At Odds with Everything around Me: Vulnerability Politics and Its (Out of) Place in the Socio-legal Academy

Date: *December 11, 2024 (Wednesday)*

Time: *1pm – 2pm*

Venue: Room 824, 8/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Swethaa Ballakrishnen (Professor of Law and Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine School of Law)

Professor Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is a sociologist of law 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.” This talk is based on the book chapter in Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society, edited by Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Prof. Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law, globalization and stratification from a critical queer and global south perspective. Particularly, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities.

Professor Ballakrishnen is committed to building and serving socio-legal communities, especially ones that focus on critical questions concerning legal education and the profession. At UCI, they co-run the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession, the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop, and the Law, Society, and Culture Emphasis.

To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=97429.

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at mcgrace@hku.hk / 3917 4727.