2. Law as a multi-sited information system: going beyond language

Recent critical legal scholars have been discussing the co-constitutive role of law in shaping social reality, ontologically, politically, and economically in ways that have widened inequalities and entrenched structures of power. Examples include ways in which law has constituted and entrenched the logics of unequal labour markets and reinforced wealth inequalities by constructing meanings through interconnected concepts, or networked codes of ‘capital’, ‘labour’, ‘disability’, ‘time’, and ‘work’.

Katharina Pistor critically analyses the law’s role in ‘coding’ or conceptualising ‘capital’ for the benefit of the wealthy.Footnote ³¹ This legal coding of ‘capital’ is complemented by a legal coding of ‘labour’ in ways that have historically ‘invisibilised’Footnote ³² the racialised and ableist hierarchies of the labour market. Diamond Ashiagbor explains how the neutrality of employment contracts often masks the precarity of work that racialised bodies have historically carried out.Footnote ³³ Adébísí further traces law’s complicit role in coding ‘bodies’ to facilitate such hierarchised labour to the assumed ontological understanding of body as separate from its labour in legal code.Footnote ³⁴ The ‘body’ and ‘labour’ are further separated from the ‘time’ it takes to carry out that labour, repositioning labour as a commodity for capitalist use.Footnote ³⁵ Clare Williams shows how labour law in particular co-opts the default legal subject as a fully abled body, and renders legible for law only those who can ‘optimise’ in the workplaces that are designed for fully abled bodies in the first place.Footnote ³⁶ Zoe Adams discusses yet another networked concept of ‘work’, which excludes from its boundaries certain kinds of work that are more often invisible, precarious, gendered, or racialised – such as care work and household work.Footnote ³⁷

How and where do these concepts – capital, labour, bodies, time, and work, for instance – get legally coded and networked, and why do these coding processes tend to entrench previously attributed power? Part of the answer lies in the underlying causal mechanisms that determine what information tends to get prioritised in legal coding and why, questions that my framework of ITL has begun to address.Footnote ³⁸ ITL theorises legal coding by modelling the legal system as a multi-sited information system. It explains how networked codes co-evolve in exclusionary, reflexive, and adaptive ways, determined by legal coding in parliaments, courtrooms, law offices, litigation chambers, judges’ chambers, media offices, and newspapers, among others. During these multi-sited legal coding processes, certain information gets selected, while other remains excluded from the scope of these codes.

It must be acknowledged that the legal coding process, like any other meaning-making process, will always remain selective by design.Footnote ³⁹ It is the patterned tendency of the system to repeatedly select and process information in favour of previously attributed power that needs to be identified, examined, and challenged.

These skewed tendencies of selectivity that underlie legal coding processes must be shifted to re-centre information, meanings, and lives that have continued to remain on the margins. The exclusion of information from legal coding both roots from and results in what Miranda Fricker calls ‘epistemic injustice’ – a harm where someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower, based on a lesser credibility attributed to them because of not what they know but because of who they are.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to Fricker, epistemic injustice can either be ‘hermeneutical’ (ie, when a lived experience is misunderstood due to its lack of comprehension through language and therefore continues to remain absent from systemic meaning-making processes)Footnote ⁴¹ or ‘testimonial’ (ie, when a speaker is not attributed enough credibility because of their identity, also known as the ‘identity-prejudicial credibility-deficit’).Footnote ⁴²

Epistemic injustice embedded within, and reinforced by, legal coding can be attributed to at least three kinds of intertwined and mutually reinforcing mechanisms – ignorance, irrelevance, or illegibility of information. Whether information was excluded from legal coding because of ignorance, irrelevance, or illegibility further depends on a combination of agent-driven and systemic mechanisms.

An example of exclusion by the first mechanism of ignorance is the For Women Scotland case, where the UK Supreme Court coded the legal definition of ‘sex’ as ‘biological sex’, based on courtroom hearings where the voices of transgender communities were not heard or cited in the judgement text.Footnote ⁴³ The result of the coding in For Women Scotland is a binary conceptualisation of ‘sex’ exclusive of the lived realities of those who do not fall into either of the binary categories of male or female. Ignorance of information in this case is a type (and a result) of silencing that leads to a deliberate exclusion of lived realities from the meanings of legal codes.

