I have been teaching undergraduates since 2001, and in an interdisciplinary undergraduate legal studies department since ’06. I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds (a thousand?) of students over the years and honestly delight in helping them see connections between courses, among authors, and between their lives and the readings. I know that helping them learn about reproductive justice, American Indian survival, and – yes – the gap between law in the books and law in action – is important work.

That doesn’t mean that, some days, I don’t wonder what the point is.

There are times I leave the classroom completely jazzed because the discussion was SOOOOO good – and yet, I hear a voice in my head asking “Why did we just spend 75 minutes in conversation about legal pluralism, or class action law suits, or systems of oppression that they are – individually – powerless to change?” What’s worse, I have a fantasy that my colleagues in math and pharmacy, the business school, and the physical sciences never feel this way – that each lesson they teach is obviously and clearly relevant to the next, and to the work their students will do when they are young professionals.

Many of my students go on to law school. I know that I am preparing them well for the work of reading closely, thinking analytically, and writing clearly. But I also know that law school will change their understanding of law, their relationship to linguistic and professional power, and their view of the same systems we’re learning to understand and occasionally critique. Many of our students will go directly into the workforce – some as political campaign workers and advisors, some to policy analysis groups, some to governmental affairs offices. Yes; they’ll know how to meet deadlines, how think about ways to evaluate the impact of policy on different groups of people, and how to – yep – write clearly. But how will their understanding of the 5th Amendment’s Takings Clause factor into their work? How will their ability to talk about the novel An American Marriage and its relationship to mass incarceration be meaningful to their professional life at MidAmerican Energy or in the legal affairs department at Meredith Corporation?

I will readily tell you that I don’t think a college degree is necessary for everyone, nor is it necessary for success. I will also tell you that going to college changed me so profoundly I am still, 25 years later, learning from the experience. My desire is to provide my students with the kinds of meaningful experiences and opportunities that I had during those four years, but I also know that the most important thing I learned in college was how to learn. It wasn’t until my fifth year of graduate school that I understood how what I was studying could lead to a career – and let’s be honest, that’s only because the only career for a nonquantitative PhD in Political Science in the late 1990s was “being a professor.” We send only one student every three years or so to doctoral programs (hi Phoebe! hi Richard!) – replicating the field isn’t where my colleagues and I find meaning – no matter how much joy I feel in being part of a field/discipline.

Increasingly, honestly, I feel an ethical responsibility to provide students with a shot at an education that offers opportunity for both material and cognitive growth and betterment. In a field where we often critique the transactional approach to education, I still feel an ethical responsibility to make sure the transaction is a beneficial one to the folks who come into my classroom.

A new opportunity has come my way – probably just in time, given that these end-of-semester musings tend to creep in as early as February, now. I’ve just been named the Herb and Karen Baum Professor of Ethical Leadership in the Professions at my home institution (Drake University). The three-year professorship comes with two primary obligations: to host a Symposium in the second year on a topic of my choosing related to ethical leadership, and to teach a course once a year on that same topic. I’ve decided to focus on the issues that I’ve been pondering lately: the role of higher education in developing capacity for ethical decision-making and leadership in our students – simultaneous to our role in helping them develop cognitive capacities around core subject matter; the ways that a liberal arts education is pre-professional education, and appropriately so; and the ways that universities themselves have ethical obligations to our students around issues of access, equity, diversity, affordability, and job readiness.

I’ve put together a team of undergrads (hi Jaime, Gabrielle, Rae Ann, Jackie, and Marisa!), and we’re spending summer and fall reading together from a nice list of books on higher education in the present age; and I’ve put together a reading list for myself, on finance in higher education and the ways our ‘business model’ operates (and fails).

I’d love help from readers here, in particular, in developing a list that also understands how how undergraduate legal studies and sociolegal faculty have thought about the university and the professoriate’s role in creating lawyers, scholars, citizens, and ethical humans.

Please reach out: comment here, send me an email (renee.cramer@drake.edu), find me at LSA or the WPSA. I want us, as a community, to find meaning in the work we do, beyond the tremendous, real, important and fun it is to think and write and teach about law and society J - I invite a conversation about how what we teach our students really does matter, and how we can continue to teach them things that will serve them throughout their professional lives.

Renée Ann Cramer
Professor of Law, Politics, and Society
Drake University

​For the past two years, I have taught an experimental course in the undergraduate Criminology, Law and Society (CLS) Program of the Sociology Department, University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Under the title “Research Projects in Criminology, Law and Society” (SOC440), this is an unusual course in several ways. Instead of meeting weekly for a semester, it meets every other week over a whole academic year. Although some academic articles are assigned as course readings, the focus is not on the substantive topics they cover, but on their research designs and writing styles. Most importantly, students spend most of their time during the year designing an empirical research project, collecting data, and writing up a research paper by the end of the year. It is not a thesis course, but an opportunity provided for fourth-year undergraduate students in the CLS program to explore the fun and complexity of social science research before graduation. For most students who took the class, it was their first hands-on experience with empirical research in the four years of undergraduate education.
 
I greatly enjoy teaching this course as it enables me to get to know the students well and guide them through some exciting projects. From the pedagogical perspective, however, the course is unlike anything I had taught before in my teaching career. About half of the sessions are co-taught with a parallel course “Research Projects in Sociology” (SOC439), when the two classes meet together with two instructors. As a result, I was able to learn much from my UTM sociology colleagues Hae Yeon Choo and Kristin Plys on research methods and student mentoring. Selecting the right readings, however, is a difficult task as the purpose of the readings is different in every class. As a strong believer that the best academic writings speak for themselves, I did not use any textbook but assigned 2-3 journal articles in those sessions that focus on how to frame a research question, how to write a literature review, how to discuss data and methods, etc. Some readings are in the area of crime and law, while others are more general articles in sociology to accommodate the co-teaching needs. Students are told to pay attention to the form rather than the content of the readings and asked to write a reading response reflecting upon the topic of the session. As the class size is limited to no more than 15 students, class discussions are informal and focus on situating the readings in the context of the topic of the day (e.g., literature review).
 
But the most exciting and enjoyable part of the course is to guide students into the field. Many students were interested in the criminal justice system and thus they picked research topics such as racial profiling in policing, attitudes towards capital punishment, the production of space in prisons, job satisfaction of correctional officers, gender and racial discriminations in the police force, and so on. As a sociologist of law, I was also delighted to see some students study classic sociolegal topics such as lawyers and the jury. While a few students used archival research, survey, or experiment as their primary methods, the majority of them conducted in-depth interviews and/or participant observation for their projects in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
 
Fieldwork presents many challenges. Some parts of the legal system are simply inaccessible to undergraduate researchers. For example, one student originally thought she could go into prisons for interviews or at least speak to prisoners on the phone. Not surprisingly, she had to adjust her research design and focus on ex-prisoners and family members instead. Another student tried hard to contact police officers in multiple offices, including the campus police, for interviews without much success, as most police officers were very busy when on duty. Eventually, through her contacts in the police force, she complemented her small number of interviews with a survey via email, which enabled her to reach a larger sample of officers.
 
There is also the issue of research ethics. While a course-based ethics approval is obtained for the whole class every year, due to the large variety of student projects, how to make sure undergraduate researchers stick to their ethics protocols in the field is a major challenge. This requires not only introducing the ethical requirements of human subject research to students as a group, such as the importance of informed consent and confidentiality, but also many one-on-one consultations on specific issues arising in the process of research. There were even two occasions when I, as the faculty supervisor, received complaints from community organizations or residents about student behavior – fortunately, both turned out to be misunderstandings.
 
After fieldwork, data analysis and paper writing present additional challenges. Like in any class, there is a range in the students’ ability in research and writing throughout the year. One student conducted a survey smoothly, only to realize that she forgot most of her statistical training and did not know how to analyze the data. In this situation, I asked a classmate of hers, who was the stats wizard in the class, to help her out. Another student did some extraordinary ethnographic work, but the first draft of his paper was mostly theoretical and philosophical discussions and presented little data from the field. I had to walk him through some of his field notes to figure out how to tell a good story and be truthful to the research subjects. These surprises kept reminding me of a general weakness in our undergraduate education, that is, the curriculum often gives the social science majors very little hands-on training in both empirical research and writing. This Research Project course is one of the few opportunities for some of them to develop these practical research skills.
 
As this course is part of UTM Sociology Department’s Peel Social Lab (PSL), a research platform aimed to develop a repository data on the Peel region (where the UTM campus is located) that can be used by researchers and the community, students are encouraged to write a blog post for the PSL’s blog in addition to their final papers to disseminate their findings. I was delighted to see some creative and thought-provoking essays written by my students posted on the PSL’s blog Peel Urbanscapes and reached the general public in the past two years. It was a great way to showcase the quality and potential of undergraduate student research in UTM’s Criminology, Law and Society Program and the Sociology Department.

