Funding to help launch innovative workshop for young scholars
Criminology, law & society Assistant Professor Eraldo Souza dos Santos was selected to be among the Law and Society Association’s 2026 Advance Grant Program recipients.
A total of $265,000 is being awarded to Advance Grantees this year to foster new programming opportunities for members and enhance LSA’s efforts to promote sociolegal scholarship as a global field. Dos Santos and his fellow recipients will develop conferences, seminars, and workshops that will facilitate collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge production among participants across the globe.
"I feel deeply honored to receive this grant,” dos Santos says. “Thanks to it, I will be able to contribute to recent efforts to diversify the training of scholars in law and society and adjacent fields.”
His specific project to earn the grant is titled “Critical and Interpretive Methods in Law and Society: A Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars.” The LSA description follows:
Upon joining the University of California, Irvine’s Criminology, Law and Society Department, Professor Eraldo Souza de Santos was surprised to learn that his students were primarily training in interviewing and/or causal methodology, with other methods, especially interpretive ones, considered secondary for success. Upon learning that his peers at other institutions faced the same issue, he developed the idea for a virtual, monthly, nine-session workshop series, where graduate students and early-career scholars will supplement their methodological toolkit to include critical approaches rooted in decoloniality, feminism, and black studies, potentially addressing the longstanding divide between social sciences and the humanities.
“The entire series will be recorded and made available on YouTube, so I hope it will have a lasting impact,” says dos Santos. “My colleague Elliott Prasse-Freeman [of the National University of Singapore] and I are currently recruiting speakers for the series, and the first workshop will be held in January 2026.”
Besides dos Santos’ appointment to the Department of Criminology, Law & Society (CLS), he is an assistant professor by courtesy with UC Irvine’s Department of History as well as a visiting professor in his native Brazil at Federal University of the Southern Border’s Department of History and Federal University of Amazonas’ Department of Society and Culture in the Amazon.
The Law and Society Association, which is an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts, was founded in 1964 by Professors Harry Ball, Robert Yegge, and Richard Schwartz. The executive office is at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but the association has deep connections to UC Irvine.
Current LSA president Mario L. Barnes is a Chancellor’s Professor of Law and co-director of the Center on Law, Equality and Race at UC Irvine School of Law. Treasurer Bryan L. Sykes, who is an associate professor of public policy and sociology at Cornell University, was a UC Irvine CLS assistant professor from 2014-20 and associate professor from 2020-23.
The immediate past president of LSA is former UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of Law Michele Goodwin, who is now the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown Law. Previous presidents also include CLS Professor Emeritae Kitty Calavita (2000-01) and Carroll Seron (2013-15).
– Matt Coker