An example of exclusion by the second mechanism of irrelevance includes cases related to hijab or veil bans across Europe and elsewhere, which tend to ignore the agency of the women who choose to wear them. For instance, Ratna Kapur points to various cases at the European Court of Human Rights where ‘veil bans’ were upheld by the Court as the veil was considered a symbol of gendered oppression.Footnote ⁴⁴ Legal coding of the hijab has historically reduced the identities of Muslim women to victims of culture and religion, awaiting some form of rescue through liberal rights intervention.Footnote ⁴⁵ All this, while the first-hand voices, agency, and freedom of choice of Muslim women continue to remain largely irrelevant for legal coding in legislative bodies and courtrooms.

The third mechanism is the exclusion of information because of illegibility, where legal coding processes do not have the capacity to process or code a certain type of information. For instance, Dipika Jain and Kimberley M. Rhoten highlight how transgender and non-binary persons in Indian litigation are faced with not only the barrier of establishing that they belong to a protected identity but also the bigger barrier of proving the validity of the identity itself.Footnote ⁴⁶ This means that they have an additional burden of communicating and helping the legal system develop a working understanding – some sort of legal legibility – of their identity. Other similar examples include the failure of legal coding processes to comprehend the embodied and emotional lived realities of illness,Footnote ⁴⁷ forced migration,Footnote ⁴⁸ and living in indigenous groups.Footnote ⁴⁹

These examples show that exclusion of information from legal coding – be it from ignorance, irrelevance, or illegibility – continues to reinforce path-dependent tendencies of legal evolution to selectively visibilise, include, and protect certain lived realities over others. Once coded into legal language, these networked codes become a repository of information for some lives and a carrier of epistemic injustice for others. By shifting the focus from language to the more foundational unit of information in theorising law and society interactions, ITL lays the ground for revealing, challenging, and potentially dismantling the epistemic hierarchies embedded within legal coding processes, as well as the epistemic limitations imposed by the form of their outputs.

3. Research as legal coding: de-centring the black letter

Just as in parliaments and courtrooms, the legal academy is also an active site of legal coding.Footnote ⁵⁰ The epistemic logics with which we produce legal knowledge as researchers seep into legal codes, just as the arguments of counsels and the interpretation of judges. Legal research does not only observe or measure how law has coded social reality, but in clarifying that position further, it actively codes social reality in deeply non-neutral ways. For instance, the Supreme Court judges in For Women Scotland relied on the works of legal scholars to arrive at a strict biological interpretation of the identity category of ‘sex’.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, it is common knowledge that the voices and lived experiences of petitioners are increasingly becoming irrelevant for Indian constitutional litigation,Footnote ⁵² which disproportionately increases the burden on judges to rely on research.

A more elaborate example of the role of the legal academy in legal coding can be presented through the networked codes of ‘data’, ‘cloud’, and ‘platforms’ and how they have come to be conceptualised for legal systems across the world. Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias explain how international economic laws code and conceptualise ‘data’ as an open resource that is somehow just there, readily available, and potentially valuable, to be extracted, exploited, and monetised by whoever has the means and will to do so.Footnote ⁵³ This extractive coding, primarily based on the knowledge produced about the ontological nature of data in the west, has enabled large market players in developed countries to unilaterally extract data from developing countries.Footnote ⁵⁴ Couldry and Mejias term this extraction as ‘data colonialism’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This control over data supply chains is exercised by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, in particular, who control the global cloud market with a combined market share of more than 60 per cent.Footnote ⁵⁶ The legal coding of ‘data’ is further facilitated by the legal coding of platform services such as the ‘cloud’. Tung-Hui Hu argues that a metaphorical coding of the digital ‘cloud’ as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated has facilitated a cultural rhetoric that separates the idea of the cloud from the material data centres it is embodied within.Footnote ⁵⁷ These ontological underpinnings, largely theorised within academies, are conveniently co-opted by industrial lobbies at the domestic level and western lobbies at international forums like the World Trade Organisation, to attribute economic value in ways that selectively favour some market players over others.Footnote ⁵⁸ The construction of the legal meanings of ‘data’, ‘cloud’, and ‘platform’ that only render data valuable after it has been processed is the reason why a few market players with processing capacity have competitive advantage. This competitive advantage is not an unforeseeable result but a careful construction of networked codes that strategically and selectively attribute value in the globally scattered supply chains.

