Graduate Student and Junior Scholar
Workshop
Past Programs
The New Directions in Law and Society: A Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Workshop was held virtually on October 8-9, 2021, hosted by the Center for Justice, Law, and Societies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with the generous financial support of the Law and Science Program of the National Science Foundation.
We designed this event with the following goals in mind:
·Extend training opportunities to graduate students and junior scholars who are interested in law, politics, and society topics and can benefit from mentoring by faculty at different institutions
·Create communication channels among scholars working on similar law, politics, and society problems across disciplines and institutions
·Promote dialogue to help develop the new concepts needed to analyze unique law, politics, and society problems, and the empirical tools necessary to investigate those problems
To meet these goals, we organized two events: the first was a virtual graduate student and junior scholar workshop followed by an in-person conference in 2022. Our virtual workshop took place for four hours the mornings of Oct. 8 and 9, accommodating all time zones in the continental United States. We created workshop cohorts of 4-5 graduate students and junior scholars, which were be paired with two more senior scholars. Graduate students and junior scholars were expected to share an article draft or draft dissertation chapter (up to 10,000 words) with their workshop cohort one month before the conference, all of whom provided constructive feedback on the paper. Workshop sessions were focused on the development of individual papers and how the work fits into broader law, politics, and society scholarship.
As part of the workshop, distinguished law, politics, and society scholars participated in plenary panels on the past and future of law and society scholarship. We also held professionalization panels on grant funding and publishing research.
Applications are no longer being accepted, look out for the 2023-24 opportunity.