Highlights from the Young Scholars’ Workshop at the NLS Campus | Humboldt University & NLSIU Exchange
April 1, 2023
The National Law School of India University hosted the 2023 edition of the Young Scholars’ Workshop, as part of its collaborative project on ‘Law and Transformation’ with three other Indian institutions, Azim Premji University, National Law University, Delhi and Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat and the Chair for Public and Comparative Law at Humboldt University, Berlin, between March 16 and 18, 2023.
This is the fourth part of the series of workshops organised under this project. It aims to foster a community of young scholars or researchers from India and Germany on their doctoral projects or other long term research projects and provides a platform for these scholars to present their work, exchange perspectives and experiences and receive useful feedback on their projects.
The principal investigators of this project are Philipp Dann (Humboldt University), Anup Surendranath (National Law University, Delhi), Sitharamam Kakarala (Azim Premji University), Pritam Baruah (previously at Jindal Global Law School), Arun Thiruvengadam and Aparna Chandra (National Law School of India University). We are grateful for funding support from the DAAD and the University Grants Commission, India.
The Workshop
The Workshop was structured as a three day intensive exercise with participants divided into three thematic groups covering topics under the areas of Comparative Constitutional theory, Access to Justice and Law and Violence. Each group consisted of one senior academic and 3-4 PhD scholars or researchers selected from the partner institutions, working on the same or similar areas of research. A total of 17 research projects/texts were discussed covering a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues under these broad areas.
Participants could choose to present a research paper or the “text+ticket” option where they shared one text of an important interlocutor for their work, or wrote a short ticket setting the context for the seminal text and explaining how that fit with their own research project. At the sessions, presenters explained the context of their paper/text and then other participants in that thematic group provided their feedback and comments on the paper or text shared by the presenters.
The discussions that took place were characterised by deep understanding of the main problems that each paper presented to the group, including inputs on the choice of literature, ideas to improve comparative law concepts, and suggestions to employ a variety of legal research methodologies.
The presentations were followed by a special skills building session where participants explored several AI and tech enabled research tools and examined their efficacy for specific purposes and ethics of use. These included Elicit, Bing, Chat GPT (for research questions); Research Rabbit, Inciteful, Litmaps (for literature review); Casper, Jenni and Scispace (for summarising and writing) and Zotero (for document/citation management).
Participants found the workshop extremely engaging and useful. Prof. Sitharamam Kakarala, Director of School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University, remarked “Young researchers’ workshop has been an energetic platform of intersubjective learning. The wide-range of thematics explored, and diversity of methodological frameworks provided rich exposure and inspiration to the participants in rethinking their projects in a meaningful way. Such exposure is a rare opportunity in the Indian legal higher education and with emulating on a wider scale to improve the doctoral training processes”.
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