Academic work, particularly legal research, therefore, has direct implications for how law codes and co-constitutes social reality. Thinking about legal and law-adjacent research as a practice of legal coding can, therefore, open new pathways to challenge and shift the implicit role of law in perpetuating different forms of injustice, including epistemic injustice. This sentiment is echoed by Marija Bartl, Pola Cebulak, and Jessica C. Lawrence who argue that legal research needs to become more self-aware and critical of its implications by acknowledging its theoretical assumptions and methodological choices.Footnote ⁵⁹ Our ability to code new concepts within the legal academy relies on pre-existing webs of networked codes such as data-cloud-platform and capital-labour-work. A sole focus on legal doctrine, or even text-based empirical research, can reinforce the pre-existing patterns of selectivity by which codes have included and processed information. These risks make knowledge production about law as self-referential (or ‘autopoietic’)Footnote ⁶⁰ as the law itself. The purpose of the academy, however, goes beyond complementing legislators, judges, and lawyers in their coding processes and maintaining internal consistency. Considering the academy as a site and research as practice of legal coding can reveal the epistemic implications of our methodological choices and equip us to question what information they ignore, render irrelevant, or simply exclude because of illegibility.

The case for the legal academy to have a method of its own – in most cases specified as doctrinal – rests in a justifiably unique normative power of the law to construct (and not just observe or measure) social reality.Footnote ⁶¹ This argument relies on a correct apprehension of quantitative methods based on risks such as the difficulty of studying realities that cannot be (or are not yet) counted or measured.Footnote ⁶² The doctrine can be and has been studied without falling into the trap of believing everything it says. However, purely relying on doctrinal methods limits our ability to examine what happens outside the boundaries of legal language. While quantitative empirical methods offer suitable alternatives in some cases,Footnote ⁶³ qualitative methods are being increasingly adopted by socio-legal scholars to push the methodological boundaries of legal research. However, even qualitative approaches are only equipped to capture information that has largely been excluded because of ignorance or irrelevance. Continuing to be rooted in the western hierarchies of knowledge production that prioritise language (especially written text) over other forms of communication, purely text-based qualitative methods risk excluding information that has historically been considered illegible. This exclusion reinforces hermeneutical injustice, particularly for lived realities that have not yet found a language to capture aspects of their lived experience.

If doctrinal research is one method to examine reality from within the legal academy, then empirical research – qualitative or quantitative – does not have to be the only alternative. A third type of method that expands the toolbox to capture epistemically misunderstood or excluded realities is creative. While there is remarkably little attention to methods in legal research training and writing,Footnote ⁶⁴ there has been an explicit and rather surprising underutilisation of creative methods within the legal academy.Footnote ⁶⁵ Using a creative praxis in research methodology is relatively more common in ethnographicFootnote ⁶⁶ and feministFootnote ⁶⁷ methods, spanning disciplines such as literature,Footnote ⁶⁸ anthropology,Footnote ⁶⁹ sociology,Footnote ⁷⁰ international relations,Footnote ⁷¹ education,Footnote ⁷² and performance studies,Footnote ⁷³ to name a few. Within law, critical legal studies, feminist legal studies, law and political economy, and socio-legal studies are some of the approaches that have begun to address this gap. By adopting methods from disciplines occupied with studying lives (over letters), and by borrowing from other knowledge systems, these approaches have gone beyond the doctrinal and text-based empirical to consider the lives that law births from, inhabits, impacts, or oppresses.

Examples include Danish Sheikh’s call for dispensing the rigid black letter traditions of law schools by adopting creative pedagogies that allow for multiplicity of meanings.Footnote ⁷⁴ Renske Vos has extended the visual turn in legal research from knowing to doing through ‘legal sightseeing’ as a method.Footnote ⁷⁵ Vos calls for studying the ways of ‘seeing’ international law by visiting the actual sites where international law gets coded, intertwining her tourist-self with a more reflexive researcher-self.Footnote ⁷⁶ Tine Destroopera and Sofie Verclyte use embroidery to connect with their research participants and study trauma in the legal processes of migration.Footnote ⁷⁷ Joanna Kusiak, in her creative account of how the law enabled the corporates to take control over Berlin’s housing, followed by an organised social movement to topple it, discusses the role of dancing and ‘action research’ to intervene in policy while critiquing it.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other examples of use cases are ‘socio-legal research in design mode’,Footnote ⁷⁹ ‘art as a legal method’,Footnote ⁸⁰ and ‘practice-led’Footnote ⁸¹ methods in the study of law and performance.Footnote ⁸²

