Author: Ellen Campbell

Trans Justice – a zine by Cole Calijouw

Cole Calijouw created this Trans Zine for Rebecca Johnson’s first-year Criminal Law Course.

Rebecca Johnson's Commentary on the Project

by Rebecca Johnson

“This ‘zine was produced in the context of a first year criminal law class. The students were invited to do a book review or engage with a contemporary book on any number of criminal law issues. This particular student asked if they could produce a ‘zine’ instead, which was fine for my purposes. This particular zine really showed the ability of the student to draw into conversation issues from both criminal law and from society more generally. Really quite transgressive, if I can use that word, engagement with criminal law in a way that helped to certainly centre the invisibility, or the hypervisibility, of binaries within criminal law.”

Rebecca Johnson

Use the arrows below to scroll through pages in the zine

Beach Fires – by Unknown

Unknown created this project for a constitutional law course taught by Gillian Calder. 

This was was a 10% assignment in Constitutional Law where the students were asked to go to a community event (it could be a talk at the law school or something at home) and then write about how they saw the Canadian Constitution reflected in that event. How could they draw a connection between the event in their community and Canadian Constitutional Law?

This student did a painting about a disconnect in her life as an Iranian person living in Canada, participating in a traditional ceremony.  The painting was accompanied by food, and some writing.  The three items together were the means through which to not only engage with the constitutional questions that exist for immigrants to Canada, but to document and overcome some of the similar challenges of being at law school.

Gillian Calder

Life Size: Two-Spirit – by Margaret Lovely

“Life Size: Two Spirit”

Margaret Lovely

Margaret Lovely created this project for a course taught by Gillian Calder (Law 357: Sexual Orientation and the Law).

[This] is a full sized figure that was handed in for Sexual Orientation class. It is the creation of an Indigenous student who has a partner who is is a trans-man. The figure represents the various ways she is living the life of a two-spirited person. Both the front and the back are meant to be seen and draws on different notions of what it means to be present in such a body. I have this figure in my office. I take it with me to presentations where I am talking to others of my colleagues about the transformative role projects can play in the teaching and learning of law. Teachers from the art school were just enamoured by this work.  The figure is presented as looking out the window of this room so that everyone who is passing by and looks through that window can see her.

Gillian Calder

Private Food or Public Good? – by David Gill

This project, produced for Law 315: Business Associations (taught by Rebecca Johnson), was an engagement with questions raised in J.K. Gibson-Graham et al’s, Take Back the Economy.  The project was composed of 4 parts:

  • The Menu

  • The Meal

  • Notes to Accompany the Meal (A book of poems and images)

  • A Reflection on the Project

Each of these can be seen below, along with a few reflections by the professor on the process of assessing (that is, ‘eating’) this project.

 

The Menu

Morels from an aging apple orchard

Poached eggs from my friends:
Rosebud, Catherine, Valentine and Ms. Stanley Featherbottom

Lady fern fiddleheads from the forest

Nodding onions from my garden

Salt boiled from China Beach seawater

Kombucha made with Morgan’s starter,
wild nettles and honey from a lost love

 

Everything on this menu originates in a direct relationship with a place or person. The ingredients cost no money – they were gathered through going out on the land, caring for friends, both feathered and not, and tending the garden.

The Meal

Notes to Accompany the Meal

“Private Food or Public Good?
Notes on a meal drawn from the capital of relationships
with no money down.”

Click here

Final Reflections

Click here

Rebecca Johnson on David Gill's "Breakfast Food"

This particular project, again in the context of business associations class, was a menu and a meal and a paper. This particular project was handed in at the . . . business associations exam final. I had been sick that day and was home, so the people from the office wrapped up this meal and delivered it to me, so I had a meal for two delivered to my home with the poached eggs still warm. One of the interesting things about this paper was the experience of eating the meal itself. . . This project, maybe more than any others I have encountered before, made me think very seriously about the experience of eating. So, reading the paper and thinking about the individual ingredients and items as poems, in some ways, left this meal feeling. . . like a sacrament almost more than a meal in and of itself as the labour that had been made to produce the meal made the experience of eating seem highly significant in ways that are probably true for papers but, somehow, the work in a paper feels different than the work involved in the production of food.

Rebecca Johnson

Take Back the Market Pizza – by Ian Trimble

This pizza was submitted, along with a paper, by Ian Trimble for Rebecca Johnson’s Business Associations class. About the project, Professor Rebecca Johnson states the following:

Rebecca Johnson's Commentary on the Project

by Rebecca Johnson

“In this particular work, the student produced a paper for me in business associations but had also asked if I would be available at a specific time for the delivery of another element of the project. When it arrived, it was a pizza in a pizza box, still hot from the oven. I walked down the hall, sharing pieces of pizza with my colleagues, before I started to read the paper. As I read the paper, the student discussed his exploration of what would be necessary in order to take seriously local economies by figuring out how to produce a pizza that was sourced entirely from materials available on Vancouver Island. What was particularly interesting was that, as I ate the pizza, I thought to myself “oh it could have used a few other minutes in the oven” because the cheese was not as melty as I would ordinarily prefer. As I headed to the paper, there was a large discussion of the processes he had been involved in in order to make cheese from milk available on the Island and the ways which, given the sources available to him, he could only produce a cheese that had a certain chewiness to it in that it would not melt sufficiently. And so, there was a very embodied experience of feeling in my mouth the experience that he described in his paper of what kinds of losses would be necessary if one were to take seriously fully the demands of what is available in the economy in which we live.”

Rebecca Johnson

Fabrics + Mobiles – by Caitlin Stockwell and Kaitlin Keufler’s

Caitlin Stockwell and Kaitlin Keufler created this book and mobile on textiles for Rebecca Johnson’s 2017 Business Associations class.

Flip through the book here, and listen to Rebecca Johnson discuss the project below:

Discussion of Project by Rebecca Johnson

by Rebecca Johnson

“This project of textiles and mobiles was created in the context of Business Associations Law 315. In this class, the students were asked to respond in some form to J.K. Gibson-Graham’s book Take Back the Economy. This particular project is an engagement with taking back work; taking back economy. And the two students who worked on this together took as their question tracking the relationship between majority and minority worlds through fabrics and through women’s work. So, in these two documents, if I can call them that, . . . the book and the mobile, they sought to understand what would be the realtionships between the fabrics we buy and the places that they are produced. On the mobile, what you see is beads representing the distance that the fabric in question travelled from the place of its origin to Canada. So you see various lengths of distance as well as the sizes of paper representing what proportion of fabric produced by that country enters the Canadian market. What is also interesting here is thinking about the ways in which those relations are invisible to the consumer; the ways in which . . . it is very hard to locate the actual locations between the women who produce them and very often the women who purchase them or wear them.”

Rebecca Johnson

There’s a Crack in Everything – by Sarah Beth Hutchinson

Sarah Beth Hutchison created this painting, “There’s a Crack in Everything,” for a 2012 course taught by Gillian Calder.

It features the words “There’s a Crack in Everything, That’s how the Light Gets in.” The words featured on the painting are quoted from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen (words that were later used as partial lyrics to the Coldplay song “Up With the Birds”). The use of these lyrics gives an auditory motif to the two-dimensional painting.

The birds they sang, at break of day

Start again

I heard them say

Don’t dwell on what

Has passed away

Of what is yet to be

Ah the wars they will

Be fought again

The holy dove

She will be caught again

Bought and sold

And bought again

The dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect. . .

Leonard Cohen`s The Anthem