Introduction

The editorial team at Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies is delighted to launch a new section of our website called ‘methodology toolkits’.  The aim of the series is to support socio-legal scholars who want to adopt a particular methodology, or teachers who are looking for material to use in seminars.  Over the course of this series, we will be publishing two methodology toolkits a year.   These will each provide links to the blogs and podcasts we have published on a particular topic, together with some of the recommended readings provided by those who take part in our podcast series. The latter tend to be ‘go to’ pieces in the field recommended by experts who have engaged with a particular methodology. The editorial team will also add some of their own recommendations for readings. Combined, they form an accessible methodological toolkit that draws on a burgeoning body of work around socio-legal methodologies.  

In this first posting on the Methodological toolkits section of Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, we focus on an issue which is of considerable importance to many of our readers and listeners.  Critical race theory and counter-colonial thinking are playing an increasingly vital role in informing methodological debate and in questioning concepts of neutrality and objectivity, which have long served as a veil for particular ways of seeing.

Podcasts

• Decolonising Research Questions (with Sarah Radcliffe)
• The Price of Positionality (with Mark Massoud)
• Insider Research (with Roxana Willis)
• Colourism, Race and Power (with Varona Sathiyah) 
• Participatory Research from an Anti-colonial Perspective (with Silvana Tapia Tapia) 
• Deconstructing the Colonial Archive (with Eddie Bruce-Jones)

Readings recommended by our Podcast Speakers

• Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2021). Decolonizing Methodologies: research and Indigenous peoples (Zed Books).
• Radcliffe, S. A. (2022). Decolonizing geographical research practice in Decolonizing Geography: An Introduction. Polity Press/Wiley & Sons.
• Massoud, MF (2022). The price of positionality: assessing the benefits and burdens of self-identification in research methods. J Law Soc. 49 (Suppl. 1), S64–S86.   
• Jones, D. (1970). Towards a Native Anthropology. 29(4) Human Organization 251.
• Hoogendoorn, G., & Visser, G. (2012): Stumbling over researcher positionality and political-temporal contingency in South African second-home tourism research. Critical Arts, 26(3), 254–271.
• Barnabas, S. B. (2018): The Intermittent Researcher and the Marginalized Research Community: Reflections of Research Praxis from Two Studies Conducted Amongst the !Xun and Khwe in San Rinehart, R. E., Kidd, J., & Quiroga, A. G. (eds.): Southern hemisphere ethnographies of space, place and time. Peter Lang, 119–136.
• Sathiyah, Varona (2022): An Indian South African’s reflections on conducting fieldwork in the global south in Pezzano, Antonio; Pioppi,Daniela; Sathiyah,Varona; Frassinell, Pier Paolo (eds.): The Question of Agency in African Studies. UniorPress.
• Chua. L.J.; Massoud, M.F. eds (2024). Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Cambridge University Press.
• Van Der Hout, F. (2022). From Colonial Extractivism to Hearting and Feelthinking: Reflections on Accompanying Women Territory Defenders in Bolivia. Contention, 10(1), 46-64. 
• López, R. (2023). Participatory Law Scholarship. Columbia Law Review, 123 (6), 1795–854.
• Tapia Tapia, S. (2022). Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador (1st ed.). Routledge.
• Ellis, C. (2007). Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others. 13(1) Qualitative Inquiry 3.
• Kleinsasser, A. M. (2000). Researchers, Reflexivity, and Good Data: Writing to Unlearn, Theory Into Practice, 39:3, 155-162.
• Shepherd, V. (2002) Maharani’s misery: Narratives of a passage from India to the Caribbean. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press.
• Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in two acts’, Small Axe, 12(2).
• Bahadur, G. (2013) Coolie woman: The odyssey of indenture. London: Hurst.
• Bruce-Jones, E. (2020) ‘Review of Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of social upheaval by Saidiya Hartman’, Feminist Review, 125, 110-116.

A Frontier’s Blog pick:

• Chasing Billboards: Reflections on Building a Methodology or Finding One Along the Way by Cherisse Francis | 22 October 2025