As these scholars merge their teacher/researcher-selves with their artist/activist/performer-selves, they code information about how law is embodied, felt, and lived. In this process, they also clearly visibilise their own positionality and acknowledge that, as agents producing critical knowledge about an unequal social world, they are a part of it. Following in their footsteps, I have tried to merge my different selves too, towards centring the lived realities and voices of my research participants in a way that accounts for the embodied, emotional, spatial, and temporal aspects of their lived realities. Re-centering the individual in a study that seeks to theorise systems, both as the knower-doer (ie, the subject of research) as well as the known-done (ie, the object of research), can reveal the structural.Footnote ⁸³ As the next section demonstrates, creative methods have immense power to do that.

4. Creative methods in legal research: re-centring the lived

C. Can you see us: mapping spatiality of legal coding

I accompany the participants’ voices, my spoken word, and the sonic rhythms in the background with carefully choreographed embodied movement rooted in the Indian classical dance form of Kathak. The choreography includes ‘mudra’ (gesture), ‘nritta’ (dance), and ‘abhinaya’ (expression),Footnote ¹⁰⁵ which attempt to represent my embodied interpretation of the data, as well as the embodied experience of my research participants. This is to acknowledge, analyse, and demonstrate that the process of researching law – just as the other work of legal coding – is not an emotionless or disembodied experience. The embodied challenges of researching the field (for the researcher), as well as of those working in the field (for the research participants), are often excluded from the written accounts of methodology.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The visuals of the film aim to address, acknowledge, and capture some of these challenges.

In my attempt to bridge the physiological with the psychological visually, I bring together the embodied with the expressed, as well as the seen with the seeing. Combining my rhythmic, sonic, and poetic analysis with Kathak helps me ‘bring back’ the ‘flowing, resisting, and spinning body’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ in the analysis. (IN)VISIBLE maps the spaces of legal coding through the bodies behind the black letter, moving to the letters behind those bodies. That is how the analysis itself becomes embodied.

The film, therefore, also responds to and builds on the ‘visual turn’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ in socio-legal research, towards what I propose as a ‘rhythmic turn’, while speaking directly to and of my positionality as a researcher. For example, I may not have been able to capture and present an embodied analysis if I had not embodied some of these experiences myself. It is important to note here that methods can be embodied not only at the stage of analysis but also at an early stage of the research project, such as at the stage of collecting data to connect more intimately with the research participants.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ My motivation for choosing a movement-led method partly came from the embodied discomfort I had been sitting in after the fieldwork (which closely resonated with the discomfort I was hearing in my interviewees’ voices). My decision to map the space through rhythms was also determined by the object of my analysis, which was not only bodies but also the way they were flowing across, interacting with, and shaping each other in dynamic space-times at the sites of legal coding.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In addition to analysing this embodied discomfort through choreography, the film challenges the aesthetic pretence of neutrality within the legal system. As the dancing body spins through different types of spaces, ranging from shadowed bars to a black box to an open field, the visibility of the body also fluctuates (Figure 1). The visual elements capture this fluctuation by at least two types of non-linear oscillations – first, an oscillation between black/white and colour, and second, an oscillation between the reflections, shadows, silhouettes, and images of the body. Both these types of oscillations capture the fragmentation of the embodied experiences of women’s bodies at the sites of legal coding. On some occasions, they become (hyper)visible in settings where dressing, hair, or make-up are selectively scrutinised as a misdirected measure of ‘merit’,Footnote ¹¹¹ while on others, their invisibility directly results in epistemic injustice.

Figure 1.

Visual oscillations between colour and (in/hyper)visibility.

Figure 1. Long description

The first image captures a close-up of a person’s arms raised in a dynamic pose, emphasizing the movement and energy of the dance. The second image shows the shadow of a person dancing on a surface, creating an abstract and fluid form that contrasts with the solid environment. The third image depicts a person dancing in an open field at sunset, with arms raised towards the sky, highlighting the expansive and natural setting. Together, these images explore the themes of visibility, movement, and the interplay between different spaces.

