Shannon Portillo  is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. She is also a Board Member of the Consortium for Undergraduate Law & Justice Programs.

My former colleague, and good friend, Danielle S. Rudes originally turned me onto the nested mentorship model.[1] In my current work, I’ve been able to adapt this model to build a team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants studying how we conceptualize justice in sociolegal scholarship. While future posts will discuss the project specifically, here I want to discuss the nested mentorship model. The nested mentorship model builds off of a “see, hear, do” approach, exposing students to research.

Students are first introduced to research by seeing all of the pieces from proposals to finished publications. I typically show them a previously published journal article on a similar subject to what we are going to study. If it is possible, I start with early drafts of funding proposals so students can get a feel for how I originally envisioned the work. They I guide them through a few iterations of manuscripts, and eventually show them the finished product – a published article. During this “see” process I want to show them that, scholars, published academics, their professors, edit and revise. Things rarely go according to plan, and we never “turn in” or publish a first draft. I want to instill in them a culture of editing and continual refinement and progress.

Then, students “hear” about the research process by talking with scholars immediately senior to them. While I might seem like a distant authority figure to the students when we’re first starting out, I want them to hear from students a bit closer to their reality. They talk with graduate students and senior undergraduate students who have worked on research with me. That lays a foundation for expectations and the culture of our research team.

Finally, students “do” by participating in the project. We develop students’ skills incrementally so the research process does not overwhelm them. In my current project students are helping to code articles. Trainings for coding include a faculty member, graduate student and senior undergraduate so students can hear from people with different experience levels and have access to people who have recently developed the skills they are learning as well as leaders on the project.

The undergraduate research assistants (UGRAs) actively engage in the research process. From coding, to methodological reasoning, and from analysis to theory building, I try to foster an active learning environment for research assistants at all levels. The hands-on experience empowers students to navigate the iterative, rigorous research process and explore their intellectual potential in a way unique from traditional coursework. Because many of the students hold underrepresented identities, they experience newfound collegiality working in the nested mentor model. They often find connections with other students with similar experiences, as well as graduate students who they can relate to and inquire about potential next academic steps.

Exposing students to a team of mentors not only benefits them, but also makes my time and commitment to project leadership more manageable. Students often rely on each other and create a culture of support and socialization without constant hands-on supervision from me as the faculty member. The model is fluid rather than hierarchical, and students always have access to a team of mentors. Students access mentorship from UGRAs immediately their senior as much as, if not more than, graduate students and faculty on the project. The access and camaraderie build confidence and allow students to find their scholastic voice.

I’d love to hear more about your experiences with mentorship and undergraduate student research assistants in the comments below.

[1] See the following for a full discussion of our earlier work with undergraduate student researchers in the classroom: Portillo, Shannon, Danielle S. Rudes, Lincoln Sloas, Kirsten Hutzell and Paula Salamoun (2013). “Students as Scholars: Integrating Research into the Undergraduate Classroom Experience” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 24(1): 68-96.

Ieva Jusionyte, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and Center for Latin American Studies, 
University of Florida, writes in the blog of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology about taking her students to the local state prison, and about what they learned. Read more here. 

Renee Cramer is associate professor and chair of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University; she is also President of the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs.

What is Law, Politics, and Society?

My department at Drake University: Law, Politics, and Society, is an interdisciplinary undergraduate legal studies program.

That’s a mouthful.

I find, as chair and professor, that much of my work with prospective students, current students, and … yes … our graduating students is to help them understand what our major is – and how to translate that major, and the knowledge and skills they develop within it, to their parents, to potential employers, and to graduate programs.

When our faculty revised our curriculum a few years ago, we did so with a large amount of willed ignorance about the name of the major – and a considerable amount of attention to the learning objectives we have for our students.  We used to try to be sure students took a specific number of courses that were “political,” a certain number that were focused on “society,” and a certain set of courses that were “legal.”  When we revised the curriculum, we realized that our faculty didn’t see those divisions starkly, and that we didn’t want to encourage our students in that mindset, either.  Rather, we focused on what we hoped that students should be prepared to do, by the time they left our major. 