Many students are looking for hands-on experience with research, but it’s often hard for them to know how to start. It can also be difficult for faculty to shepherd them through the process. Other students may not be actively looking for research experiences, but can benefit from them all the same. As a recent post by Danielle Rudes points out, there are many paths to creating good experiences with research for undergraduate students. In this post, we want to discuss an approach that can be implemented in a wide range of classes, with a wide range of students: incorporating significant research components into regular substantive courses. We also offer advice and evaluations from two undergraduate students, Joseph Buttino and Jeremy Carr, who participated in our approach.

For the past two years, we have given hundreds of students at our university the opportunity to get hands-on experience conducting and analyzing qualitative interviews and constructing, collecting, and analyzing quantitative surveys. We are also using the student-collected data for a research project of our own. Here’s how we did it:

We first worked together to come up with a broad research idea that would be applicable to both of our courses (Criminology for Mary Nell and Juvenile Justice for Ashley). We decided that both sets of students could collect data on juvenile offending and perceptions of juvenile offenders. We then obtained IRB approval for the project, including permission to consider all of our enrolled students (approximately 100 students per course per semester) as research assistants, provided they completed the CITI online human subjects training course. In each course, the CITI course completion counted towards a small component of their final grade (2.5-5%).


Qualitative Project


For the Criminology course where students would be doing qualitative interviews, Ashley and Mary Nell worked together to develop an interview guide, leaving space for students to probe and include their own questions. Mary Nell devoted one full 90-minute class period to interviewer training and gave students time in class to practice interviewing and troubleshoot any concerns. Students had to conduct and record interviews with two people, transcribe their interviews verbatim, then write a course paper that incorporated the interviews and applied criminological theory. They submitted the transcripts, the audio recordings, their course paper, and a summary of the interview experience, including their evaluation of whether the person they interviewed took the interview seriously, how well they thought they did as an interviewer, and how they established rapport. Students each interviewed two people, so by the end of each semester, we had 200 fully transcribed interviews ready for analysis.

We tweaked this project over the course of three semesters. Some changes we made were related to IRB -- the first semester, IRB insisted that students interview strangers, which did not work out very well. We discovered that the “sweet spot” was for students to interview someone they knew casually, or a friend of a friend, rather than a complete stranger or a very close friend. We also learned which kinds of questions worked better than others. Students do not start out as very good interviewers, so when we had a string of questions in the interview guide, meant to be probes or follow ups, students would read all of the questions at once rather than wait for responses in between. We also added the requirement that students add their own interview questions in each section so that they could focus the interview on a theory or concept that they were especially interested in. Our first semester of data was not usable for our own research, there were just too many problems with the questions, topics, and interview techniques. So we would definitely recommend having a semester to pilot the interviews before keeping the interview data to use for your own purposes. However, students still learned a good amount from the process. The day that students hand in their papers, we spend part of class summarizing their experiences, what they learned, and what they would change or do differently next time. We also glean some of this information from the questionnaires they fill out after their interviews. Almost all students enjoy the project and feel like they learn more about the research process and the theories that guide the course. As two examples, undergraduate students Joe Buttino and Jeremy Carr write about their experience:


Joe’s Perspective: Through the Criminology project, I learned a great deal about proper interview techniques and how to conduct a quality interview. When analyzing my two interviews, I was excited to apply criminological theory. For example, Cohen and Felson’s “chemistry of crime” [routine activities theory] proved helpful in understanding my respondents’ rationale for their delinquent behavior, and labeling theory helped me understand other people’s responses to their behavior. My final paper was a culmination of the theories I learned in class and their real-world application to young people my age. The focus on my peers was refreshing because it overlapped with my own academic interests of understanding generational differences between Millennials and Gen Z.

Jeremy’s Perspective: The qualitative Criminology project is one of my favorites during my undergrad career and was helpful in preparing me for a sociology graduate program. In the prep work for the project, I learned about the utility of different sampling strategies, and through the process of conducting the interviews, I learned to be reflexive about my own standpoint and biases. Further, when interviewing a friend, the strengths and weaknesses of having an insider status quickly became apparent. In analyzing my interviews, my main takeaway was that one criminological theory cannot explain all aspects of delinquent and criminal behavior. Rather, a web of theories can offer more insight into explaining behavior and others’ responses to it.


Quantitative Project

In Ashley’s Juvenile Justice course, students completed the key components of a quantitative survey project, from literature review through data presentation. When paired with the main course text, an ethnography by Victor Rios, the survey project allowed students to compare the utility of different methods for studying juveniles and juvenile justice. The project had several checkpoints, some of which were completed in groups. Students began the project by identifying broad topics of interest and potential research questions in small groups. Based on these group topics, each student completed a short annotated bibliography and shared with their group the key takeaways. Each group then honed their research question, developed a simple hypothesis informed by their collective literature review, and wrote survey questions that would enable them to test their hypothesis. Ashley then added these survey questions to a Google Forms pre-existing survey developed in collaboration with Mary Nell. This ensured comparability of survey data across semesters while still allowing each class to add their own questions and test their unique hypotheses. Each student was responsible for distributing the survey and obtaining at least 10 survey respondents, resulting in about 1000 respondents for the full class each semester. Upon completion of data collection, students tested their hypotheses and prepared a policy brief or presentation to describe the findings and their implications as they related to theory and practice.

Because the project was labor intensive and student preparation for it varied widely, Ashley modified its structure slightly each semester to maximize student learning and minimize chaos. From this trial and error came several successful changes. First, any required group work was minimal and took place in class. Students also completed peer evaluations of their group members to hold one another accountable. Second, the number of hypotheses actually tested was reduced to 3-4 per class (rather than 1 per group) by holding a small competition in which each group presented its hypothesis and made a case for why it was important to test. The class then voted on which hypotheses were most interesting, and only the survey questions relevant to this narrowed set of hypotheses were added to the final survey. Consistent with the limits of cross-sectional survey research, hypotheses were also required to be very basic (e.g. Young people who report more X will also report more Y). Finally, it was important to gauge students’ quantitative skills and/or familiarity with Microsoft Excel or other analytic software before requiring them to analyze data. Most students, Ashley discovered, lacked any familiarity with Excel and had difficulty forming basic cross tabs or descriptive statistics. Walking through the data analysis in class for the 3-4 hypotheses proved a much better use of student and faculty time than having students attempt data analysis on their own. Students were still responsible for interpreting and presenting the results in their final write-ups.

As with any class project, some students were more invested in the survey project than others. Most students, though, seemed engaged and interested to learn if the survey data supported their hypotheses (as demonstrated by class cheers when a hypothesis was supported). Students consistently developed interesting hypotheses that applied and extended course material. For example, some students in the most recent semester were interested in understanding how high school security measures (e.g. school resource officers, active shooter drills, random searches, security cameras, etc.) were related to student feelings of safety on campus. Other students were interested in understanding how juvenile interactions with police were related to university students’ perceptions of campus police. Because hypotheses were grounded in theory and existing literature, students connected with the material in new ways and learned applied skills -- like data management, sampling, and survey writing -- in the process.


Joe’s Perspective: The Juvenile Justice survey project piqued my interest in quantitative data analysis. I was quite curious before the beginning of the course but I did not yet have the opportunity to collect or analyze quantitative data. Because I had already taken Dr. Trautner’s class and knew a little about the complementary survey project, I was able to formulate interesting questions and hypotheses for my class to test with this year’s survey. For example, I proposed, and my class agreed, that it would be interesting and relevant to test how the presence of metal detectors and other high-security interventions in elementary and high school were related to students’ self-reported levels of fear in college. I was excited to find patterns in the survey data that supported criminology theory and also to have interview data to provide a more nuanced take on these patterns. The project allowed me to learn the basics of survey data analysis in Excel and STATA and, together with Dr. Trautner’s project, to see the benefit of a mixed methods approach.

Jeremy’s Perspective: Professor Barr’s approach to the Juvenile Justice survey project was unique, and I would encourage other instructors to implement a similar approach. Rather than proposing an easy and predictable topic for a passing grade, the in-class competition to narrow our hypotheses encouraged us to propose a more interesting and relevant research question and hypothesis. Further, because our class simply added to a preexisting survey and we analyzed the results as a group in class, we were able to spend the majority of project time discussing methods and theory and understanding why we found the results we did. If we had to start the survey from scratch or analyze the data on our own, my classmates and I likely would have spent the majority of the project simply figuring out how to create a survey or navigate Excel to show our results. Finally, many sociology students acknowledge that there are problems in society and spend a lot of class time understanding these problems. Yet we rarely are asked to think about how to fix them. Professor Barr asked us to do the latter. During my semester, we were prompted to use theory and our survey results to complete a policy brief relevant to our own university. This allowed students to get their feet in the door of change and to recognize their own agency.


