#10 – Swethaa Ballakrishnen on what it means to do global sociolegal studies

PALcast

In this episode, Fabio talks to Swethaa Ballakrishnen, a law professor at UCI with training in sociology and law. Swethaa studies legal globalization and how law and legal institutions create, sustain, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities, drawing from fieldwork in multiple sites. But the interview focuses mostly on the book Swethaa edited with Sara Dezalay, called "Invisible Institutionalisms", which questions the process by which academics give meaning to global legal development and how this sometimes reifies categories and hierarchies. This is a timely conversation for a project like PAL that is set off to produce "global collaborative research" involving scholars in both the "North" and the "South".