Unravelling the Neutral Scholar

This blog post is part of the symposium “The Rooms We Wanted: What a Year of Decolonisation Seminars Revealed about a Law School”, reflecting on the Decolonisation Seminar Series at the University of Edinburgh.

Our first event, led by Dr Karla Perez Portilla, directly engaged with the Eurocentric foundations of the notion of neutrality in both legal research and its objects of enquiry. In what ended up being an unintentional full circle moment, the same questions came up in our last event. There, in conversation with Dr Ahmed Memon and Dr Rohini Sen, we asked what it takes to unlearn Eurocentric habits within academia. What we mean by habits is the patterns of scholarly thinking and writing which generate unconscious preferences towards whose knowledge we reproduce when we conduct what is termed “neutral” research, and what signifiers we are consciously wearing when we think of the neutral scholar. We also focussed on the emotional and intellectual labour it takes to “foundationally” unlearn established academic practices and presumptions which treat European scholarship as the gold standard when it comes to intellectual rigor. The neutrality of the legal discipline therefore appears a natural starting point for this symposium, which will contain reflections from participants in both events.

What do we mean when we speak of neutrality in legal academia, and how can decolonial thought help us both capture and challenge it? Dr Portilla’s reflections shed light on her own academic journey as a Latin American woman, and on how far the legal discipline’s standards diverged from her own experiences. That distance led to an in-depth discussion of the liberating and disruptive effects of autoethnography, and of its benefits as a legal method. Moving deliberately towards an embodied approach to legal research, placing herself and her privilege within Latin American academia (or disaffection with European academic contexts, highlighting the relationality of privilege), Dr Portilla discussed the new communities that this approach opened her up to. In particular, she discussed the ways in which autoethnography brought legal praxis and theory closer together when consciously conducted in a way which displaces Eurocentric expectations of what “proper” legal research ought to look like, rather than treating the two aspects of scholarship as separate components of a rigidly structured research design.

The importance of considering embodied and reflexive approaches to legal research, understood as an ongoing process which the researcher must actively set in motion, rather than a series of discontinuous moments or outputs, was echoed in the event with Dr Rohini Sen and Dr Ahmed Memon. The intimate conversation touched upon whether there had been a moment, in their doctoral work or early careers, when the frameworks each had been trained in proved inadequate for the arguments they were trying to make, and what they did with that discomfort. Was epistemological code switching – writing one way for a supervisor while thinking another way privately – a sustainable survival strategy within neoliberal academic institutions which prioritise certain outputs, and what did it cost the researcher? Does making non-Western knowledge legible to Western audiences risk domesticating and essentialising it, and is full translation possible at all?

The following reflections by two doctoral researchers – Alexandrine Lamarre and Linn Pfitzner – who attended both sessions highlight the immediate impact that unpacking the notion of epistemic neutrality can have in early career researchers’ thinking, when they are still learning how to construct impactful and conscientious research design.

Alexandrine Lamarre:

I experienced the Decolonial Research and Methodologies seminar series as a space of open conversations where speakers and attendees could together explore how to challenge premises of legal methodologies and learn from these rearticulations. In the series, discussants encouraged the audience to acknowledge systems of power, to problematise what they mean for knowledge production and to engage with decolonial perspectives in research.

I am a second-year PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and I am conducting empirical research which involves interviews. As a researcher in this method space, I am constantly puzzled by my own positionality, my own relation to my object of study and the techniques of narration I am using. The session entitled ‘Decolonial Theory and Epistemology’ by Dr Karla Perez Portilla explored autobiography and autoethnography as a technique of legal scholarship. This technique stands as a critique; it deconstructs the universalist underlying claim of academic knowledge and brings to light that narrating (legal) stories is not a neutral exercise. As I am conducting a multi-sited ethnography of a professional ecosystem, I am constantly engaging in exercises of narrating what I see or what I experienced in my empirical sites. How am I making sure to avoid neutrality/universalist claims? How am I not using remarks on positionality as simply a disclaimer? How does positionality become a method throughout my writing? How does rooting my perspective in my own narration might confront me with preconceived ideas of what is ‘a good form of academic writing’?

In the seminar ‘Epistemologies from the Margins’ Dr Rohini Sen and Dr Ahmed Memon further connected the dots between knowledge hegemony, transmission of knowledge and interdisciplinary categorisations. My research on civilian protection often sits at the intersection of different “fields”; whilst I examine governance practices co-produced by military and humanitarian epistemologies in forms of normativity that escape legalised enveloped (e.g. guidelines that only rarely take formal legal form). I analyse how and where these practices sit in relation to the legal construction of the ‘civilian’ and the justification of armed conflicts. The differentiation between law, policy and other regulative endeavours appears as a never-ending exercise of re-articulation produced by the actors of that ecosystem as well as by me, the researcher examining and translating the phenomenon into the academic sphere.