Outside the Classroom

Really engaged students might want to work more closely with the data than just doing two interviews or testing very basic hypotheses with survey data. In our case, we hired two students (Joe and Jeremy) to work as research assistants on the project. Joe also used a subset of the data for an Honor’s project.


Joe’s Perspective: During my first year in college, I had the unique opportunity to work closely with Dr. Trautner on a different qualitative project and with Dr. Barr in a small seminar class, so I was excited to be selected as an RA on their joint project. My work on this project has formalized my training in basic and intermediate research methods. In addition to the interview and survey skills acquired through coursework, I learned the basics of constructing codebooks, cleaning and analyzing data, and working with others to establish interrater reliability. The project has also allowed me to improve my critical thinking skills by understanding the sociological context of deviance and crime. I put all of these new skills to use in the form of an Honors Contract paper entitled “Perceptions of Delinquency among College Students and Non-students.” This paper draws upon the blinded survey and interview data collected in prior semesters of Dr. Trautner’s and Dr. Barr’s classes to examine differences in how young people rationalize their own and others’ adolescent delinquency. This paper has secured me a spot in the American Sociological Association’s Honors Program at their annual meeting this year in New York City, and I also won the Undergraduate Paper Prize from the ASA’s Sociology of Law section. Although my career intentions are a bit unclear at the moment, I am excited to explore sociology further and network with other students at this year’s conference.

Jeremy’s Perspective: Having the opportunity to be involved in the nit and grit of these two projects as an RA has provided me experience in collaboration with other research assistants to function on a professional level. I have become much more interested in conducting my own research after being exposed to the raw process of analyzing and organizing data. I intend to use methods I have learned in my RA position to construct my Master’s thesis when I being graduate studies in the fall. Expanding my interview analysis to 400 interviews (versus 2 for class) allowed for a better assessment of patterns and more consistent application of theory. I will be furthering my education at the University at Buffalo in the fall of 2019 to pursue an MA in sociology with a focus in criminology, and this decision was partly inspired by my involvement as an RA. Further, my research assistantship with Professors Trautner and Barr served as a focus for my statement of purpose when applying to graduate programs and, I believe, was a selling point on my CV.

For all students, we gave them advice on how they could frame the experience they gained on their resume to highlight to future employers. We circulated our assignments to career counselors at our university’s career services office, who then turned the assignments into bullet
points that could be put on a resume. We then gave these to students as examples should they wish to use them.

For example, here are the suggestions the career counselor made for the interview project for language they could include on a resume:

Interview-based social research, Spring 2018
• Collaborated with lead faculty to locate, recruit and interview 2 people on their experiences with, and others’ reactions to illegal juvenile behavior.
• Conducted two 60-minute interviews and demonstrated strong attention to detail by accurately transcribing responses
• Completed 3-hour tutorial to learn effective and ethical practices on conducting research with human subjects
• Analyzed and summarized interviewee responses and applied knowledge of criminological theory in 6-page written paper

We have both really enjoyed incorporating research components into our substantive courses. Students are able to see the practical value of course concepts while building their resumes and developing an appreciation for empirical work. Our approach allows all students to benefit, and for especially interested or advanced students to gain even further experience.

​I have taught in the Criminal Justice program at Weber State University, a regional comprehensive university in northern Utah, for six years. As a sociologist in a criminal justice department, I weave discussions about inequalities in the criminal justice system into all of my courses. This is not an easy task in part because our students tend to be politically conservative and hesitant to speak up in class. Furthermore, my students are hesitant to talk about race and racial inequalities because they don’t have the language to talk about these topics and they are afraid to say the wrong thing. Students who disagree with their peers also tend to stay quiet as illustrated by one student who told me in office hours that she never spoke up in class because she disagreed with the majority of what her peers were saying. These dynamics can easily produce classroom environments in which students stay quiet while their professors either avoid conflict by lecturing for the entire class period or ask thought-provoking questions that elicit blank stares rather than conversation. The teaching strategies I have developed for addressing issues of inequalities in my courses help avoid these types of scenarios. In this post, I focus on a few such strategies I use in my undergraduate upper-division Law and Society course.
 
On the first day of class, I begin creating a safe space for students to express a variety of opinions by introducing them to the idea that minority opinions and unexpected answers can foster more productive conversations than “right” or expected answers. I tell students that I’m going to call on one of them to give a wrong or unexpected answer to a simple question. Then, I call on a student and ask, “What color is the sky?” Instead of the standard answer of “blue,” students have given a variety of answers including brown, purple, and orange. With this seemingly wrong answer out there, I then ask the class, “Under what conditions could the sky actually be [brown, purple, orange]?” This simple exercise has led to ten-minute conversations on various topics including pollution, sunrises and sunsets, and wildfires. At the end of the short discussion, I point out to students that whereas the standard answer of blue would have provoked nods and little to no discussion, the unexpected answer gave us the opportunity to have a thought-provoking discussion about the color of the sky. This, I tell them, is why I encourage answers and opinions that challenge consensuses that arise during class discussions. After leading them through this exercise, I present the students with our overarching critical thinking question for the entire course: “What’s wrong with this picture?” Throughout the semester, whenever we have an apparent consensus on the topic of the day, I return to our guiding question to allow students who may not agree with the consensus to express their views and, more generally, to facilitate students’ thinking about alternative perspectives on the topic.
 
The exercises on the first day prime students for the second day of class in which I lead a workshop on how to discuss issues of race and racial inequalities. I provide an online module of readings and videos about racial oppression, privilege, and how to talk about controversial subjects. Before class, students read a blog post on how to disagree, choose a reading and a video to watch from the module, and then bring to class an explanation of one thing they learned, one thing that surprised them, and one question they still have about the information they’ve read and watched. I begin class with a freewrite and discussion on why it’s difficult to talk about race. During the discussion, students often express their fears about not knowing what to say or how to say it, not wanting to offend other students, and having different perspectives than the majority of students in the class. White students tend to mention their feelings of guilt and being blamed when it comes to talking about privilege. The discussion also provides opportunities for students to discuss why issues of racial inequality provoke such strong emotions and how we might have productive conversations in class in light of those emotions. Overall, the discussion lays the groundwork for talking about how to disagree in ways that promote constructive conversation.
 
After discussing why it’s difficult to talk about race, I ask students to form small groups to talk about the written reflections they’ve brought to class. Because students could choose from a variety of materials to watch and read, I ask them to find other students who watched and read material different from what they chose. Then, they explain the main ideas of their readings and videos to their peers before discussing what they learned, what surprised them, and the questions they still have. I let students discuss on their own for a few minutes before circulating among the groups to provide input where necessary.
 
These strategies get students talking about an uncomfortable topic that they usually avoid. By having these conversations on the first days of class, I signal to students that I welcome dissenting viewpoints while also giving them an opportunity to practice skills for discussing social inequalities that provoke ideological splits and strong emotions. Throughout the multiple semesters in which I’ve taught my Law and Society course in this way, I have found that starting with the exercises and workshop on multiple perspectives and how to talk about race opens the classroom space to more productive conversations throughout the semester. In these conversations, students bring up dissenting viewpoints and question their peers’ perspectives more often than in semesters when I have not provided the foundation for these discussions during the first week of class.

The Law and Society (LWS) major at John Jay College of Criminal Justice currently has over six hundred undergraduate students. The majority of our students are from underrepresented populations, including working-class and immigrant students of color. These students therefore live on a daily basis in the social worlds Law & Society scholars seek to understand. 
 
In 2019, the LWS faculty launched a new initiative aimed at bringing the experiences of our students to a broader audience. We were honored to receive a Presidential Faculty/Student Research Collaboration Award from John Jay College to support the preliminary phase of this project, which will work with student focus groups to define the research priorities of their communities, as students understand them. We broadly envision that the project will involve students in collecting primarily qualitative data from their home communities throughout the five boroughs and the broader metropolitan area.
 
Since all LWS majors are required to take a Senior Research Colloquium, there is an opportunity to use the research projects from that course in the development of this new project. The Research Colloquium requires students to conduct primary research about how law operates in their social worlds, and how people respond. Our students have relationships that they use to build authentic trust in pursuit of mutually beneficial research, making possible a more socially embedded and responsive form of research that is, up to now, rare in Law & Society. Many students produce work of remarkable insight, and the strongest projects each semester could be developed into publishable work with sufficient support. A few recent examples include:
 

• An interview-based study of how non-Latinx as compared to Latinx undocumented immigrants manage the public display of their undocumented status;
• An oral history of how the “dollar vans” in West Indian communities of Brooklyn were legalized after operating illegally for years;
• An ethnographic study of how prison inmates who have sought parole multiple times navigate parole board hearings.
• An interview-based study on how women of color navigate office policies on hairstyles and personal style within professional environments.
  
• An oral history of how bodega owners in the gentrifying neighborhood of Washington Heights interact with police when conflicts arise in public spaces.
  
