In recent years, scholars within the legal academy have attempted to bring the voices of marginalized and social movements into the academic space through their scholarship, particularly with the focus on social movement lawyering or social movement research. While their stories are added into academic journals, the academic remains the sole narrator and producer of knowledge, and their social location as an academic along with institutional pressures of the academy, shape the scholarship produced. This scholarship maintains the academic as the expert and the movement actors and movement as subjects. In this presentation, I share some critical research methods that scholars may employ in their research to open up the legal academic space for marginalized voices to be heard, narrate the movements they are part of, and viewed as creators of knowledge on the movements they are a part of. The session covers three broad areas. First, I review different ways Global South and Black scholars like Walter Rodney, bell hooks, and Gayatri Spivak have conceptualized the role of the scholar in relation to knowledge production and social movements. Then, I provide an alternative approach to a Law and Science methodologies rooted in feminist methods that introduces interviews and social movement cases studies as two examples that stand in distinction to the traditional legal analysis, or quantitative approaches. Finally, I share some projects that relate to my scholarship which has as its goal to make visible the voices of workers in legal academic space including a documentary amplifying the voices of garments workers in Bangladesh, a digital archive of interviews of tea workers who led the land movement called Chai Justice. (https://chaijustice.com/mission/). Through these examples, I highlight the structural challenges within legal academia, and in broader society in having marginalized voices shape the narratives about them, articulate the analysis of their movements, and solutions to address their challenges. Extractive research methods, long prevalent in academia, would have scholars go to the field, obtain the stories, and then, write and present the information as experts of the knowledge; thereby depriving marginalized communities from shaping their own narratives. While the critical research methods I employ do create space for perspective of marginalized communities, much more needs to be done to ensure meaningful inclusion within legal academic spaces, including participatory research, co-authorship, alternative modes of scholarship. In doing so, hopefully we also begin to challenge the definition of legal scholarship in its entirety.
About the Speaker
Chaumtoli Huq is a leading expert on employment and labor law, migration and human rights with a focus on social movements in the US and South Asia and the founder/Editor of an innovative law and media non-profit focused called Law@theMargins (www.lawatthemargins.com).
Huq has devoted her professional career to public service focusing on issues impacting workers in the US and South Asia. Along with holding leadership roles at Legal Services of NYC and MFY Legal Services, she also served as Director of the first South Asian Workers’ Rights Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the first staff attorney to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance
Her scholarship explores interrelated issues under the broad theme of Transnational Labor Law and Social Movements which includes how law and social movements interact to create emancipatory visions of global labor and human rights laws. She has produced short documentaries related to her work in Bangladesh called Sramik Awaaz: Workers Voices, and has also created a digital archive of her work on tea workers in Bangladesh called Chai Justice (https://chaijustice.com/).
She is the 2019 Access to Justice Leadership Award by the South Asian Bar Association of New York, the 2020 Daynard Public Interest Visiting Fellowship awarded to nationally recognized public interest leaders. She was a 2023 Fulbright US Scholar in Malaga, Spain and Visiting Scholar in Sicily researching South Asian migration to Europe.
You can follow her on twitter @profhuq