Kent Law School Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris has been awarded a nine-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship, worth \u00a333,000, for her project\u00a0\u2018Doing Socio-legal Research in Design Mode.\u2019<\/p>\n
At the centre of the project is the question: How might design enhance our understanding of, and our ability to communicate about, law as a social\u00a0phenomenon; and at what cost? Professor Perry-Kessaris said: \u2018Design-based approaches such as visualisation and prototyping have for the\u00a0last\u00a0decade increasingly been identified as distinctive and useful; and adopted in other fields of practice from\u00a0business, to civil society, to government. This project explores how entering \u2018design mode\u2019 might enable socio-legal research processes to become more\u00a0social, with associated improvements in research quality and reach.\u2019<\/p>\n
The project draws on insights from original experimentation that Professor Perry-Kessaris has undertaken with 100 socio-legal researchers, as well as from her wider design thinking and practice (examples of which can be accessed via her econosociolegal.wordpress.com<\/a> blog and via her page on Vimeo<\/a>.) It also builds on her publications \u2018Legal design for practice, activism, policy and research\u2019 46:2\u00a0Journal of Law and Society<\/em>\u00a0,\u00a0\u2018The pop-up museum of legal objects project: an experiment in\u00a0\u2018socio-legal design\u2019’ 68:2\u00a0Northern Ireland\u00a0Legal Quarterly\u00a0Special Issue on the Pop Up Museum of Legal Objects 225-44 and\u00a0\u2018The case for a visualized economic sociology of legal development\u2019 67\u00a0Current Legal Problems\u00a0169-98 \u00a0which was awarded the 2015 SLSA\u00a0Article Prize<\/a>.<\/p>\n Professor Perry-Kessaris will complete a monograph for publication by Routledge and, with Emily Allbon from City University Law School, will hold the UK\u2019s first workshop on Legal Design. Funding for the workshop was secured in February with a grant of \u00a31527<\/a> from the Socio-Legal Studies Association.<\/p>\n Professor Perry-Kessaris<\/a>\u00a0specialises in empirically grounded, theoretically informed, cross-disciplinary approaches to law. In addition to qualifications in law, she has an MA in Visual Communication and Graphic Design. She teaches undergraduate law students in the field of International Economic Law and postgraduate students in Research Methodology. She tweets\u00a0@aperrykessaris<\/a>.<\/p>\n