Translation into Fieldwork

I experienced how the different epistemologies encounter each other at Protection of Civilians (POC) trainings I attended. The seminar allowed me to reflect on this experience; I was able to grasp how academic categorisations add a layer of complexity for the researcher and pinpoint how academic language inherently carries hegemonies and hierarchies.

The POC trainings were aimed at practitioners working in the field of civilian protection. In the same room, I was surrounded by professionals with experience on UN peacekeeping mission camps, military personnel working in NATO missions, academics, lawyers and non-lawyers. Each participant held different preoccupations, for instance, civilians’ access to basic needs, risks for troops, causes of threat or interoperability concerns. Further, their methodologies appeared different: some are informed by the NATO planning doctrine whilst others think in terms of UN guidelines or international humanitarian law. Notwithstanding these differences in experience, I could hear legal concepts such as distinction, proportionality and military necessity permeating most discourses. The line between policy and law appeared blurrier than what I first envisioned. I immediately found the overlap of these knowledge ecosystems fascinating. Nonetheless, the interdisciplinary nature of my object of research was a puzzling challenge in terms of writing and presenting my findings; how could I grasp these legal and non-legal epistemologies and translate their relationship for my legal academic audience?

In my project, I am trying to disentangle and “decode” the epistemological encounters to portray the different constructions of “protection”, “harm” and the “civilian”. The seminar was the entry point for me to deconstruct my anxieties of categorisation and to question the extent to which my own exercise of “decoding” might mould my findings to academic boxes. However, by “moulding” and adapting the empirical experience to what is considered suitable for the legal field, the researcher participates in assembling rigid field classification. The reflection on the neutrality of the scholar, or on positionality, allows me to reinsert my own viewpoint in my analysis and to challenge reflexes of sculpting research to corresponding academic structure. In other words, studying this interdisciplinary, multifaceted object cannot be accomplished with the lens of a “neutral” researcher. Instead, my own legal background and my position as a researcher is inserted in the field I study and shapes my own perception of it.

The seminar with Dr Rohini Sen and Dr Ahmed Memon asked the following question: what would happen if you do not “adapt” your language to academic settings? Revisiting neutrality in this light brings me to interrogate what my legal language can obfuscate. My approach to methods moves towards examining my own experience and my use of categorisation as part of my object of inquiry. In my context, not fitting within (legal) academic boxes, will mean actively engaging with the non-legal content; like policies and other guidelines, whilst they are not law per se, they have normative effects deserving legal attention.

Linn Pfitzner:

“Truth” as presented in Western law schools often constitutes the outcome of doctrinal legal research. Doctrinal scholarship has been condemned for an overreliance on abstract concepts whilst disregarding the socio-political realities it both produces and is conditioned by. Legal education faces similar criticism, as its orientation towards domestically qualifying degrees renders it unresponsive to international influences or contemporary issues in a world characterised by overlapping systems of injustice. Last year’s Decolonial Research and Methodologies Seminar Series at Edinburgh Law School provided a counterpoint to this, seeking to normalise discussions on politics and power within the legal classroom.

In the following, I offer a brief reflection on how the series’ events on “Unpacking the Neutral Scholar” with Dr Karla Perez Portilla and “Epistemologies from the Margins” with Dr Rohini Sen and Dr Ahmed Memon offered a space for interrogating perceptions of neutrality and disciplinary truth in legal research, and the impact thereof for my personal academic development as a white European interdisciplinary scholar. I focus on a subject common to both events which particularly resonated – the implications of reflexivity and positionality for a decolonial research agenda –, whilst engaging broader questions around the production and contestation of knowledge within (Western) legal academia.