• An interview-based study of how DACA-mented students take their immigration status into account when making educational and career decisions. 
• An interview-based study of how men accepted plea bargains because they understood the system to be built against them thanks to their income level and skin color.

 
The Research Colloquium is only one piece of the way this project could be streamlined with the major requirements. Additional contributions could occur through assignments in classes, paid student research assistantships, or both. For example, a project on gentrification could ask students in our new 300-level Law in the City course, currently under development, to collect observational and photographic data on changing streetscapes in their neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, students working as paid research assistants and trained in human subjects protection could perform interviews with different stakeholders in key neighborhoods. Research outputs could take the form of articles, a book, and/or an edited volume. We anticipate that publications from this project would be sole- or co-authored by students.
 
A great deal of research in Law and Society focuses on working-class communities of color like the ones our students call home, but the research is almost always conducted by outsiders. In this research project, our students will help design and conduct the project from the ground up. The project is structured around the principle that no one understands oppressive systems better than those who are oppressed by them. By placing John Jay students at the center of the research and letting them drive its direction, the project will provide a unique perspective not available in conventional research conducted by outsiders.

International mobility for college and post-graduate students has become a major priority for academic institutions in the United States and worldwide.  We live in a ‘global’ era, and there is growing recognition that the university’s mission should include helping students to become responsible global citizens. This is especially relevant in the social sciences and, in particular, in socio-legal studies, a field that offers fertile ground for developing perspectives, skills and an ethos framed around becoming responsible global citizens.  Technological changes, rising student demand, the pressing needs of university administrators to pursue this goal and, most importantly, the faculty’s awareness of its importance and genuine interest mean that global citizenship will continue to be an important topic for years to come.  

Global Citizenship education “refers to a sense of belonging to a broader community and common humanity. It emphasises political, economic, social and cultural interdependency and interconnectedness between the local, the national and the global.” (UNESCO 2015).  According to this paradigm, students should see the processes and phenomena associated with globalization not only as a global trend that opens up opportunities for individual economic improvement, but also responsibilities and duties towards our fellow citizens in an ethical, principled manner.  Moreover, the call is not only for students – a sense of mission in higher education based on global citizenship must be embraced by faculty and staff as well, along with the rest of the academic community.  

A pedagogy based in global citizenship is particularly important in socio-legal education across all levels.  Some of the most pressing issues covered in socio-legal studies curricula, affecting the lives of millions of people, have a strong international/global dimension and can be best understood (and taught) accordingly.  This is obvious in the case in courses that cover the socio-legal implications of a variety of topics of a global/transnational nature – such as migration studies, global warming and environmental issues, indigenous rights, cybercrime, terrorism and international development / poverty, global/transnational policing (just to name a few).  This involves reflecting about the themes in question with a global view, debating their ethical dimension with a special sensitivity towards this dimension, fostering a critical perspective that embraces key values of recognition, inclusiveness, equality, sustainability and social justice. This is, it allows educators to enhance empathy, difficult to accomplish but desperately needed in this day and age.

However, even topics/realities that are usually explored, taught and researched in a specific location or domestic context could (and should) be explored with a comparative/international outlook, establishing their relevance in a global context, cultivating a genuine sense of curiosity and responsibility.  This applies even to those areas that we have traditionally covered from a local/national lens, such as civil rights activism, police practices, disability rights, punishment, judicial adjudication and other themes.

​Many teaching and learning modalities can be employed to advance Global Citizenship in Socio-Legal Society Studies – from including key classes/topics in our curricula, to different modes for delivery specifically devised with this goal. We would love to hear more about the different examples of tactics/strategies readers follow in their courses, and the extent to which they have been successful (or not).  We want to know more about what resources you use, and whether (and to what extent) you receive institutional support. Quite often, universities and colleges express a need for ‘internationalization of the curricula’ and expect faculty to follow through, but without providing the tools and backup needed to this end.  We hope this blog can help to fill this gap.  

​Of particular note are the different initiatives that involve physically moving outside of the spatial social, cultural and political context where the academic life of staff/students usually takes place – that is, initiatives that involve ‘global mobility’, especially study tours.  This initiative has special resonance for Socio-Legal Studies and is a topic that I am very keen to discuss further with other colleagues. Shameless plug:  At La Trobe, together with my colleagues Trevor Hogan and Terrie Waddell, I co-coordinate a research-oriented Study Tour that brings undergraduate and post-graduate students from Melbourne, Australia to New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta region over the course of three weeks.  It is interdisciplinary by nature, with a very strong emphasis on Civil Rights and Social Justice in comparative perspective. I hope to share my experiences in detail in subsequent posts.  

We look forward to your comments.    
Raul Sanchez Urribarri 
E-mail:  r.sanchezu@latrobe.edu.au    
Note:  For readers who feel coy about sharing their experiences in the blog, feel free to contact me and I will be most happy to discuss over e-mail and/or include part of our joint reflections in a future blog post if preferred.
 
Raul Sanchez Urribarri (PhD, LLM) is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at the Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.  He is a Member of the Law and Society’s Board of Directors at the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) since 2018.

In the Fall of 2013, Dr. Mihaela Serban and I collaborated to launch the Ramapo Journal of Law and Society. A casual pondering about student research and publishing opportunities in a convening group (department) meeting sparked the initiative to start an undergraduate journal in law and society. We hoped to provide a space for students at Ramapo College and around the country to publish and engage in a conversation on socio-legal issues, and also an opportunity for students to learn the art of curating work for a journal, from soliciting papers to the review and editing process to final publishing. With support from enthusiastic colleagues and Deans Samuel Rosenberg and subsequently Aaron Lorenz, the first issue of the journal went live in Spring 2014. We have had submissions from Ramapo College and other places in the country (Allegheny College, Appalachian State, California State Long Beach, Drake University, Rutgers University, Southwestern University, SUNY Fredonia, and UC Berkeley). The essays published reflect an interdisciplinary approach and have been on an array of issues such as immigrant and refugee rights, community recovery and healing after mass violence, workplace discrimination and LGBT rights, reproductive health, affirmative action, recidivism, and reversal legislation in senate. The submissions are from varied fields of the social sciences and the humanities including sociology, communication arts, political science, history, law and society, legal studies, government and justice studies, and criminal justice. 

The journal evolved from advising senior research projects. Ramapo’s Law and Society senior capstone is a two semester, sequential, thesis course, which requires students to conduct independent research and write an extensive thesis. Advising senior research projects is undoubtedly a rewarding process, but it also presents many challenges, one of which is helping students learn how to articulate ideas to a wider audience and grow as scholars. Many times, student papers have immense potential but rarely grow beyond the constraint of the grade culture. Through the journal, we hoped to provide a voice to student research, bring enthusiasm and ownership of their ideas, and engage with student scholarship in other institutions as well. However, given that most of the submissions have been from seniors, the interaction has been mostly limited to student editors and readers. The choice of an online publication platform (which we adopted), unlike traditional publications, hopefully will bring more readership and address some of these concerns.    

The journal is a baby step to creating life-long scholars, and familiarize students with the scholarly world of research and publication. While universities have a culture of promoting collaborative research between professors and students, this is a challenge at small liberal arts institutions. Our students are not as familiar with the entire research and publishing process; setting up an editorial team is a step towards collaborative learning and enculturating students into the scholarly world. Editing is one of the primary tasks of the publishing process, as it brings many skills together. The review is a collaborative process, it gets editors to read and critically reflect upon the merits of the submissions, and make recommendations in group meetings. This opens an entirely new level of research and engagement for them, as they are not only working with submissions on topics they may or may not be familiar with, but are also constantly challenged to seek the boundaries or the core of law and society, given the interdisciplinary focus. Students also work with authors on polishing their pieces for publishing, providing constructive feedback. Students learn the tough skills of working with timelines and negotiating with authors to revise and submit within deadlines. Review meetings are some of the more interesting ones, because they add a completely different level to how students read and engage with materials— a pedagogical moment that one wouldn’t get in a classroom setting only. Many of the skillsets learned in the process of editing do translate to their own work at the senior capstone level as well.   

The journal is published annually through the collective efforts of numerous undergraduate student editors, a chief editor, and faculty advisors. We have been fortunate in having great student involvement and some excellent student chief editors Jonathan Mangel (2013-14), Molly Hopkins (2014-15), Amer Garlasco (2015-17), Antonino LaRosa (2017-19). Each of them has brought their unique signature to the journal. Jonathan, of course, did some heavy lifting in setting up the journal, Molly introduced a blog page on contemporary legal issues, and Amer steered the journal’s social media page and publicized the journal. As our program has grown, we have also expanded our faculty advisors: Dr. Jefferey Ellsworth, who recently joined the law and society program at Ramapo, has also become an instrumental part of this group. 

