. He draws on examples from across the volume, as well as on his own research experience, to consider a particularly challenging (and fruitful) area of complexity in performance research: the aesthetics of research activity. By discussing the moments when the researcher becomes subsumed into the events of practices being researched, aesthetic conduct in research, and the aesthetic qualities of research design, he argues that it is only when performance researchers can better account for the integration of research activity and what is being researched, that they can arrive at a more robust account of method and methodology.

This contribution addresses fieldwork as an anthropological method. It discusses the surprising lack of a systematic conversation between anthropology and performance as well as theatre research since the ‘performative turn’. Seeking to clarify terminological distinctions between ethnography, fieldwork, and method, Jonas Tinius draws upon his fieldwork with a theatre in the western German Ruhr region to discusses how a complex understanding of the field and the commitments we make to fieldwork may offer possibilities for working across anthropology, performance, and theatre. It concludes with a sketch of three practical ways to think about the mixing of anthropological methods in performance research.

The use of qualitative fieldwork methods for comparative legal research has the potential to provide valuable insights into the relationships between laws and cultures across different nation-states and other socially defined spaces. Such methods also give rise to a wide range of methodological research design issues including fieldsite selection, the development and use of comparator concepts, and the means of handling detailed contextual accounts. This chapter discusses these issues as they arise in relation to three sub-disciplinary categories: (i) traditional comparative law; (ii) socio-legal comparative law; and (iii) comparative socio-legal studies. Building on this review of comparative legal research design discussions and examples, the authors also reflect on the design for their own ongoing comparative empirical project on labour dispute resolution systems in Southeast Asia.