Who's Afraid of Methodology? Advocating a Methodological Turn in Legal Geography

Abstract

Alongside the push to expand legal geography into new spaces and temporalities “out there,” this chapter proposes an inward expansion: a reflection on how we come to write what we write rather than where, when, and why we do so. Such greater awareness to the craftsmanship of our scholarship will pay off in a range of ways and, most importantly, by increasing our methodological diversity and interdisciplinarity. The chapter reflects on the pitfalls and virtues of my own zoo ethnography with the aim of inviting legal geographers to explore how they have crafted and choose to craft their own research. The chapter argues that because of our unique training in the nexus of law and geography, we are well equipped to explore administrative structures and cultures. Institutional and bureaucratic ethnographies should thus perform a more important role in legal geography.

Keywords: legal geography, methodology, ethnography, studying-up, multi-sites, zoos