​The rewards have been fulfilling, more importantly it has allowed us to work with a team of enthusiastic students. Guiding student editors through this process is a reflexive teaching moment. It not only gives a chance to work with a young curious group but also provides a glimpse into how they engage with their peers and work collaboratively. It is a joy to see their sense of accomplishment when they see the journey of an essay from a submission to a revised and published paper. Like most endeavors, challenges remain, most of all in sustaining interest and flow of submissions. We have considered collaborating with other institutions as an option, but it remains unexplored. This is something we need to work on; ideas and suggestions of how we can grow and sustain will be much appreciated. 
 
Ramapo Journal of Law and Society can be accessed at: 
https://www.ramapo.edu/law-journal/archived-journals/

Pictured above: (far left) GMU Undergrad Student Researchers Bryce McKune & Heather Pickett, (center) GMU 2017 summer research team: Sabrine Baiou, Casey Tabas, Shannon Magnuson (ABD), Dr. Danielle S. Rudes, Kaley Regner, Liana Shivers & Karlie Berry, (far right) GMU Undergrad Researcher Karlie Berry presenting at the American Society of Criminology meetings, 2019

I consider it my life’s mission to make research come to life for undergraduate students. When I was an undergraduate myself, many years ago, maybe the opportunities existed at the small state university where I went for my undergraduate degree, but I did not know about them. To me, research was something that occurred in scientific labs with beakers and microscopes and something that people far smarter than me or far more astute were able to undertake. I was just taking classes, working a part-time job waiting tables and working in the campus television station at night trying to make sure that a bachelor’s degree would eventually hang on my wall. Today, as an instructor, researcher, mentor, and professor at a major R1 institution, I am incredibly blessed with finding a pathway to academia, to research, and into a life I greatly admire and I am eternally grateful for.

What I understand most deeply about my own work now and the work that my undergraduate are currently doing with me is that it is not enough to tell them about available opportunities, it is not enough to tell them how the transferable skills they will learn through those opportunities will be great whether they become academics or not, and it is not near enough to just share my own research with them. Instead, my work is about inspiring them to believe that the research WE do, together, is important, maybe a little fun, and most of all possible.

For the last two summers, 2017 and 2018, I have been the lucky recipient of an on-campus grant program started by the Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities and Research (OSCAR) at George Mason University (GMU). The OSCAR office is remarkable! I do not mean to assume that all universities have this level of support for undergraduate research, but  in this blog post, I will share the opportunities I provided undergraduate students with OSCAR’s help and I will foreshadow some ways this is possible at any institution, even where this level of support is lacking. 
 
I applied for and received two competitive summer impact grants to fund six undergraduate students in a way that our university had never done before. The idea was to take undergraduate researchers into the field to experience a research project from start to finish over the 13 weeks of summer. My project, which I was already going to do with my graduate students and a couple colleagues from sociology and women studies, involves going inside restricted housing units / solitary confinement units at four prisons in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC) to do interviews and observations with staff and inmates. We were incredibly lucky to get this kind of access to prisons. Our access was based on a long-standing relationship I have with the PADOC. But, for this blog, access is beside the point. We hired six undergraduate students who applied for our posting. I carefully crafted the ad so that students would be interested in going inside prisons to do the work, but also to make sure that I attracted students who thought that they could physically and mentally handle prison research. I was sure to point out in the ad that no experience was necessaryand there was no mandatory minimum GPA. I do this with all of my undergraduate research assistants in the undergraduate research lab that I run year-round and have for now a decade at GMU. I want research to be accessible to anystudent who is interested. There was a time commitment for this project because the OSCAR office agreed to fund the students $4000 each but they were forbidden from working in other jobs over the summer and from taking summer classes with the exception of one class during the first summer session, but only in necessary cases.
 
To make the most of the experience for the undergraduates, my graduate student, Shannon Magnuson, and I worked diligently to design a 13-week research program for our undergraduate research team that included their working on our projects (my umbrella project and her dissertation research) as well as having undergraduate researchers (in teams of two) design their own research foci. Then we undertook an intense schedule that included an orientation to get them up to speed on the project and expectations, a deep dive into the literature on solitary confinement and prisons, focused workshops on writing research questions, preparing literature reviews, qualitative fieldwork, researching in prisons, coding and analysis using Atlas.ti, drafting finding sections, creating a poster/presentation and writing a research paper (See attached summer 2018 schedule for full details). The undergraduate students accompanied my larger research team into four prisons to collect data for my project, Shannon’s project, another student of mine, Taylor Hartwell’s master’s project, the questions of two colleagues of mine, Dr. Angela Hattery & Dr. Earl Smith on race/gender in prison and their own research questions (which focused on a wide-variety of topics including self-esteem, inmate coping and philosophies of punishment). We all collected data for each other so their N would be higher and so they would get the most out of the research process. Students also participated in creating a weekly video blog of their experiences learning and researching along the way. The department, OSCAR and GMU will use these to highlight student undergraduate research at GMU and to recruit new students. 
 
Then, for weeks, they slaved away over an Atlas.ti computer screen to diligently code and analyze data related to their particular research questions. We met in groups to discuss key themes and findings, link findings to relevant literature and brainstorm the best ways of presenting their data. Each team created a final poster and presented their work at the Summer Celebration of Student Scholarship at GMU. 
From there though, the work was not over…a lesson we drilled into them from day one. The research process is on-going and it was up to them to consider whether or not to stay on that path. In the fall semester, all six of the 2018 undergraduates stayed on at the ACE! undergraduate lab to work on their projects. One team completed a full research paper and will submit for publication this spring, one student abandoned her particular project, but created a new set of research questions from the existing data and received a competitive OSCAR undergraduate research scholars grant to re-analyze the data to suit her new question(s). She will complete this work over the spring 2019 semester. Three students submitted their work to the Council for Undergraduate Research (CUR) annual event, Poster on the Hill, in Washington, DC. Two students are currently applying to GMU’s doctoral program in Criminology, Law & Society to continue this work with me at ACE!. From the 2017 undergraduate group, two students presented at the CUR Undergraduate Research Conference in Oklahoma, one presented at the American Society of Criminology meetings (on a regular, not undergraduate, panel…and she rocked it!). Another 2017 undergraduate used her paper from the summer as a writing sample and was accepted into a prestigious graduate program, one won the OSCAR Undergraduate Excellence Award (only seven awarded across GMU’s campus), and one received the Social Action and Integrative Learning (SAIL) Community Engagement Medallion, in part, based on her work with the solitary confinement project. Wow…one summer and a lifetime of experiences!
 
But, what if you do not have internal resources like OSCAR’s at your university? The easy answer comes from the old adage, “Priorities: when someone tells you their too busy it is not about their schedule, it is about YOUR spot on their schedule.” Make undergraduate research important to you; give it a primary spot on your schedule. You can make it happen without funding and without support. You can do it! It is do-able at many levels and in many ways. Here are some preliminary suggestions:

• Start Small: work with just one or two undergraduates as you get started. Recruit them from your classes and give them a chance to do research and build their skills (and their resumes) as they learn to become your unpaid research assistant. Give them a fancy volunteer title like Undergraduate Research Assistant and see where this takes you, and them.
• Develop Course Credit Option(s):Work with your chair, dean or provost to develop a course option for research that exists separate from directed readings and/or independent studies. We have a CRIM 498: Research Practicum available to students at GMU that is renewable (providing students need the credits). This option gives you university structure to provide research experiences to undergrads while you work with them. It may not count as part of your teaching load, but there is a formal record of the work you are doing for your CV. 
• You Do not Need Money: I know, funds to finance research are nice, but be real…they are a luxury. Qualitative work can be relatively cheap and even free. And, if you partner with local organizations to design research questions they want the answers to, too, you can sometimes get access in ways that are not imaginable if you just go in asking to do your own research in their organization(s). Quantitative projects can also be fairly inexpensive depending on the type of work you are doing. Chances are you already have SPSS or some other statistical software program available at your university. Work with on-campus labs to reserve time for your undergraduate research team to do data cleaning, coding and analysis for your project. Once you train them, they can do this solo and you can just be on-call for questions and answers. 
• Use the Nested Mentoring Model: (see prior CULJP blog post) where you train a group of students who then mentor/train other students in subsequent semesters. This will free up a bit of your time (though you will still need to advise and provide oversight). You can even do what we do at GMU, and get one of your graduate or undergraduate students to co-design the software training for whatever program you will use (i.e., SPSS, SAS, Atlas.ti, NVivo). After the training is developed, they can add another line to their resume each time they offer a training to a new group of undergraduate researchers. 

• Call on Experts: Call, email or text me! I can help you set up an undergraduate lab, find ways to work with undergraduate research assistants and learn to include undergrads in your research in new and exciting ways. I can also put you in touch with the GMU OSCAR office if you would like to try to model some of what they are doing at your university/college. And, I can connect you to my colleague and friend, Dr. Shannon Portillo at the University of Kansas who runs a similar undergraduate research program or my former students, Dr. Kimberly Meyer and Dr. Jill Viglione who both run exciting undergraduate research labs/programs within their academic departments. 