D. Can you feel us: mapping affect in legal coding

Emotions are often marginalised in field diaries, even in disciplines that take fieldwork more seriously than law.Footnote ¹¹² In this creative analysis, however, I re-centre emotion in ways that make it possible to explain why and how certain bodies feel epistemically excluded from the processes of legal coding. This also enables me to map the invisible ‘emotional geographies’Footnote ¹¹³ of the sites and work of legal coding, which constitute the rhythms of legal institutions as much as their visible aspects like moving bodies, voices, and behaviours. By accounting for emotion in my multimodal analysis through a combination of voice modulation, evocative sonic backgrounds, and facial and embodied expressions, I render the emotions of my participants legible for legal coding through my own academic work. In bringing together the data, sound, spoken word, dance, and colour, (IN)VISIBLE combines the witnessed with the felt, resulting in an output that helped me collect further data, verify my phenomenological analysis, and extend solidarity beyond my research participants.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Various anonymous testimonials collected via a short feedback survey after (IN)VISIBLE’s screenings demonstrate how the witnessed was felt by the viewers. In over 15 screenings of the film in various academic and non-academic spaces so far, legal experts in different capacities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, India, South Korea, Pakistan, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States have provided powerful testimonials of how they resonated with the film. Over 80 per cent of around 100 survey responses ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that the film made them feel ‘angry’ or ‘uncomfortable’ with the treatment of women’s bodies in the physical spaces of legal coding – indicating the universality of the exclusionary rhythms of legal coding, regardless of what cultures they occupy.

Some of the testimonials collected from the survey responses at these film screenings are presented below (each testimonial is a survey entry from a different audience member):

Made me think about similar dynamics within UK policing!

This film equally applies to the imbalance of power in judiciary in England and Wales. Also, not as many women in top jobs in law firms and academia.

I really enjoyed and empathized with the film as a female lawyer from Pakistan who didn’t pursue actual practice because of the same worries and concerns as presented in the video.

As a female lawyer, I have had to deal with inappropriate comments from male clients while practicing in the United States.

Very evocative and thoughtful treatment of the legal systems and the barriers faced by women. I reflected on the fact I could feel the frustration of the women in the video as my own, as I have had similar experiences.

Super effective use of visuals and sound effects, which invoked a deep sense of empathy.

Very thought-provoking for myself as an aspiring woman in law.

Made me emotional because it hit some of my core values and I hope this can be shared further and wider.

Being a woman, I have often faced similar situations, and having that voiced out like this felt really empowering.

For me, it really helped to evoke the way the cacophony of instruction, doubt, and other people’s judgement and perspectives that women in all walks of life carry around with them. I think it’s a really powerful piece and the dance really helps to bring to the fore the embodied nature of these experiences for women whose bodies are always being judged.

The powerful message – especially the voices of the women in the background - were moving and jarring even for someone like me to whom none of this is a surprise!

Use of music/dance was an effective way to prompt emotional engagement from audience.

The idea of integrating dance in the visual as a spinning wheel conveyed the point right away. The colour scheme used was also very telling. The realities of many women are that of being shadowed, not having enough light to voice their opinions, which was very well represented.

I was left with a lingering thought about how women in law and being a first-generation law student myself, I have trodden in the balancing act of pursuing legal studies.

Thank you for highlighting the casual sexism that goes on in the workplace, in legal system as well.

Besides verifying the accuracy of my overarching phenomenological narrative about the lived realities of Indian women experts, the feedback data helped me expand the scope of inquiry beyond India, ranging from UK policing to courtrooms in Pakistan and to legal practice in the United States.

Bringing together the emotions of my research participants through my own dancing body and poetic voice in (IN)VISIBLE paved the way for surfacing the individual and collective bodies these emotions circulate between, demonstrating how emotions do things, especially in the way they align bodily space with social space.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Sara Ahmed conceptualises the way in which emotions do things as adherence, or binding/sticking subjects together.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the case of (IN)VISIBLE, the emotions captured in my multimodal analysis not only bring the subject and the object of the research closer to its audience – as depicted by the survey responses above – but also demonstrate how they bind and exclude the cultures and rhythms of legal coding. The capturing of affect through an explicit convergence of the witnessed with the felt can further be demonstrated by at least three specific instances in (IN)VISIBLE.

The first is when the vision of the spinning dancer becomes the lens (timestamp – 2:05, Figure 2 below), visibilising the viewpoint of excluded bodies, highlighting the chaos induced by a collective male gaze that spans and shapes the spatiality of legal coding. In flipping the subject to become the object, the film ‘flips the gaze’,Footnote ¹¹⁸ invoking a form of resistance. The spinning room, as viewed by a spinning body, is also representative of my reflexivity as the researcher as well as my interpretation of the embodied experiences of my research participants. The film embeds within it a call to consider positionality within the hierarchies of meaning-making processes and the knowledge production about them. By revealing my own body in the film, I demonstrate that my analysis and interpretation of my participants’ experiences are embodied and situated in a specific space, visibilising the subjectivity of legal coding.

