In this chapter, we discuss the relationship of individual personal thriving to fairness and worthiness by exploring the concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice refers to the rejection of people’s capacity as knowers, such that these individuals are treated as being less knowledgeable and less believable than other people, frequently on the basis of their social identities. In the first half of the chapter, we will explain how epistemic injustices take place and how they interrupt human thriving. In the second half of the chapter, we will profile the ways that psychologists and others can work to prevent epistemic injustice.

The theoretical models propose that chronic social exclusion inevitably leads individuals into a state of psychological resignation and behavioral withdrawal. After reviewing the literature addressing chronic exclusion among general and marginalized populations, we propose that the chronic exclusion–resignation link might not be inevitable and that chronically excluded individuals remain sensitive to novel social affiliations. From here, we discuss how chronic exclusion and the resignation stage can sensitize individuals to the early stages of the radicalization process. We propose that the indomitable need for affiliation may drive chronically excluded individuals toward social resurrection when supported by prosocial sources of reconnection. However, without such avenues, radicalization may become an appealing path for reaffiliation, leading to extremist groups. This chapter elucidates the complex interplay between chronic exclusion, resignation, and radicalization, and it might inform the development of targeted strategies fostering social reintegration and preventing the allure of extremist ideologies among chronically excluded individuals.

When people perceive that they are rejected by others, they may respond in positive ways to regain acceptance or in negative ways to achieve other goals, such as revenge. This chapter examines people’s negative responses to interpersonal rejection. After discussing conceptual issues that have plagued the study of rejection, the chapter examines five forms of extreme aggression in detail: school and mass shootings, intimate partner violence, hazing, retaliative suicide, and cyberbullying. The chapter examines evidence that supports a link between rejection and these five forms of aggression and discusses variables that influence the degree to which people respond aggressively to perceived rejection.

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.

Anke Charton takes the backstory of the canario, a baroque court dance, as an example to consider mixed methods in historiographic work. Marginalized knowledges, in particular, benefit from such an approach. Performance practices that have left few conventional traces behind can be explored more thoroughly if those traces are queried from different perspectives: reading archival sources against the grain, drawing on positionality, and engaging multiple temporal frameworks. The case of the canario illustrates the additional challenge – true for much of early modern Western theatre history – of working with a later, superimposed narrative that obscures an earlier, less-documented practice.

Chapter 1 brings the American state into full view by showing the ways in which its policy arm reinforces gender, economic, and racial inequality. The chapter situates this institutional function within a larger historical context of patriarchal systems that reproduce these inequalities in ways that must be understood when it comes to addressing gendered violence. The chapter then introduces the original concept of intersectional advocacy and explains its theoretical and empirical contours: how it is rooted in Black Feminist theory and developed from a practical understanding of how advocacy groups represent intersectionally marginalized constituents. After establishing the theoretical and empirical groundwork for intersectional advocacy, the chapter ends with a discussion of why this practice is important, how it travels across issue contexts, and how it is studied throughout the book.

This chapter describes the range of cognitive perceptions about the body, drawn from ethnographic narrations of various cultures, with specific emphasis on South Asia, revealing a startling plurality of views and worldviews about it. These perceptions are both informed by and influence practices related to the body, especially those of gendering, hierarchization, and sexuality and exploitation. The intersection of the way bodies are conceptualized to the power hierarchies existing in any situation illuminates how bodies are both constructed and destroyed, explaining why some bodies are considered dispensable while others are considered as precious. The modern market and the commodification of the body leads to its final disintegration and dissolution as marketable parts, dehumanizing it to an ultimate nonhumanity. All these perspectives and practices are contextualized within historical, political, and material fields of power, giving them a dynamic character. The chapter also summarizes some of the key anthropological theorizations and philosophical interrogations about the body, tracing the discourse from classical to the recent postmodern and feminist perspectives.