Our goals for student learning include graduating students who can:

• participate actively as citizens in civil society;
• read and understand legal texts, court decisions, and theoretical writing, and use those texts effectively to convey complex ideas and arguments in writing;
• know and articulate the difference between law as a professional practice and law as a topic of interdisciplinary, undergraduate liberal arts inquiry;
• demonstrate awareness of how issues of justice, morality, authority, order, legitimacy, individualism, and community create tensions within ordered social life;
• explain how historical development and different cultural practices, social organizations, and political systems affect law and justice around the world;
• assess critically how people interpret, respond to, and experience law and the legal system based on factors such as race/ethnicity, class, gender, and religion;
• deploy contemporary legal, critical, and/or interpretive theories in their own analysis of political, social, or legal events or situations.

And, we agreed that the best ways to help students accomplish this learning included encouraging all classes to include interdisciplinary readings, discussion-based classrooms, and writing-focused assignments. 

In other words: we agreed with Austin Sarat and others, that a strong liberal arts foundation was the best way to achieve our goals, and to prepare students for life after college – whether or not they enrolled in law school.

What sets our major apart from other reading- and writing- intensive majors is simply our focus on issues of power as constructed through law.  What sets it apart from public law within political science, or other more traditional understands of law, is our insistence that law is located in both the formal and informal realms, and our desire – rooted in a law and society tradition – to decenter courts from the study of law, to recognize legal pluralism, and to investigate the contingent and constitutive relationships between law, politics, and society.

Most prospective students simply want to know: is this a pre-law major?  With the decline in law school enrollments, I do get this question less frequently – but it still comes up at every admitted student day.  Because any major could be a good pre-law major, the answer is both yes, and no.  It’s also a pre-teaching certificate major, a pre-Masters of Social Work major, a pre-political campaign job major, etc.   Our students go on to a range of careers – it is our hope that they go into them understanding the value of interdisciplinary perspectives on law, and prepared to think in complex ways about the complex relationships they will encounter between the component parts of the major: law, politics, and society.

I’m curious:

• What do your majors and programs focus on?  
• How do you achieve your goals for student learning? 
• To what extent do liberal arts traditions inform what you do? 
• Where is the role of the humanities in your students’ education?  

​Let’s chat – in comments!

The ASLCH sends word: 

We are pleased to announce that the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities will be held at the University of Connecticut Law School, in Hartford, CT on April 1-2nd, 2016. We invite your participation.  Please note, panel and paper proposals are due Thursday, October 15th, 2015.

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities is an organization of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistically-oriented legal scholarship. The Association brings together a wide range of people engaged in scholarship on legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence, law and cultural studies, law and anthropology, law and literature, law and the performing arts, and legal hermeneutics. We want to encourage dialogue across and among these fields about issues of interpretation, identity, and values, about authority, obligation, and justice, and about law's role as a constituent part of cultures and communities.

If you have any general questions about the conference, please do not hesitate to ask me at jmartel@sfsu.edu. For matters related to the program or its organization, please write to Simon Stern simon.stern@utoronto.ca.  I want to thank the members of the program committee, chaired by Simon Stern for all their hard work on the Call for Papers. 

This year’s conference theme is Reading Race, Writing Race and Living Race
 “Within the text of the law there is an afterlife of slavery … as matters of aesthetic and legal representation … as an aesthetics of legal representation”
–Stephen Best, The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession, 14

The question of race is central to historical and contemporary violence, to material conditions, reproduction and global politics. In the US, recent police violence against African Americans has again raised the ongoing question of the significance of lawful violence, of law’s complicity, in upholding the state. Penal law is implicated in the incarceration of African-Americans in the US, Aboriginal communities in Australia, and Indigenous peoples in Canada, demonstrating a settler-colonial preoccupation for using race and racial profiling to mask and further colonial ends. In the context of securitised responses to migration, the onshore refugee applicant speaks as an already criminalised subject, as ‘an illegal immigrant’ or as an ‘undocumented migrant’. Under the conditions of continuing colonization, statutory schemes such as Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention target Aboriginal populations and make such populations subject to state violence. These examples raise the urgent question of law’s relation to, and production of, violence through race. From transitional justice to human rights processes, race is foregrounded at scenes and struggles in which law seeks to respond to and adjudicate violence, and assert its own authority.
 