Figure 2.

Flipping the gaze/point of view.

Figure 2. Long description

A black and white image with text reading ‘Lady justice might be blindfolded’

The second instance that merges the witnessed with the felt is the visual reversal of time (timestamp – 2:11, Figure 2). This not only brings the felt non-linear temporality in conversation with the felt spatiality, but also inherits an explicit call to memory, unfolding how the ascending accumulation of individual instances of testimonial injustice (witnessed, heard, or felt) can lead to systemic silencing.

The third instance is when the dancing body finally escapes the closed dark spaces that were suffocating her (timestamp – 2:28, Figure 3). As the hands of two other women’s bodies facilitate this escape, the visual is accompanied by a quote that sternly calls for sisterhood, explaining how ‘sisternity’ (a critical spin on the word ‘fraternity’) can open doors for liberation. Having travelled from fear to despair, to rage, to conviction, the phenomenological narrative of the film ends at hope – invoking the agency of the excluded bodies to write their own stories.

Figure 3.

Sisternity.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Figure 3. Long description

The image features a silhouette of a person dancing with multiple balloons in a dark environment. The person appears to be in motion, with the balloons glowing and creating a contrast against the dark background. The scene suggests a sense of freedom and escape from confinement.

The escape to the outer field at this point can be interpreted in at least two different ways. Either the dancer, with the support of those who came before her, is finally able to overcome the various forms of epistemic injustice, but in a new space (also indicating the need for the change to come as much from the system as it must come from its agents). Or, it can be read as a commentary on how meaning is made outside the boundaries of the legal system too, especially when legal coding is exclusionary. The choice to transcend the black letter for dismantling power through social movements is one such example, like the one Kusiak was a part of in her action research to reclaim Berlin’s housing.Footnote ¹¹⁹ These movements often take place outside the physical sites of legal coding. Dismantling of institutional structures that embed and perpetuate old world orders (sometimes through old methods) often needs a community for execution – just as the film needed generosityFootnote ¹²⁰ from a community of committed and collaborative artists to come to life.

In de-centring the black letter both in its object (as doctrinal law) as well as in the method of its study (as a purely textual analysis of qualitative data), the film attempts to de-centre the hierarchies of knowledge production, which are often rooted in western, Eurocentric, and colonial traditions.Footnote ¹²¹ The film demonstrates new ways of studying ‘law in context’ by placing different forms of information about the lived realities of people at the centre.

5. Limitations of creative methods: caution, care, and complementarity

Before concluding, it is important to note the potential limitations of creative methods. Too much reliance on positionality can sometimes lead to inflated conclusions, presenting all understandings of reality within social science and humanities research as subjective. When stretched too far, this could lead to a conclusion that nothing is ‘real’ because everything that attempts to describe it is the researcher’s perspective. I want to clarify that my ontological stance remains loyal to Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist account that allows for multiple lived realities to exist alongside an objective social reality independent of individual perception, even when structured.Footnote ¹²² My case for creative methods is limited to the extent that it enables more information about social reality to be captured and analysed (from more perspectives) than doctrinal and text-based empirical methods currently allow.

A common limitation of creative methods lies in their undeniable need for an ‘artistic nerve’Footnote ¹²³ in the researcher. Just as the personal and professional identities of other experts – judges, lawyers, legislators, journalists, bureaucrats – shape the legal coding process, the personal and professional identity of the researcher also shapes legal coding from within the academy. Any potential argument for treating the ‘artistic nerve’ required for a multimodal socio-legal analysis in this case, any different from what one might call the ‘philosophical nerve’ or ‘statistical nerve’ or ‘sociological nerve’ required by other methods in the legal academy, is therefore weak.