As Dr Perez Portilla highlighted, embracing positionality and reflexivity arguably conflicts with legal scholarship’s aspirations to universality as the gold standard. This resonated with my own experiences of trying to find my academic bearing as an interdisciplinary scholar in a discipline which continues to be overwhelmingly positivist. International climate law, for instance, runs on numbers – emissions, quantified obligations that treat everyone as starting from the same starting point, when contributions to the crisis have been historically unequal. The seminar on Epistemologies from the Margins also affirmed something which I had already become increasingly mindful of throughout my academic career to date. Shortly prior to the session, a colleague introduced me to the work of Édouard Glissant and his concept of “the right to opacity”, or, crudely put, holding space for cultural diversity within shared legal vocabularies. Shifting from “neutrality” to reflexivity in line with this ethic necessitates critical reflections on the scholarship one’s positionality permits – and denies, regardless of how many books I read, conferences I attend, or ethics procedures I complete. Glissan’s “right to opacity” is the claim that others are owed recognition without being made fully transparent or knowable to us. Applied to my own position, it asks me to accept that some experiences of loss are not mine to render legible and that treating my standpoint reflexively means recognising not only what it does but also what it does not give me access to. This has had significant implications for my PhD research on climate-related intangible loss, in which I explore the responsivity of legal frameworks to such harms, rather than seeking to understand and map experiences of loss within place based ontologies which are not my own. My project focuses on the Pacific, the region most acutely exposed to intangible climate losses, to cultural heritage, Indigenous knowledge systems, and self-determination. Taking opacity seriously means I do not attempt to document or map those experiences of loss from the outside, within ontologies that are not my own. Instead, I begin from the responses that affected communities themselves put forward, and ask how international legal frameworks can be made answerable to them, treating community led articulations of harm as the starting point, and law’s responsiveness to them as the open question.

Indigenous scholars have long recognised the dirty dimensions of research as extractive, whereas situated and embodied forms of knowing are often only recognised as authoritative if presented with the required academic accreditation. The call for embracing reflexivity issued by speakers at both events taught me that fieldwork-generated affect can invite productive reflections on one’s research. Decolonial writers that I have previously encountered recognise that somatic experiences form an integral part of how we approach our work, whether academic or not. In line therewith, accountability is something which one has to negotiate with oneself. Intentionality in research as advocated for by Dr Rohini Sen pointed to doing research deliberately and in line with one’s own values and commitments, rather than deferring to what a field treats as the default or neutral choice. The insights shared in both sessions reaffirmed to me that research is implicated in a practice of world-building, and that our approach to research can render different futures possible.

The above reflections constitute a wider invitation to critically inquire into how knowledge within Western legal academia is negotiated and shaped by particular positionalities – even where its authors claim neutrality. A reflexive approach to legal research and teaching necessarily rests on intersectional contributions from different sources. The Decolonial Research and Methodologies Seminar Series constituted an excellent example of a collaborative forum which constructively challenged mainstream thinking and provided a new space of intellectual belonging to so-called critical or interdisciplinary scholars like myself. The event series has confirmed to me that diverse (non-doctrinal) perspectives can and should develop into an integral element of legal education, drawing attention to the interconnectedness of law with other realms of social life and ending the reign of legal positivism in European academic institutions steeped in colonial violence. Only by expanding law’s imaginary beyond the doctrinal can legal scholarship begin to push at the boundaries of what is possible in pursuit of just futures.

A Reflection from the Organisers

The reflections describe two rather different forms of labour. For Alexandrine, the difficulty is largely methodological. Positionality can be an easy and superficial declaration, the paragraph in which the researcher names her situatedness can itself function as a kind of alibi, a disclosure that licenses business as usual. The more demanding question she raises is how positionality might instead become constitutive of method, how the work of narration shapes what can be reported from an empirical site, and how the pull towards a recognisably legal grammar quietly shapes findings to fit the preconceived expectations of one’s legal readership. This is intellectual labour of a continuous kind, and reveals the tiny ways in which reflexivity can manifest itself in daily practice. It is discharged in the writing itself, sentence by sentence, and it does not provide a discrete output so much as a sustained attentiveness, an attitude towards one’s work.

Linn looks at as a form of refusal. Reading Glissant’s right to opacity, where others are owed recognition without the demand that they be rendered fully transparent to us. They describe a decision not to map experiences of loss located within ontologies that are not their own and a corresponding reorientation of their project towards what legal frameworks can and cannot register of such harms. Restraint of this sort is difficult to credit within an academic economy that rewards comprehensiveness, and it deserves to be named as a conscious scholarly act rather than a gap.

What Alexandrine and Linn’s testimonies offer is an insight into what unlearning looks like, and the liberating impact it can have on those who, acknowledge their position within a Global North institution and witness the world and enact research upon it from that vantage point, and who are anxious to not let this privilege become a chasm between the researcher and meaningful engagement with their object of enquiry. The anxieties Alexandrine speaks of, and the instinctive pull towards research which aligns with one’s values, as Linn notes, are captured and acknowledged in decolonial thought.