 
The message here is simple. Do not just talk about research, do not just teach undergraduates how to do research…LET THEM DO IT! Bring them with you, engage with them as colleagues, as researchers and as skilled and thoughtful contributors. Do not set the bar high for them, release the idea of the bar and let them soar to any height possible. I know this sounds cliché, but it is how I run my lab and my life. And, the process and the results are both inspirational and amazing.

My first encounter with the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) was during a Six-week Summer program on “Rule of Law and the Liberal Arts” in Maine. The summer program felt like being in Graduate School again with tons of readings and which you feel nostalgic about only once you are out of graduate school. But there were two distinct aspects of that experience that I remember- one that we got to critically discuss the readings with the authors themselves- a rare opportunity, and two, the summer program was primarily composed of faculty who were in teaching institutions, thereby, often creating conversations on pedagogy in the Liberal Arts. To discover that there existed a Consortium that primarily focused on pedagogy in legal studies from a co-participant, the then President of the Consortium, Bill Rose (from Albion College), was quite a revelation and since then the Consortium has most of all made me more reflective as a teacher.
 
My first teaching job was in the Political Science department at Kirorimal College, Delhi University. One had to follow a centralized syllabus catering both to an annual exam as well as to ensure uniformity across colleges. When I am asked about the difference between teaching in India and the United States, the distinction between a centralized syllabus and individually crafted syllabus is always striking for colleagues in the U.S. In reality, both systems contain flexibility and rigidities in different ways. 
 
I recall a particularly important moment very early on in my teaching career at KM College. A new optional course was created on Women and Politics and some of us were unsure about its content and readings lists. Drawing on the incredible resources that were available to us, we invited teachers, scholars, and activists who had been long associated with the women’s movement in India (as I reflect more now- mostly Delhi based) to either submit pieces or let us reprint their published work but the decision was taken to publish the reader in Hindi given the paucity of such materials. All the pieces were then subsequently translated into Hindi only after a very interactive workshop in Daulat Ram College and subsequent discussions held on the translations. It resulted in a memorable edited reader on Feminist Politics: Struggles and Issues.(Delhi: Hindi Medium Directorate, 2001)with Nivedita Menon and Sadhna Arya that continues to be in circulation. But the experience was an excellent testament to what the teachers could initiate even in a centralized system. I learnt very quickly that the contours of knowledge set by a curriculum seldom restricted the creative possibilities of so many amazing teachers. For someone who had just started her teaching career surrounded by many such inspiring friends and colleagues (including my Dad), the system had never seemed as formally restricted. I hear of many changes in Indian higher education and in the same colleges and I keep meeting amazing students of some of the same colleagues. Yet I fear that the system may be mimicking a “liberal arts” formally from the west while losing its essence that already exists in many ways and could have just been strengthened with resources and support. Most undergraduate college teachers in India have no personal offices and little resources for the incredible work they do everyday.
 
But back to the U.S., where I have crafted many syllabi over the years yet Consortium conversations have made me be more self-reflexive. While some of the syllabi are easier to create because there may not be many courses on the themes that I teach in Political Science (eg Torture or Policing), I wonder if my other courses are really able to break the dominant paradigms. Sometimes limits are as much about disciplinary boundaries, departmental needs or the ease of picking a pre-existing case book for a civil liberties or constitutional law course. Recently, in a Consortium workshop, one of my colleagues said candidly- I don’t just want to know what perfect readings you get for the course. I want to know your assignments and primarily your path from taking your students from point A to point B. In some ways, the insistence on adding student learning outcomes (SLO) to our syllabi is meant to help us think about precisely that question. Yet, the bureaucratic need for SLOs to be written in assessable ways already limits the aspirational goal. Another colleague shared the ingenious way in which he uses the city as the basis of an assignment. In another consortium discussion, I learnt of the ambitious ways in which undergraduate students get involved in research projects sometimes requiring many resources and others very minimal. 
 
In all of these conversations, the passion for teaching, mentoring, and a quest for critical engagement with social justice concerns are central. While there are many formal reasons for my institution to be a part of the consortium, for me it has resulted in a community of scholars, who above all have made teaching a central part of my academic life. Even as teaching in liberal arts setting already informs such an emphasis, the desire to centrally locate pedagogy and program building in my conversations and writing about it in conjunction with my research is what I am grateful for as a part of the Consortium. As teaching loads in many liberal arts institutions increase, and research resources decline, sometimes these conversations become unexpected source of comradely resources reminding one of the joys of sharing the process of learning and teaching. And rather than relying just on individuals, colleagues, or institutions, which may vary across different contexts, the Consortium is able (or aspires) to build a more interdisciplinary and open space for such conversations to thrive.  

             ​May 2018 saw the first graduates of from the Law & Society Programin the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. A central element of this new Law & Society degree program is a capstone course where students collect, analyze, and engage with data to respond to current research questions. This course is modeled off of a course I designed with Danielle Rudes at George Mason University. It is meant to foster an engaged learning environment. While Danielle and I have previously written about the outcomes from engaged learning courses for students[1], here students reflect on their own experiences with the research intensive course. This semester students built on an Undergraduate Research Project by Sydney Bannister funded by the Center for Undergraduate Researchat the University of Kansas. Sydney’s project aimed to explore how gender shapes the role of frontline supervisors in policing. Early in the semester a panel of frontline supervisors came to speak to the class. Then students completed human subjects training, development an interview protocol, interviewed police sergeants in the community, analyzed the data, and presented their findings to each other. Below four students from the course reflect on their experiences this semester. This summer Sydney will share her experiences at the CULJP Workshopimmediately preceding LSA. Join us by registering here. 
 
Shannon Portillo


[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.

              This semester I embarked on a research journey different than my previous endeavors. Leading up to Spring 2018, I had served as a research assistant twice. My first exposure of assisting on research was through the Sociological Justice Project Summer of 2017, when I checked already coded data for errors and logged sources through Zotaro. This experience was closely aligned with what I imagined research would entail; coding, excel, numbers, etc. Fall 2018 presented a different side of research when I was tasked with changing the formatting of a paper ready for journal submission to Chicago Style. This was surprisingly fun as I got first hand insight of the researcher’s findings while diversifying my skills. Fall of 2018 also provided a new opportunity, creating my own research project. 
             With the guidance of my research mentors Dr. Shannon Portillo and Ph.D. student Nicole Humphrey, I formulated a research question. The hardest part of formulating my question(s) was feeling like there had to be a right or wrong answer available. I would imagine these feelings stems from an educational upbringing that fostered an exploration for a correct answer, not ambiguous possibility. The vagueness of my research questions scared me because I didn’t want to fail and disappoint my mentors, even though I rationally knew that ambiguity was necessary because if there was a lack of ambiguity, what would there be to research? This is more challenging because in the physical sciences there is the possibility of a cut and dry answer, and I grew up with this being the only kind of research I would think of when the term was mentioned. Now, I find that in any academic setting I cannot help but think of some research question I would like to study (making for a distracted Sydney in the classroom).
            Being a research assistant before I conducted my own research lessened the concern I would have encountered had I jumped into my own. Assisting gave me the perspective of viewing end work while understanding what needs to go into a research project. I try and imagine my research journey without the support I received from the Center for Undergraduate Research as well as my mentor and I. Just. Can’t. I would have faced such challenges writing a literature review for the first time without the advice of those who had been through the process as well as an award application for research, when I was a first-time researcher.
            Looking back, it is likely because I was a first-time semi-independent researcher that I thought I would be able to handle the process alone. I planned to conduct thirty semi-structured interviews myself as well as coding and transcribing the data alone, which is slightly laughable now. Having the Law and Society major capstone class to help me conduct and think critically about my research was essential to this project, but also my confidence as a researcher. I don’t think I would have grown the way I have this semester without my research team, because they brought ideas to the table I had not thought of as well as carrying the interview load. I think if I had conducted interviews alone this semester I would have ended up burned out and discouraged by the workload. My research team kept me afloat and excited to do more research in the Fall. I never thought research would be an interest of mine, because I imagined it as: numbers, coding, being in a lab. Yet, this past year and half I have learned it’s studying what’s below the surface, why we do what we do, and gaining understanding so we can move forward and better the communities of which we belong.