Just as the knowledge systems that other methods have been engaging with are not immune to criticisms of power embedded within them, the knowledge systems that (IN)VISIBLE engages with are not immune to similar criticisms either. For example, while I am attempting to add depth to my data analysis through embodied movement, my choice of one form of dance, choreography, poetic form, or directorial decisions when it comes to sound and screen cannot be separated from the social hierarchies they are embedded in. Similar to a text-based thematic data analysis, a choreopoetic analysis is also a form of translation, where meaning can be lost in ways different from textual translation. Just as a textual analysis would have been embedded within the hierarchies of colonial and patriarchal hierarchies of knowledge production, Kathak (the form of Indian classical dance chosen in the film) is embedded within similar hierarchies of caste, class, and religion.Footnote ¹²⁴

The cultural legibility of Kathak in (IN)VISIBLE, which allowed me to screen the film at various venues – including a stakeholder roundtable reporting back to some of my research participants – is deeply embedded in the heteropatriarchal order I was trained to perform as a Kathak dancer in. Dance scholar Rumya Sree Putcha theorises the transnational ‘cultural legibility’ of Indian classical dance forms in detail.Footnote ¹²⁵ In her ethnographic account, she demonstrates how the political and cultural economy of Indian classical dance ontologically fragments the dancing body from its voice, coding a conforming version of Indian womanhood to be ‘graceful’, ‘compliant’, and ‘silent’, in ways that make her dancing body more palatable for both the native and oriental gaze.Footnote ¹²⁶ My choice of Kathak, enabling me to screen the film before other legal experts can, therefore, be called a form of ‘sticky script’Footnote ¹²⁷ – a strategic choice of form that will allow me to shift meanings from within the legal academy, while continuing to make a radical case for going beyond the text outside.

I address some of these internal criticisms in my own dance practice as used in the film in multiple ways. One of these is accompanying the dancing body with spoken word – voices of both the dancer herself through poetry, and the voices of women whose experiences she is interpreting through her dance. Including the participants’ voices was essential to ensure that my non-textual creative method does not ‘speak over’ voices who have been using articulate language and text to describe their lived realities of exclusion for decades. Using ‘choreo poetry ’ instead of ‘choreo graphy ’, therefore, not only reduces the possibility of error in interpreting the message being communicated by the dance, but also addresses the burden that comes with the choice of Kathak as the language of movement. Another way in which I address some of these challenges is by expanding the boundaries of Kathak itself, to make the ‘mudra’ (gesture), ‘nritta’ (dance), and ‘abhinaya’ (expression) more legible and accessible to audiences who do not understand the language of Kathak.Footnote ¹²⁸ I do this by aligning the gestures, dance, and expression with the spoken word and sonic analysis of their rhythms in the background – originally produced for this film – instead of aligning them with the internal logics and rhythms of Kathak.

Despite these attempts to dispense the burdens that come with choosing one type of ‘art form’ (or ‘nerve’) over others, (IN)VISIBLE remains ridden with the respectability politics of strategically choosing a culturally legible dance form for processing information about the embodiment of lived realities. While including Kathak-based choreopoetry in my embodied analysis can be said to de-centre the western and disciplinary boundaries of knowledge production, it continues to remain palatable to previously attributed power within the structures of caste and class.

Despite these shortcomings, I argue that an embodied, poetic, and visual translation, accompanied by sonic interpretation, rooted in the presentation of original interview excerpts, captures more ‘essence’Footnote ¹²⁹ than a text-based analysis would have allowed in this case. While the considerations involved in choosing a suitable creative method inevitably have the difficulty of replicating and training in these methods, it is important to make explicit the choices that balance the questions of suitability, capacity, and positionality of both the objects and subjects of research. Regardless of the choice of method, the ability and space for researchers to bring their authentic selves to socio-legal inquiries can go a long way in enabling a critical praxis for grounded theory that no longer conceptualises the abstract ‘legal system’ as universal or neutral.

Flexibility and acceptance of what creative methods can do for legal coding processes can equip researchers to not only reveal, but also shift the epistemic hierarchies embedded within and reinforced by the networked codes of law. This could allow for illegible realities to enter networked codes, as well as make space for more well-rounded and ethical analyses that embrace the subjectivity embedded within them. Doctrinal, empirical, or creative – if there is one takeaway about methods from the discussion above, then it is the call to make methodological choices well-thought-out, thorough, and explicit in the legal academy, towards richer, more rigorous, and more reflexive outputs.

And finally, from the receiver’s perspective, creative methods, often resulting in relatively more evocative outputs, can disorient, challenge, prompt, and even trigger its audience. In examining research questions that deal with sensitive and potentially traumatic issues, adopting a creative praxis will, therefore, need extra caution and care.