Liminality in Socio-Legal Studies: Methods, Fields, and Positioning

Workshop Overview

Venue: Universidad de O’Higgins, Rancua, Chile
Date: 4 September 2026

This workshop forms part of the activities of the Socio-legal Methodological Interrogations (SMI) network, an international initiative that brings together early-career researchers from Latin America and Europe to reflect on questions of methods and methodologies in socio-legal research. It is organised in conjunction with the Laboratorio de Estudios Socio-legales of the University of O’Higgins (Lab ESL), a research hub dedicated to the interdisciplinary and critical analysis of law as a social phenomenon in Chile and Latin America.

The workshop will take place on 4 September at the Universidad de O’Higgins, Rancagua, Chile. The event will run over the course of one full day and has been scheduled to coincide with the annual meeting of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) of the International Sociological Association. It will bring together early-career researchers from Latin America and Europe, over four thematic panels, consisting of 3–4 20-minute paper presentations.

Abstract submission

If you are interested in presenting, please send a 250 word abstract to ignacio.riquelme@uoh.cl, specifying your institutional affiliation. Abstracts should be submitted by 5 May 2026, with participants to be confirmed by 15 May 2026.

Travel contributions

We have a very limited budget available to make a modest contribution to air travel for those unable to access institutional funds from their University. Depending on space constraints, non-presenting attendance may also be possible. Please let us know if you are interested in attending as a non-presenter.

Liminality in Socio-Legal Studies

Liminality is often understood as an intermediate phase within so-called ‘rites of passage’ (Turner, 1969): it is a space-time of transition, characterised by the partial suspension of norms, the indeterminacy of identities, and an openness to transformation. Liminality is thus a way of thinking about what lies ‘in between’, that which does not fully fit within established categories.

This workshop proposes to use the idea of liminality as a tool for reflecting on socio-legal studies: their object, methods, and institutional positioning. Our aim is not to claim that socio-legal studies are necessarily ‘liminal’, but rather to explore what happens when we think about sociolegal studies through this lens.

We invite each participants to engage freely with the idea of liminality in relation to their own research interests, experiences, and socio-legal studies more generally, but suggest three potentially fruitful avenues of engagement:

First, considering the processes, actors, and practices situated at the intersections between law and social life, between the formal and the informal, and between the normative and the everyday. From this perspective, liminality also invites a reflection on the positioning of socio-legal knowledge. Is socio-legal knowledge external or internal to law? Or is socio-legal knowledge perhaps in an intermediate position that draws precisely on this indeterminacy? What does it mean, methodologically, to work within such an in-between space? What does interdisciplinarity mean in this context?

Second, employing the concept of liminality to reflect on one’s own positionality within  universities and other institutional settings. Is socio-legal studies a field in transition, moving towards institutional consolidation, or a mode of inquiry, defined precisely by its intermediate or interdisciplinary character? What role do socio-legal scholars play within legal communities? How are their intellectual trajectories shaped and how does this figure in their research (Boulanger, Creutzfeldt, Hendry, 2025)?

Third, thinking about liminality in relation to the global scale of the production and circulation of knowledge. Like other academic fields, socio-legal studies are shaped by distinctions across regions, languages, and intellectual traditions. This includes differences between the Global North and South, between centres and peripheries, and between what is considered ‘mainstream’ and alternative or niche. How do these differences shape the definition of research objects and scholarly positioning? What possibilities might this liminal condition open up?