Associate Professor, American Culture
About
Leila Kawar is a socio-legal scholar whose work examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice. Her comparative research has focused on how the work of lawyers, judges, and other legal experts intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Law and Society at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law. Her first monograph, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France, is published in the Law and Society Series of Cambridge University Press and is a co-winner of the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob book prize. Contesting Immigration Policy in Court also received the annual book award from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association.
Her current research project explores the migration question through the lens of international social law. Through a combination of historical and ethnographic research, the project explores the engagement of the International Labour Organization with migration issues from the interwar period through the post-Cold War era. The analysis foregrounds how the migrant worker as a juridical subject has been produced by shifting legal practices and principles as well as by changing territorializations of “the social state.”
Kawar is the recipient, with co-PI John Valadez, of a 2024 Vital Impact Project Award through the LSA Meet the Moment Research Initiative for their project The Jungle, a short documentary film, intended for national broadcast on PBS, about the horrific experiences of children in American agricultural work.
Courses Taught
Lecture Courses:
AMCULT 356 / AMAS 356 / RCSTP 350.007
Law and Border
An introduction to critical border studies that explores the legal and cultural dimensions of contemporary bordering, both inside and outside of North America. The final project is a comparative documentary film analysis.
RCSTP 250 / INTLSTD 385
Introduction to Global Workers’ Rights
What legal instruments and strategies can be used to expand rights for workers across globalized supply chains? This course uses an interdisciplinary social science lens to assess the current challenges facing advocacy for global workers' rights.
Seminar Courses:
AMCULT 302 / RCSSCI 302 / STS 302
Contemporary Social and Cultural Theory
Explores some of the critical theoretical tools available to social researchers and social justice activists today. Readings include selections from texts by such authors as Paulo Freire, Silvia Federici, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Edward Said, David Graeber, Bonita Lawrence, and Angela Davis.
AMCULT 498
Law in American Culture
A writing-intensive seminar course exploring law's relation to race, gender, sexuality, and class-based inequality.
HISTORY 329 / RCSTP 316
Law and Social Policy
Through a combination of case readings and historical sources, we examine how the U.S. labor movement and progressive reformers engaged with law and courts during the first half of the twentieth century and the consequences of these struggles in the areas of labor relations, social protection, and workplace safety policies.
Graduate Courses:
AMCULT 601
Cultural Studies of Law
Contemporary questions and frameworks in the interdisciplinary field of law and society. Assigned course readings engage with newer methodological frameworks (law and governmentality; actor-network theory; affect theory) and issues of our time that were not part of the original, 1960s law and society movement (international human rights law; immigration, law, and resistance; indigenous critiques of settler colonialism).
Publications
“Learning Migration Governance: Professional Training Programs and the Representation and Reception of International Norms” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (Special Issue on Migration and Development: Political Implications, Forthcoming 2024).
“Mapping the Judicialization of Politics: A Reflection on Methodological Issues in Writing a Social Science Review Paper,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Vol. 22 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231160981
“Meanings of Palestinian Peoplehood,” Against the Current, Vol. 225 (July/August 2023): 42-44. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc225/meanings-of-palestinian-peoplehood/
“Assembling an International Social Protection for the Migrant: Juridical Categorization in ILO Migration Standards, 1919-1939,” Global Social Policy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022): 244-262.
“Enacting Immigration Politics in a Juridical Register” (Co-authored with Jonathan Miaz), in Shauhin Talesh, Heinz Klug, and Elizabeth Mertz, eds., Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism (Edward Elgar, 2021): 161-175.
"Legal Mobilization in the Governance and Politics of Migration: The Dynamics of Turning to Courts," in Emma Carmel, Katharina Lenner, and Regine Paul, eds., Handbook of the Governance and Politics of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2021): 380-390.
“Recasting Labor Standards for the Contemporary: International vs. Transnational Frameworks at the ILO,” in Christopher L. Tomlins and Justin Desautels-Stein, eds., Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017): 219-237.
Critical Dialogue Review Essay of Stuart Chinn, Recalibrating Reform: The Limits of Political Change, Cambridge University Press. Perspectives on Politics. Vol. 14, Issue 3 (2016): 826-830.
“Grappling with Global Migration: Judicial Predispositions, Regulatory Regimes, and International Law Systems,” Tulsa Law Review, Vol. 51 (2016): 101-114.
"Making the Machine Work: Technocratic Engineering of Rights for Domestic Workers at the International Labour Organization," Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 21 (2014): 483-511. [Selected for presentation at the 2013 ASIL-ESIL-Rechtskulturen Junior Scholars Workshop]
“Commanding Legality: The Juridification of Immigration Policymaking in France,” Journal of Law and Courts, Vol. 2 (2014): 93-116.
"Défendre la cause des étrangers en justice aux Etats-Unis." La Revue des Droits de l'Homme. Trans. Johann Morri. Vol. 4 (2013).
“Juridical Framings of Immigrants in the United States and France: Courts, Social Movements, and Symbolic Politics,” International Migration Review, Vol. 46 (2012): 414-455.
“New Directions in Comparative Public Law,” symposium essay with Mark Fathi Massoud, responses from Karen Alter, Michael McCann, Martin Shapiro, and Lee Walker. APSA Law & Courts Newsletter, Vol. 22 (2012).
“Finding a Place for Marginal Migrants in the International Human Rights System.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. Vol. 56 (2011): 67-90.
“Legal Mobilization on the Terrain of the State: Immigrant Rights Practice in Two National Legal Fields.” Law & Social Inquiry. Vol. 36 (2011): 354-387.
“Legality and [Dis]membership: Removal of Citizenship and the Creation of ‘Virtual Immigrants’.” Citizenship Studies. Vol. 14 (2010): 573-588.
U-M Affiliations:
- Social Theory and Practice Program (STP)
- Arab and Muslim American Studies Program (AMAS)
- Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History
- Program in Race, Law, and History
- Science, Technology, and Society Program (STS)
- Program in International and Comparative Studies (PICS)
- President's Advisory Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights (PACLSHR)
- University of Michigan Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