​            My capstone class for Law and Society was the first of our program. It was led by Professor Shannon Portillo. Professor Portillo was an exceptional leader and teacher as she directed us through the tasks we had during our semester. She laid it out the first day in class that we would be interviewing police officers of different departments to get data on their roles as frontline supervisors. I thought that this approach to teaching was a great style and we learned from our research experiences being hands on. She guided us in a mentoring type of process. Research sounded scary coming into this capstone class, especially since we found out that research is never ending. With one question can come millions more where those came from. One question leads to so many follow up questions that can lead you down any number of rabbit holes. 
            “Learning by doing” (Takata and Lieting, 1987) is the type of learning we did this semester in this capstone class. Hands on learning approach has several benefits such as preparing us for real world experiences, how to communicate, how to gather data by having to critically think on your own; also this form of learning allows you to process data at your own speed and style, which is beneficial for everyone involved.  I agree with scholars that argue that teaching and research don’t not have to be antagonistic. Rather, they should be integrated in undergraduate curriculum, particularly at research universities ( Boyer, 1990; Boyer Commission, 1998: Healey 2005) Being a student that studies at an AAU school it brings me great pride and honor to be a part of this study with Professor Portillo. There really is a kind of culture that you acquire with staff and fellow students as we see in the Bennet, Boyer, Brake and Healey Research, teach the research process enhances students’ understanding of the process and discipline, as well as promotes a university culture, which values and support scholarship, this allows faculty to benefit as well while collaborating, mentoring and aligning their research goals. 
            Allowing her students to learn actively has allowed for a new experience as a student. I didn’t fully understand at first what her intentions for us were, but now that I do, I love that we were the first capstone class of our department in Law and Society. I would love to see where the research direction goes for future students. Inquiry and research based teaching facilitates student learning and engagement in the classroom find that students at all achievement levels can thrive and benefit from research experience (Apedoe and Reeves, 2006: Baldock and Chanson, 2006; Matand, Wu, and Rollin, 2011; Spronken-Smith, 2010: Spronken-Smith and Walker, 2010). With more research we could get a better understanding of what other forms of teaching/learning would benefit those studying at KU in the Law and Society department, and what better way to get data then using this theory of professors working with undergrad students who attend AAU universities. This collaboration benefits science, KU, professors and students alike, and society because answers for issues in law and society are always needed to bring a level of peace in the community.  

​Overview:
This semester I participated in a capstone course designed so that each student had the opportunity to engage directly with frontline supervisors in the region to gather information regarding their positions. This analysis is based on interviews conducted with sergeants in jurisdictions in Northeast Kansas. My analysis is also informed by: (1) transcripts of other student-lead interviews with police sergeants, (2) an undergraduate research project shaped by Sydney Bannister’s Undergraduate Ressearch Award, and (3) from literature by academics such as Shannon Portillo, Kimberly Kras, Faye Taxman, Howard Risher, Janet Chan, Sally Doran, Christina Marel, and many more. This project was exploratory in nature, and is shaped by some limitations. Data collection was limited to the region. The data are also shaped by my own positionality as a young (21), white, gay man, However, the results of the research reinforce what we find in the limited academic research on frontline supervisors. My analysis below focuses on my research experience and some of the themes that emerged from my analysis. 
Research:
CITI training:During the first two weeks of the course, we were asked to participate in the CITI Training course in which the Human Research Protection Program. 
Academic review: Following our certification, we began exploring what literature already exists (and there isn’t much!) regarding frontline supervision. In “Managing from the Middle”, Frontline supervision is defined as: “serv[ing] in a critical role, maintaining relationships between upper management and frontline workers” (Kras, Portillo, and Taxman 2017, p. 1). This definition shaped the outlook of the Undergraduate Research Application formed by Sydney Bannister, which lead to the focus of our capstone course.
Purpose:The purpose of our research is to explore and understand how power is wielded by middle managers in local law enforcement precincts and how they manage their use of power in relation to their gender identity. 
The Interviews:I conducted two interviews with local police sergeants. Before each of the interviews, the sergeants signed informed consent forms. The interviews were both semi-structured to allow for a better flow of ideas and conversation in a confidential setting. I took notes of the actions/reactions throughout our dialogue and compiled all of the information (verbal & nonverbal) via transcription. Interviews focused on broad themes related to sergeants roles as middle managers, and specifically asked for narratives of how sergeants engage with their work with subordinates and superiors. 
Challenges:
One difficulty I faced during the process, was access to research participants. It was difficult to recruit people into the study. One of the more interesting findings from my analysis is how my identity may have shaped the data I acquired. 
In one interview, I felt uncomfortable on the basis of my sexuality whereas I felt comfortable in the other. Which, in regard to the perception of power, one sergeant seemingly used my identity as platform to exert his authority over me. Some of the key indicators that I noted throughout that interview included: Frequent interruption, correction of my questions, rolling of eyes, and patronizing tones and vocal inflections. This slight difference of social identity appeared to separate me from the social status of the heteronormative sergeant. In the reading “How Race, Sex, and Age Frame the Use of Authority by Local Government Officials”, “Social status can be seen as a continuum, with middle-aged white men at one end and young women of color at the other” (Portillo, 2010 p. 608) While understanding that my identity leans heavily towards one end, even the slightest difference in social identity made me feel extremely uncomfortable as I felt my status challenged greatly (You can imagine what that could mean from identities on the other end of the spectrum). However, that same individual did not have a post-high school education and felt as though his authority was challenged as my questions were ‘academic’-based and not ‘practice’-based. 
Another challenge, among the difficulty in locating sergeants in general, were locating women in those roles. When, at the beginning of the semester, we had a conversation of what it was like for women to be in these roles, many have discussed feeling as though they needed to express their title of authority to be taken seriously. As well, many felt as though they had to become accustomed to the ‘fraternization’ environment of policing. That being said, during a panel towards the beginning of the semester, one of the sergeants stated that her subordinates often found her to be “bitchy” when enforcing rules. Prokos and Padavic outline these scenarios justly, that such masculinity, “Is rendered most visible in situations where it is challenged, as when men face unemployment, enter traditionally female occupations[...], or, as in this case, when women enter jobs that traditionally had been used to confirm masculinity” (Prokos and Padavic 2002, p. 441).  
Conclusion:
The solution? I would urge for more data and research into this, especially into the day-to-day environment of middle-management as well as in interviewing sergeants from other jurisdictions and regions. This way, we can improve academia and provide sound literature to better shape policy, in training of future sergeants, and in educating the public.
This research was extraordinarily exciting in terms of being on the forefront of research. Prior to the capstone course, I knew that I was interested in continuing in some sort of higher education but having the opportunity to engage in this particular research study has reinvigorated that passion. I knew that we had a long ways to go in terms of diversifying the roles of leading figures in our society but I had no idea to what extent such intentionality, time, and effort must be taken to achieve that. This course helped me to realize that while there may be no simple solution. 


Works Cited:
Kras, K., Portillo, S. and Taxman, F. (2017). Managing from the Middle: Frontline
            Supervisors and Perceptions of Their Organizational Power. Law & Policy, 39 (3), pp.215-236.
Portillo, S. (2010). How Race, Sex, and Age Frame the Use of Authority by Local Government Officials.
            Law & Social Inquiry, 35 (3), 603-623. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2010.01197.x
Prokos, A. and Padavic, I. (2002). 'There Oughtta Be a Law Against Bitches': Masculinity Lessons in
            Police Academy Training. Gender, Work and Organization, 9(4), pp.439-459.

          They say there’s a first time for everything. Doing anything for the first time can be very daunting and intimidating, but also very exciting and intriguing. I’ve taken a few courses in college that involved research, but most of them were from books or on computers and it involved lots of reading and interpreting. In my Capstone course at the end of my senior year, I had to actually get out and interview people for a project in which the subject matter was one that not much research had been done before. 
         Since this was something that I’ve never done before, it was kind of scary, but the more involved that I became with the first interview, the more interesting the actual interviews became and therefore it was more that I liked the actual research of people.   My confidence increased with the second interview as I had more of an idea of what I wanted to as although it was that much better than the first interview.  
       In the end, I think that had I done more, it probably could have been even easier and maybe even become addictive if there could even be such a thing in the academic world.  Being the ground breaker for research of a subject that doesn’t have much information and knowing that I had a hand in how future research can and will be done is very satisfying to know and it would be interesting to know how far research can go years down the road.

This political cartoon deals with the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, leaked in 2004 by 60 Minutes. This cartoon deals with the issues of responsibility within the United States military and government, directly linking the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the Bush administration. This cartoon criticizes the lack of accountability among higher-ups, as the blame for these abuses was placed solely on individual military personnel such as Lynndie England, who is depicted in the pose of one of the more infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of her holding a leash around a tortured and naked Iraqi detainee.

