My research lies at the intersection of law and social science with topical emphases on climate change and migration. While my approach is broadly rooted in the law and society tradition, it also benefits from methodological and theoretical contributions from the social sciences, in particular sociology, history, and migration studies
My first research strand is focused on the climate crisis and focuses on how we make law both a material and cultural sense. Work in this strand approaches law as more than a set of rules or standards, but a broad cultural understanding of the way we do, and might, normatively order our lives, relationships and communities.
My second research strand is focused on how narratives of and about law emerge and evolve over time. What are the stories we tell about the law and what do those stories mean for how we understand individuals, institutions and interactions under the law.
Stepnitz, Abigail. 2023. "Storied Pasts: Evolving Norms in US Affirmative Asylum Narratives 1989-2018.” Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality 41(2): 1-43.
This article develops a framework for understanding the emergence and evolution of structural and substantive norms in asylum narratives over time. First, I offer an historical framework which shows how these norms evolve as a result of combined legal, political, cultural and institutional changes. Institutional norms are infused with politics, undergo processes of bureaucratization, and change in response to imperatives and opportunities presented by social and cultural shifts in the way asylum is framed. Second, drawing on a sample of 120 affirmative asylum claims filed between 1989 and 2018, I offer an empirical analysis which reveals the rise of a contemporary system in which competing demands on asylum stories severely limit how those seeking protection can communicate about their experiences. The result is a legal and institutional environment in which asylum seekers must respond to demands for increasing conformity to institutional expectations about how experiences are narrated by adhering to a progressively more formalized, legally and institutionally legible structure for narrating experiences of persecution or fear..
Stepnitz, Abigail. 2023. "Believing Asylum-Seeking Women: Doing Gender in Legal
Narratives of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence.” Social & Legal Studies 32(5).
In this article I seek to expand the understanding of what it means to credibly “do gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) for women seeking asylum in the United States. I present an empirical analysis of documents related to 30 women’s affirmative asylum claims in the US from 2001-2018, which center experiences of sexual and gender-based violence. My analysis reveals how women’s credibility is achieved interactionally and institutionally when their written narratives and interview interactions reflect culturally salient and organizationally-embedded ideas about trauma and memory, culture and violence and, thresholds of harm. I demonstrate how credibility is refracted through these deeply gendered legal and cultural lenses, and how law and gender, in interaction, reframe and reconstitute the meaning of individual actions and narratives, producing and reinforcing a limited range of credible stories about gender-based violence that these women can tell.
Stepnitz, Abigail. 2020. “Between Convention and Resistance: Counter-Narrative
Strategies in Political Asylum Claims” in The Routledge Handbook of Counter-
Narratives, Klarissa Leug and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, eds. London: Routledge.
Like many counter- narratives which are powerful because they articulate an alternative, rather than presenting direct challenges to master narratives, asylum claims based on political opposition engage in subtle forms of resistance. In doing so, those making political opposition claims engage in an oppositional construction of a political subject by appropriating dominant knowledge about who engages in political contestation and why.
Stepnitz, Abigail. 2017. “Re(art)iculating Refugees: Spectacle and the Cultural
Contestation of Law.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 61: 70-7
The waning relevance of the law, coupled with the reality of a contemporary refugee crisis, creates a space in which the idea of the refugee can and must be challenged. Art has emerged as one form of expression in which such a rearticulation is taking place. Art engages with and questions law’s boundaries by illuminating and appropriating the performative aspects of law, in particular its role in the creation of socially legitimated meaning. When law’s role is performed in an artistic space, criticism can be levied in cultural terms.
Stepnitz, Abigail. 2012. “A Lie More Disastrous Than the Truth: Asylum and the Identification of Trafficked Women in the UK.” Anti-Trafficking Review 1: 104-119.
Like many counter- narratives which are powerful because they articulate an alternative, rather than presenting direct challenges to master narratives, asylum claims based on political opposition engage in subtle forms of resistance. In doing so, those making political opposition claims engage in an oppositional construction of a political subject by appropriating dominant knowledge about who engages in political contestation and why.