Speaker Series: Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen
Using 60 ethnographic interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals, this Article illuminates the cruciality of eCRT tools to understand the experience of individual deviance and the usefulness of a queer theory lens in aiding such an effort. Analysis from these narrative data show that students with different kinds of peripheral identities experience professional spaces in many uniquely different ways but that narratives across minority categories (primarily differentiated by race, gender identity, religion, and disability) also overlapped in important ways. Particularly, the data show a clear pattern among these differently peripheral actors of what I call “blasé” dismissal and denial of discrimination. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as an operationalization of structural violence, what distinguishes blasé discrimination, I argue, is the ordinariness of the act in common interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and even justification in the face of being questioned about the violence that makes blasé discrimination and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light – borrowing from queer theory – on the opportunities available for theory building when difference is analyzed across narrative to focus on the commonalities of deviance across sub-categories of assumed identity. In turn, it offers a framework for considering what I am framing as the “QuEer-CRT” approach for law and society scholarship.
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law, globalization and stratification from a critical feminist and global south perspective. Particularly, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities.
Scholarship from Professor Ballakrishnen’s research projects has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Fordham Law Review, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Their first book, Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press: 2021), unpacks the case of unintentional gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals; a second book Invisible Institutions (Hart Publishing: 2021, ed. with Sara Dezalay) brings together cross-subjective perspectives on legal globalization; and a third book, Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (Zubaan Books, with Kalpana Kannabiran) investigates the gendered legacies of India’s privacy jurisprudence. These strains of research have received a range of honors and awards, including from the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Law and Society Association; and in 2022, Ballakrishnen was awarded the campus-wide UCI Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research. You can read more about their research praxis and commitments here.
Alongside this scholarly output, Professor Ballakrishnen’s research has been featured in a range of professional and popular media including Harvard Business Review, Stanford News Report, Above the Law, Bloomberg Law, Quartz, Law School Transparency Radio, The Practice, New Books Network, and WPR. They have presented research at over 100 conferences worldwide, delivered over 50 invited talks in a range of academic and professional settings, and their legal opinions on family and financial laws have been cited by the Probate and Family Court of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectively.
Professor Ballakrishnen is committed to building and serving socio-legal communities, especially ones that focus on critical questions concerning legal education and the profession. At UCI, they co-run the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession, the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop, and the Law, Society, and Culture Emphasis. In addition, beyond UCI, they are affiliated faculty at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, on the board of trustees of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and the ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law, a co-founder of the LSA Collaborative Research Network on Legal Education, and on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession. In 2017-18, they were the AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the American Bar Foundation. In 2020, Professor Ballakrishnen was named a AALS Teacher of the Year.
For over a decade before entering academia full-time, Professor Ballakrishnen was a legal intern to Hon’ble Justice Arijit Pasayat of the Supreme Court of India, an international banking associate in Mumbai, and an external consultant for cross-border litigation financing in New York City.