Zooming In, Zooming Out: Socio-Legal Trajectories between Country Studies and Scholarly Self-Reflection

THIS BOOK IS the result of a workshop we organised in April 2023 in O ñ ati (Gipuzkoa), Spain at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL). We invited scholars from across Europe and encouraged them to investigate, self-reflectively, what they were doing as socio-legal scholars, what motivated the questions they were asking and the methods and theories they were using. Furthermore, and as if that wasn ’ t enough of a challenge, we also asked for this reflection to occur against the backdrop of the legal and academic context in which they worked, inclusive of considering its distinct historical trajectory. In short, we were looking for contributions that overtly connected the individual scholar with their own intellectual, institutional and political context, which is to say, to those things that have influenced them, and to which they have responded or reacted. Our contributors were invited to ponder questions like: What is the relationship between a socio-legal scholar ’ s academic biography and the intellectual and institutional context(s) in which they have been socialised ? How do their personal and disciplinary trajectories align, intersect or collide ? What were the main influences on their work ? These are the questions explored in this volume, articulated by and through the voices of socio-legal scholars telling their own stories.