This book illuminates methodology in legal research by bringing together interdisciplinary scholars, who employ a diverse set of methodologies, to address a specific shared research challenge: ‘the body’. The contributors were asked a question: if you were invited to contribute to an edited book on ‘the body’, where would you start and then where would you go? The result is a self-reflective discussion of how and where researchers engage with methodological practices. The contributors draw on their own interdisciplinary research experiences to explore how ‘the body’ might be addressed in their work, and the resources they would deploy in order to carry out the task. This ‘book within a book’ is innovative in both content and format. It provides a rare insight into how top interdisciplinary legal scholars go about making decisions about their research. The shared device of ‘the body’ allows the volume to trace a number of rich approaches into the process of research as practiced by these diverse scholars. In presenting thinking and research in action, the volume offers a new, self-reflective view on the much-addressed theme of the body, as well as taking a fresh approach to the historically vexed problem of research methodology in legal studies.

Didi Herman is Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of, amongst other things: (2011) An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness and English Law, Oxford University Press; (2003) Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right’s International Activism (co-author Buss, D), University of Minnesota Press.

Connal Parsley is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Kent, UK. His research spans the fields of critical jurisprudence, political theory and visual cultural studies. He is the translator of Roberto Esposito’s Categories of the Impolitical (2015) Fordham University Press, and co-director of the AHRC Law and the Human network.