This concurrent session is founded on our belief that clinicians can produce high-quality “academic” scholarship without forfeiting our commitment to social justice activism. In this session, we will consider the comprehensive role clinicians can play in the academy as scholars, practitioners, and social justice advocates. We will propose a conceptual framework that understands, and accounts for, the limited time clinicians have to plan for and accomplish work that fulfills each of these three roles.
Participants will be encouraged to think broadly about the various types of activism they and their students have pursued and to consider which of their clinic’s social justice pursuits might translate well into scholarship. We hope to galvanize participants to translate scholarship into activism and activism into scholarship. With that goal in mind, we intend for each participant to leave this session with a concrete idea for a piece of scholarship informed by social activism or a clinical litigation/advocacy project informed by scholarship. Our hope is that participants will come away from the session with concrete tools for facilitating the synergies between their lawyering, activism, and scholarship.