This conference seeks research drawn from multiple disciplines and jurisdictions that addresses the following questions: How might we think of the relations among law, culture, history, and the shaping of racial imaginaries? How is law complicit and productive of violence? How should we read the legal and cultural forms that produce the conditions of this violence? What kinds of legal, critical, and cultural practices can intervene in both this violence, and the conditions that are complicit with it? How might legal, critical, and cultural projects provide counter-narratives and counter-archives to the juridical imaginary of responsibility for historical and contemporary violence? How do historical and contemporary readings of race relate? Are anti-racist forms of law and state possible, and what would they look like? How might law be enlisted in the development of new racial formations? How should we re-think critical legal feminisms, and Marxism, through the category of race? How can we devise legal, critical and cultural forms that are attentive to race, and make visible this legal violence? What is the significance of ‘reading’ race—what is the materiality in the metaphor?
 
This conference seeks to develop conversations regarding the roles of representation, affect and imagination in the ongoing relationship of law to concepts of race, justice, sovereignty, captivity, history. We seek to examine legal and cultural practices of representation for their juridical, as well as cultural, effects. Questions of genre, narrative, and aesthetics are not only sites of critique, but also become potential sites of theoretical intervention, and intervention into projects of social justice.
 
In addition to sessions that connect to the conference theme, examples of other types of sessions we expect people to organize include: 
History, Memory and Law; Law and Literature; Human Rights and Cultural Pluralism; Speech, Silence, and the Language of Law; Judgment, Justice, and Law; Beyond Identity; The Idea of Practice in Legal Thought; Metaphor and Meaning; Representing Legality in Film and Mass Media; Anarchy, Liberty and Law; What is Excellence in Interpretation?; Ethics, Religion, and Law; Moral Obligation and Legal Life; The Post-Colonial in Literary and Legal Study; Processes and Possibilities in Interdisciplinary Law Teaching. 

We urge those interested in attending to consider submitting complete panels, and we hope to encourage a variety of formats-roundtables, sessions at which everyone reads the papers in advance, sessions in which commentators respond to a single paper. We invite proposals for session in which the focus is on pedagogy or methodology, for author-meets-readers sessions organized around important books in the field, or for sessions in which participants focus on performance (theatrical, filmic, musical, poetic).
If you are inclined to register sooner here is the link:
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/annual-meeting-association-for-the-study-of-law-culture-the-humanities-registration-16184614618
 
As you’ll see, we have a new system for registration. For the first round of registration our membership fee has gone up very slightly to $37.74. For the second round of registration, we will give you a code with which to register sometime around the new year.
We hope to see as many of you as possible in 2016 in Hartford!

Really interesting discussion here by Ruthann Robson about using role play in the law school classroom when teaching First Amendment religion questions; this could be easily adapted for an undergraduate classroom.  

The Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association (MALSA) will host its third conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City on October 10, 2015. We hope you will join us in our efforts to build a vibrant regional network of sociolegal scholars.

We seek papers, panels, roundtables, and pedagogy workshops aimed at stimulating conversations across the range of law and society topics and disciplines. Proposals for individual papers and fully formed sessions are welcome, as are proposals for pedagogy workshops on activities and assignments you use in your law and society teaching. We also invite scholars new to law and society research to submit their ideas-in-progress for Socio-Legal Individual Mentoring (SLIM) sessions, where they can receive individualized feedback on substance and/or methods from an experienced law & society scholar about how to turn an idea into a research project (subject to availability of senior mentors with relevant expertise).

Accepted papers will draw on theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical sociolegal scholarship. Papers focused solely on doctrinal analysis are unlikely to be invited. Though presentations on any topic are welcome, we are especially interested in panels that focus on areas of current interest and controversy in the region, such as fracking, policing and race, political corruption. We also welcome panels that bring together practitioners and scholars.

The deadline for all proposals is August 21, 2015. Proposals should include an abstract of approximately 250 words; panel proposals should include a list of participants. You may also use the link below to volunteer to serve as a panel chair/discussant or to serve as a SLIM senior scholar for a colleague seeking to develop a sociolegal research project. Accepted presenters will be notified by September 7

To submit a proposal or volunteer, please complete this form:  https://midatlanticlsa.wordpress.com/call-for-participation/

Please direct inquiries (but not proposal submissions!) to: malsa2015jj@gmail.com

For those of us putting our syllabi together for Fall, here's a list of readings and resources on race and racial violence in America, compiled at the African American Intellectual History Society blog following the murders in Charleston.  

The American Historical Association has its own reading list here.