Home Away from Home: Collaborative Research Networks and Interdisciplinary Socio-Legal Scholarship

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research has long been suspect within the disciplines. Because the disciplines control recruitment, tenure, and promotion, it is difficult for interdisciplinary scholarship to gain traction in the academic world. Within socio-legal scholarship, the Law and Society Association has been instrumental in fostering interdisciplinary and, more recently, transnational research. The association's latest and certainly one of its most promising interdisciplinary and international initiatives is the creation of Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs). These CRNs, while of relatively recent origin, have already contributed impressively. On the one hand, they have established structures and processes that provide opportunities, training, and rewards for interdisciplinary scholars. On the other hand, the CRNs have demonstrated the multiplicity of ways in which socio-legal scholarship can bring all manner of research tools to bear on topics that cross disciplinary and national boundaries—incorporating the global and the local as well as the mediating forces and institutions betwixt and between.