In the interview with Angela Y. Davis, Davis asserts that “these abusive practices [at Abu Ghraib] cannot be dismissed as abnormalities,” echoing sentiments that reject the ‘few bad apples’ explanation put forward by the U.S. government in the early days of the Abu Ghraib scandal (49). Moreover, this cartoon ties in with Basuli Deb’s work regarding the tensions between liberal feminism and transnational feminism after the Abu Ghraib atrocities. Deb writes that “US-centric feminisms at once leapt to the rescue of these women [such as Lynndie England] and portrayed them merely as tools manipulated by the military establishment” (Deb, 1). Transnational feminism, on the other hand, looks at the dynamics between gender and race, taking note of how white women became ‘good citizens’ by helping in the torture of brown Iraqi detainees. This cartoon highlights the transnational feminist perspective by showing that while Lynndie England was working for the higher up government apparatus, she is also accountable for her part in the chain of command. England, though being a woman and a victim of the patriarchy, is white and therefore benefits from that patriarchy due to the power she holds over men of color.

Looking into the actual illustrative details of the cartoon, the themes mentioned (lack of accountability and where responsibility lies in the chain of command for torture) are represented most clearly in the directions each figure is facing. Lynndie England, the lowest in the “Chain of Command” and the one who was directly involved in the torture, faces the crumpled figure of the torture victim head on, thus acknowledging her actions in the practice of torture. On the contrary, Rumsfeld's head is only slightly angled toward England, giving the impression that he is neither acknowledging nor condemning the actions that led to the crumpled and chained figure. President Bush’s face is turned the furthest from the body, his eyes closed, whistling a tune to represent how he refuses to outwardly acknowledge the torture in any way. The positions of power are indicated by the size of each character, Bush by far the largest with each body shrinking in scale as the chain. While the size decreases, the detail of each figure increases the closer they get to the tortured victim, again suggesting a refusal to acknowledge the extent of the torture the further up the command chain one is. England is the most detailed because the public has become privy to the details of her involvement in the torture, whereas Bush and Rumsfeld’s connections are obscured to the public, leaving them “clean”. This cartoon is significant to the contemporary public because of its deconstruction of the ‘few bad apples’ explanation.

References

Angela Y. Davis. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. Seven Stories
Press, 2005.

Basuli Deb. “Transnational Feminism and Women Who Torture: Re- imag(in)ing Abu Ghraib
Prison Photography.” Postcolonial Text 7. 1, 2012.

Drughon, Dennis. “Chain of Command.” Scranton Times, Scranton Times, 16 May 2004.
​

                                                                    “Captive” by Todd Tarselli

Some of the themes we related this political cartoon to were the transition from the spectacle of torture to a more private form of torture, specifically Foucault's idea that torture has become about imprisonment and detainment. Furthermore, this cartoon shows the more modern psychological form of torture. This is shown in the way he seems to be imprisoned within his own mind. This cartoon could also be demonstrating an after effect of torture in that the effects never leave and the tortured experiences post traumatic stress. Even though he may be free, torture and pain can be hard to describe with words and the experience leaves him trapped with his memories. In a contemporary sense we related this to the U.S. and its current detainee program in which they often deprive detainees of their senses using blindfolds and earmuffs leaving them only with their own thoughts. Prolonged exposure may lead to the detainee having mental issues and effectively “going crazy” from being trapped with only their own thoughts.

References
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

​

​Spring feels like conference season in my disciplines.  Many of my scholar friends just got back from the Western Political Science Associationmeetings in San Francisco, and many others are gearing up for the Midwest Political Science Associationmeetings in Chicago.  
 
And of course, right now, my attention has turned to the Law and Society Associationmeetings – June 7 – 10 in Toronto, Canada and to the Consortium Pre-Conference Workshop.   The Consortium will have several professional development panels at LSA – on undergraduate research, getting and loving a tenure track job in legal studies at an undergraduate focused institution, and a panel on the connections between LSA and CULJPS (they are long and deep connections!).
 
With all of the recent attention to “Manels,” as well as to the multiple ways that women are showing “we also know stuff,” I’ve been reflecting lately on how proud I am of how inclusive CULJPS is, and how inclusive my time at LSA has been (with caveats, and acknowledged limits – I find CULJPS to be really supportive of women’s leadership, and LSA to be terrific at being an inclusive and international organization; both still have room to grow).  
 
I’ve also been thinking about who I am when I attend a conference, why I go, and how I act while there.  For instance, I avoid APSAmeeting – going only once a decade or so – but I usually attend the WPSA.   I find myself at home with the public law people there, the popular culture people there, and the feminist political theory folks; and I always attend an environmental theory panel, even though they don’t usually relate to my areas of research or teaching.  I like the WPSA focus on pedagogy, the intimate and relaxed feel of it, and the ability to construct a “conference within a conference.” 
 
I presented at some graduate student conferences when I was earning my PhD at NYU in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and I attended disciplinary conferences related to my dissertation, as an observer, during the same time.  But it wasn’t until I attended the 2000 LSA meetings and the graduate student workshop in Miami Beach that I began to see myself as “an academic attending an academic conference.”  In the nearly twenty years since then, I’ve cycled through loving, and loathing, the conference process – and I’ve noticed that the wayI conference has changed over time.  When I was first out of grad school, and still working to develop the book that grew out of my dissertation, I attended in order to present.  Because I was a junior scholar, I almost always presented fully formed work, and therefore didn’t get as much benefit as I could have, from presenting work in progress. 
 
It wasn’t until my first book came out, and I switched gears, that I began to see conferences as a place to have meaningful conversations about my work and teaching – it wasn’t until tenure that I saw conferences as places to be vulnerable, intellectually.  Now, I love to be on panels where I can present work where the research is mostly done and the argument is in formation, but I am still trying out different approaches.  Even more, I love being on panels that are focused on something outside of the research, and use the research as a springboard – a roundtable on Data Access and Research Transparency, for example, or a panel on pedagogy and engaging undergraduates in research.
 
Early in my career, I understood that conferences were important places to network, even as I hated the term, and cringed at the thought.   I was lucky to have an advisor who did lots of heavy lifting on my behalf – she’d introduce me to her peers, saying things like, “Renee’s research is on ...” and when I listened closely I learned not only how she saw my research, but how to talk about it within the different subfields of my disciplines.
 
On my own, though, I didn’t start out strategically – in fact, I was such a dork! I’d actually follow senior scholars around the book room, or around the reception buffet (grabbing as much food as I could, to supplement my super small assistant professor at a state university per diem), and “accidentally-on-purpose” run into them, smile, and blunder through “I love your work” conversations.  I was lucky that so many senior folks were generous – they gave me their cards, they sat down with me to hear what I loved about their work, they invited future conversation, they helped me connect with their graduate students and colleagues.  Over time, I learned to be more strategic (and respectful) – to email in the month ahead of a conference to introduce myself and ask for a cup of coffee, to follow-up with everyone I met with an email in the weeks after the conference, thanking them for their time, suggesting an article, sending my work whenever they invited it.   I learned to ask my panel mates to meet up for breakfast before, or for drinks after, as a way of extending our scholarly connections and conversations.  
 
I learned, actually, to be much more extroverted than I am.  
 
Years later, I learned the value of three special treats: one hotel breakfast-in-bed, the ability to say no to an evening out, when I was wiped out, and the pleasures of an afternoon in a strange and fabulous city. As a new mom, I learned that conferences were also places I could sleep in, and take uninterrupted showers, and eat breakfast alone.  
 
While conferencing, I was always aware that I was making connections – I didn’t realize that I was also making friends.    I didn’t realize that slowly, over the course of a career, conferences would become the highlight of my academic year – a chance to see and talk with people I only get to see once every twelve months, as well as a chance to meet junior scholars who are just beginning to develop their research agendas and teaching personas. 
 
Time at conference is, for me, like a miniature sabbatical on an amazing fellowship – three to five days of focused conversation about my work, and your work – the chance for adequate sleep (or not) and the chance for a morning writing retreat in a new city with great coffee.  I try to do two conferences a year – more doesn’t seem sustainable (though I’ve done four, before), one doesn’t seem quite enough.  I try not to grade during conferences – except on the airplane (airplane grading is the best) – and I try to return from conferences refreshed and energize for future work.
 
I am certain that LSA will be all of that that this year – and I am incredibly excited about the pre-conference workshop that CULJP is planning.  
 
We will meet – and I hope you’ll join us – the day before, in the conference hotel in Toronto, to engage in sustained and invigorating dialogue about undergraduate legal studies. We’ll start the day with presidents – past and future – of CULJP and LSA, discussing the interplay and overlap between our two organizations, and the role of sociolegal studies in undergraduate legal studies.  We’ll network and chat at lunch – and maybe even take a walk – and then return in the afternoon for a hands-on and interactive set of sessions on program development and maintenance, curricular outcomes and assessment, and how best to serve our students. 
 
The CULJP pre-conference workshop will be an intimate gathering 20 – 30 people, and a perfect place to have a conference experience as a junior scholar new to LSA and CULJP, as well as a place for those of us who are more ‘seasoned’ to connect in different ways with our peers.  
 
I hope you will join us – register here, then email me and ask to meet up for a cup of coffee at LSA!