The question of how to pursue politically relevant and engaged scholarship has been an ongoing theme within socio-legal scholarship. In the United States of America, Presidential Addresses of the Law and Society Association have consistently urged greater political engagement (Lempert 2001; Seron 2016; Scheppele 2023). In the United Kingdom, journals such as Social & Legal Studies have placed critical and engaged scholarship at the core of their mission (Editorial 1992; Editorial 1998). In the Majority World1 – where the socio-legal field is less institutionalised – scholars have often been more directly involved in political action, re-imagining colonial law and using it as a tool for social change (Shivji 2018; Sieder, Ansolabehere and Alfonso Sierra 2019). These scholars have not only inspired calls for activist scholarship in the Minority World (Munger 2001) but have also unsettled the very dichotomy between scholarship and activism (D’Souza 2009).

Socio-legal scholarship has long been driven by a commitment to social change. Yet scholars continue to debate how best to pursue politically engaged empirical research – especially in relation to the elite audiences that influence the production of socio-legal knowledge. Increasingly, researchers are turning to participatory action research (PAR) as a strategy of scholar-activism. PAR centres the knowledge and agency of marginalised communities by involving them as collaborators in the research process, with the aim of producing knowledge that supports their struggles for justice. As socio-legal scholars experiment with PAR, they may encounter tensions both with their research participants and within the broader scholarly community, particularly over the role of ‘law’ in their work. Drawing on my experience using participatory methods to study data governance in Kenya, I explore the challenges and possibilities of integrating PAR into socio-legal inquiry. I suggest that when socio-legal scholars adopt PAR, they are likely to fall short of PAR’s radical participatory ideals and the conventional framing of socio-legal research. Yet, as I argue, this friction is generative. Adopting PAR can transform socio-legal inquiry to be more responsive to contemporary political struggles.

This paper examines the intersection of socio-legal research and activism through my ethnographic work with the Tulipas do Cerrado collective, a group of sex workers in Brazil. It explores the dynamics of knowledge production and the transformative potential of collaborative research that prioritises the reflections and experiences of marginalised communities while recognising the importance of legal expertise. Drawing on the concepts of ‘whoring the knowledge’ and ‘whoring the law’, the article highlights how sex workers reclaim their narratives and creatively navigate legal frameworks, demanding that researchers enhance both academic and activist relevance of their endeavours. First, I discuss relevant literature on ethnography within sex workers’ activism, introducing recent key studies on Brazilian sex work as examples of having the knowledge whored. Then, I detail the ethnographic approach employed in my research, which was inspired by the preceding three studies. Ultimately, the work analyses how reciprocal engagement between sex work activists and scholars is a consequence of a demand that researchers adopt a bolder and more creative way of thinking and living. Furthermore, from a socio-legal perspective, these exchanges present an opportunity to rethink the role of law within these communities and to foster concrete social transformation. I propose the concept of ‘whoring’ the law, suggesting that both activists and socio-legal scholars can identify and build new pathways for dealing with the law.

Law is both shaped by and a vehicle for hierarchically structured dichotomies that fragment life, thought and action – most enduringly the split between scholarship and activism. This article revisits investigación militante, a Latin American and Caribbean tradition that rejects the separation between theory and practice, and between academic inquiry and political struggle. Through the work of Orlando Fals Borda, Lélia Gonzalez and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, we explore how investigación militante offers a distinctive onto-epistemological and ethical orientation for law and society research. Concepts such as senti-pensar, amefricanidade and ch’ixi open up approaches to law as a terrain for co-producing alternative normativities. We identify three core commitments – methodological, political and ethical – that distinguish investigación militante from adjacent approaches such as movement lawyering, offering critical resources for re-imagining law and society praxis amid intersecting planetary crises.

This article examines the Puerto Rican legal mobilisations for the right to access public information through the lenses of activist-scholarship. Based on ethnographic research with Puerto Rican scholars, lawyers and civil society organisations, the article explores how they have used the legal system to demand greater transparency and accountability from the Puerto Rican government and the Federal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). First, it engages with the efforts of Proyecto de Acceso a la Información, a law clinic and civil society organisation initiative aimed at securing access to public information, transparency and accountability in government. Second, it reflects on Sembrando Sentido’s efforts, an anti-corruption and transparency civil society organisation, to draft and enact a series of anti-corruption laws. These case studies illustrate how activist-scholarship shapes Puerto Rican society by using legal tools to challenge colonial legality and resist the imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate inequality and corruption.

This article develops Border Work (BW) as a theoretical concept and methodological approach, underexplored in socio-legal scholar-activism, through analysing two distinct examples: Noor, who applied for protection, and her individual and collective struggle for residency and the making of a manifesto against borders. While both examples depart from feminist methodology, the differences are stark: Noor, excluded from democratic processes, faced deportation risks, while we, with institutional support, engaged in public mobilisations without such threats. Despite these differences, we use BW to understand and analyse both examples, highlighting their commonalities. The analysis of the manifesto work and Noor’s efforts shows how transgressive work creates new subject positions. BW provides a deeper understanding and a common analytical framework for scholarly work interlinked with activism. Through BW, Noor transformed from being seen as an object of the law to becoming a creator of legal knowledge. In the manifesto exercise, the boundaries are both collective and political: participants jointly challenge the national order and advocate for a transnational political identity. Both Noor and we, as part of the collective, engaged in the making of the manifesto and engaged at the intersection of personal experiences and powerful institutions and ideologies, with the aim of contributing to the struggles within and against restrictive migration regimes. Socio-legal scholars are experienced when thinking critically about the role and rule of law in society; BW can be understood to put this knowledge into action and apply it in broader struggles for justice.

