Away with oppressed methodology! Reflections on an experiment in Law & Development education

Abstract

Ten years ago, six institutions came together to establish a joint doctoral programme. The shared motivations behind this project were to improve the quality of doctoral research that we encountered and to create a space for qualitative research within our law schools. We called the project the ‘European Joint Doctorate in Law and Development’ (EDOLAD). A key element of the programme was to be a core, and therefore compulsory, curriculum that all researchers were to follow. For most of the scholars involved in the project, L&D was a useful label that allowed us to bridge our different interests and to create shared ground. For some, though, the core curriculum also provided an opportunity to define what we thought L&D education or legal research should be. What emerged was a focus on critical methodology. This paper explores this by reflecting on what we had hoped to achieve with the core curriculum and draws on EDOLAD researchers’ experiences to determine what impact our efforts at creating an L&D-focused education may have had. What our reflections here suggest, in part, is the difficulty of creating a coherent, field-building, programme of education in a multi-university collaboration in which resources are unevenly distributed; but also, more interestingly, that L&D as a concept - at least as we imagined it - seems to struggle to provide a scholarly identity for critical researchers.