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New Directions in Law and Society Virtual Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Workshop

April 5, 2021

October 8-9, 2021
Center for Justice, Law, and Societies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

Invitation and Call for Participation

We welcome paper proposals for New Directions in Law and Society: A Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Workshop, which will be held virtually on October 8-9, 2021, hosted by the Center for Justice, Law, and Societies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with the generous financial support of the Law and Science Program of the National Science Foundation. 

We have designed this event with the following goals in mind:

  • Extend training opportunities to graduate students and junior scholars who are interested in law, politics, and society topics and can benefit from mentoring by faculty at different institutions
  • Create communication channels among scholars working on similar law, politics, and society problems across disciplines and institutions 
  • Promote dialogue to help develop the new concepts needed to analyze unique law, politics, and society problems, and the empirical tools necessary to investigate those problems 
To meet these goals, we will be organizing two events: the first is a virtual graduate student and junior scholar workshop followed by an in-person conference in 2022. Our virtual workshop will take place over two mornings (accommodating all time zones in the continental United States). We will create workshop cohorts of 4-5 graduate students and junior scholars, which will be paired with two senior scholars. Graduate students and junior scholars will be expected to share an article draft or draft dissertation chapter (up to 10,000 words) with their workshop cohort one month before the conference, all of whom will provide constructive feedback on the paper. Workshop sessions will focus on the development of papers and how the work fits into broader law, politics, and society scholarship.

As part of the workshop, distinguished law, politics, and society scholars will participate in plenary panels on the past and future of law and society scholarship. We will also hold professionalization panels on grant funding and publishing research.

While this workshop is aimed at graduate students, any junior scholar not yet on the tenure track (i.e., postdoc, visiting scholar, visiting assistant professor) is welcome to apply. We welcome scholars from all social science and humanities approaches whose work touches on law.

To participate, please submit the title of your paper, an abstract of no more than 250 words, your CV as a PDF file, and your contact information here.

The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2021. Please email questions to Dr. Jamie Rowen.

Categories: Social Sciences