Drawing on two decades of collaborative legal ethnographic research with Indigenous communities, this article weaves personal narrative and lived experience to highlight working-class scholar-activism and embodied spiritual rituality as an act of resistance within academia. It critically challenges Western research ethics paradigms by emphasising ethics as a lived, relational practice grounded in rituality and interconnectedness rather than mere compliance. Through an audiovisual lens, it demonstrates how visual storytelling can embody and amplify more-than-human voices, fostering relationality and responsibility. The paper offers two key contributions: recentring the positionality of working-class scholars and recentring the agency of the more-than-human int he field of law as vital in knowledge production. While decolonial and Indigenous scholarship advocate for diverse epistemologies, they often overlook working-class perspectives rooted in societal justice. I argue that a heart-based resistance grounded in critical care, relationality, Indigenous ontologies and spirituality can foster transformative academic knowledge.

This paper draws on two seemingly disparate moments – standing witness to protest in Guatemala and unpacking programme design in New York City – to explore the connections, linkages and methodological insights brought forward by front-line organisers. These individuals, though not typically recognised as policy experts, offer crucial knowledge that challenges dominant approaches to law and policy. Turning to their actions and framing, this paper argues that these organisers share a deep and urgent analysis of institutional and state violence. Their perspectives highlight the inadequacies of conventional institutional lenses, which often exclude or dismiss such grassroots expertise. The paper emphasises the importance of how these voices are heard and responded to, particularly given the historical and ongoing marginalisation of such knowledge holders. Drawing on multiple examples, it critiques institutional investments in spatial and bureaucratic schemes that deflect responsibility for violence, and that distance possibilities for accountability. This raises the question of what orientation or sensibility is necessary to engage with and to listen to these collective voices differently, especially from within administrative and bureaucratic systems. Grappling with the possibilities and limitations of what a category of ‘activist-scholar administrator’ could mean, this paper identifies three key lessons: the need for bureaucratic imagination, an iterative approach and expanded analytical frameworks. I argue that much more thinking and action are needed to navigate bureaucratic systems – whether in universities or state institutions – in ways that centre community knowledge and respond meaningfully to calls for broader accountability.

The article focuses on the Ukrainian official language policies and their impact on Ukrainian people-building, claiming the state promotion of Ukrainian as an exclusive language of public life and the ethnically-based understanding of the Ukrainian people, inevitably lead to the exclusion of non-Ukrainian communities from participation in democratic processes, politicise the already problematic language situation and risk undermining the role of Ukrainian as an official language.

For such an analysis, and a conceptualisation of how the state can shape the nature of the people, the article proposes a new theoretical understanding of the people as an organisational system, based on a functional adaptation of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and Charles Taylor’s social imaginary.

Credibility and intent are important but imprecise legal categories that need to be assessed in criminal trials as neither common nor civil legal systems provide decision-makers with clear rules on how to evaluate them in practice. In this article, drawing on ethnographic data from trials and deliberations in Italian courts and prosecution offices, we discuss the emotive-cognitive dynamics at play in judges’ and prosecutors’ evaluations of credibility and intent, focusing on cases of murder, intimate partner violence and rape. Using sociological concepts of epistemic emotions, empathy, frame and legal encoding, we show that legal professionals use different reflexive practices to either avoid settling on feelings of certainty or overcome doubts when evaluating credibility and intent. Empathy emerges as a multifaceted tool that can either generate certainty or be used deliberately to instigate or overcome doubts. We contribute to the growing body of literature addressing the emotional dynamics of legal decision-making.

This article offers a Baradian–Butlerian reading of Arendse & 42 Others v Meta, a landmark Kenyan case on outsourced content moderation. Moving beyond structural and subjection-centred framings, it theorises law as a site of ontological reconfiguration – where labour, harm and personhood are co-constituted through intra-action. Drawing on diffraction as an onto-epistemological method, the paper examines how the Kenyan courts reclassified digital labour, pierced jurisdictional separability and temporarily unsettled transnational corporate insulation. Yet, this legal aperture also generated recursive violence: moderators lost employment, residency and psychiatric care, even as their trauma became juridically legible. The paper challenges linear emancipatory or subjection-based accounts of such cases, arguing instead that law functions as a diffractive apparatus – producing patterns of recognition and exclusion without closure. It contributes to the governance of content-moderation scholarship by showing how Kenya’s legal system intra-acts with global capital to generate contradictory but generative juridical formations.

This study examines Israeli judges’ incorporation of the Arabic language and Islamic religious sources in court rulings within Israel and the West Bank military courts. Analysing seventy-eight judicial decisions (1997–2024) and interviews with legal professionals, we identify six themes motivating this practice: persuasion, authority reinforcement, cultural bridging, mutual respect, substantiation and alternative reasoning. Both Arab and Jewish judges employ this approach across criminal, family and civil law cases. This linguistic and cultural integration enhances court decision legitimacy among Arabic-speaking litigants and fosters intercultural understanding within the legal system. The study contributes to discussions on legal pluralism, judicial behaviour and the role of language in multicultural judicial systems, illuminating how the Israeli legal system navigates its multicultural reality and the interplay between law, language and cultural identity.

Understanding how law is articulated by computer means becomes crucial amid the widespread use of algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMs) in public policies. Based on a case study of the profiling algorithm deployed in labour market policies in Poland, this article contributes to the debate on computer representation of law. Using unique data concerning ADMs and their development, we address the following questions: How is the law articulated through algorithms? Who produces, and how, what kinds of discrepancies between the law and ADMs? Our analysis revealed discrepancies that were indicative of political decision-making that go far beyond adaptations of law to the requirements of ADMs. Furthermore, contrary to what the literature suggests, these discrepancies were a product of backstage decision-making by traditional policy-makers – executive and public administration – rather than system-level bureaucrats. Thus, we argue for the need to incorporate the political dimension more systematically into the analysis of computer articulation of law.