By Gillian Calder and Rebecca Johnson

IdeaFest is the University of Victoria’s annual research festival, showcasing the ideas of faculty, students and staff from across the University. This year, there were a number of events involving the Law School community.   One was “Reimagining Justice: Art, Law and Social Change”.

This event involved a series of talks during the week about Law and Theatre, Law and Dance, Law and the Arts, and the Arts as Pedagogy.  As part of this event, for the duration of the week, the UVic law moot court room was transformed into an interactive art installation showcasing the relationship between art, law and social justice.  The room was filled with creative projects that had been handed in  as part of the course work in classes such as Criminal Law, Business Associations, Family Law, Constitutional Law, and Sexual Orientation and the Law.  The project curated by Lorinda Fraser (MSc in Museum Studies). Click here for a link to the Exhibition Catalogue, which lists the students whose work was featured.

On the final day of the event, we held a “Gallery Walk” where three of the professors who had been involved (Professors Gillian Calder, Rebecca Johnson and Sara Ramshaw) spoke in more detail about the specific projects that were in the room, to open space for conversations about things that might be learned through producing, evaluating, and interacting with arts-based methods in the context of a law school. What follows below is a transcript of that gallery walk, along with some images to capture the sense of the exhibition.

THE GALLERY WALK – MARCH 8, 2019

Rebecca Johnson (RJ): We would like to begin by acknowledging with respect the Lekwungen-speaking peoples on whose traditional territory the University stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. One of the gifts of making such acknowledgements is that they remind us to take the opportunity to learn how we, as uninvited guests in these beautiful territories, can learn to live in ways that are lawful for the Coast Salish world. We are happy to have you here for our Gallery Walk for IdeaFest. This is Professor Gillian Calder, I am Rebecca Johnson, and this is Professor Sara Ramshaw. We have been working with Lorinda Fraser, one of our own, who has recently completed her Masters in Museum Studies. She worked with us to curate a sampling of projects that have been handed in for classes in our law school over a number of years.

 

 

Gillian Calder (GC): Part of what we have been thinking and talking about is how evaluation and iterative learning are done at law school. How do we bring deep learning to our students in the kinds of assignments that they have the opportunity to do?  How much of who students are is formed by what they go on to do?  How much of law involves creativity, imagination and empathy?  How do we train those skills?  What teachers have always done is to find opportunities with students, when they are doing assignments or in their exams in their courses, to answer questions in ways that the questions demand.

 

 

Most commonly in law, that is done through written answers, essays, and exams. But sometimes the question can be best answered by drawing on some other form. What you have in the room is a sampling of some of those. What we are going to do is walk around a bit and talk about some of these projects. We will not be able to give you the exact question each student was asked for each project, but what you should know is that there are projects in this room from Criminal Law, Business Associations, Family Law, Sexual Orientation and the Law, Directed Reading Classes and others. The questions that the students were answering through these projects were often the same questions answered by other students through more conventional forms; and so some students answered through papers, and some through projects. Some of these projects were evaluated on a pass/fail basis, and others based on letter grade.  Some of these projects were worth 10% of the final grade, others were worth 30%, and yet others represent the entirety of a student’s work in the course. That is why these projects are very different in scope and in size. We are going to walk around and talk with you about various projects. We invite you to ask questions, and to interrogate us about our experiences as teachers.  To ask us how we hold a paper and a project side by side. To ask us more about the learning we have needed to do in order to feel able evaluate these different kinds of engagements.

 

 

RJ: These projects will also let us discuss what we have learned in the process of engaging with work that raises expectations different from those we had for more conventional work. And as with all gallery tours, we will cluster in front of something and there will be chairs for people who want to sit, and for people who can get down on the floor and somehow get back up, then feel free to sit there as we move around. So let us start.

 

 

GC:  Some of the projects are rooted in the textual. On the judges’ bench at the front, for example, there is some non-conventional written work that has been handed in. Poetry books. Scrapbooks.  Photo albums.  A poem that has been published in a law journal (the poem was handed in as an exam in Federalism in Law in December and was just published). There are some examples like that around. Some of the pieces are purely visual.  You will see art on the walls around you.   There are videos playing on the screen on the wall.  There is also an mp3 player in the witness box, so you can sit there with headphones on and listen to songs that students have written and performed.

RJ:  Perhaps we can start with games as a genre since we are already gathered at this table.

 

 

GC: This table displays 4 different game categories. I will talk briefly about the game on the far end. This was a game handed in for family law, for 40% of the mark. The question the students were asked to respond to was “How does law regulate your understanding of the family?” with the option given to answer the question in whatever format was best.  This student wanted to write about obstacles that exist to gay men adopting in Canada notwithstanding that there are no formal barriers, in law, to same-sex partners, or single gay folk adopting. So he created that game that demonstrates that even though law is inclusive, there remain many barriers.  So you play the game and the goal is for you and your partner to get to the end where you adopt a baby. But you have to cross identity barriers and financial barriers and other kinds of barriers to get there.  When you play the game you feel it in your body. You understand obstacles by playing the game that you would not understand in the same sense by just reading about them. It is fun to engage with the game but you never lose sight of the fact that this is a real struggle; the project makes the argument that homophobia exists in many of our practices around how we create families in Canada, even with the shifts in Family Law. It was a stunning project and often when I  am encouraging students to think about doing projects, I bring out this game for them to play to give them a sense of what some possibilities might be for them. It is one of the best ways that an essay question has ever been answered in Family Law.

 

 

RJ: In terms of game tables you can see there are different kinds of games and different forms of engagement. Part of the work with games and students is beginning to think of how creating the rules of the game and learning how to change the rules as you go along can provide a space for learning questions about not only how you engage with a concept but how you think about teaching people you work with, people in families — how to see structural and systemic patterns. And also how to think about the difference between collaborative games, and competitive games and history games. The genre of gaming can help work through different kinds of challenges. And different forms of games. Sometimes students work with the structures that they already know. Taking something like The Settlers of Catan, for those of you who have played that game, and then modifying the game to think about the place of economy and settlement. So there are games that draw on that form. There are games that are card games that similarly draw on traditions of card games.  The projects help us think differently about the place of adaptation and creativity and modifying that which has come before. Like what it means to draw up the resources of things that you have and then modify them, adapt them and move them forward.  The card game on the table, for example, draws on the structure of a game called Zombie Fight or Flight (developed by professor Sharon Sutherland) and then the project explored the kinds of modifications that would make it work in the context of economic re-imaginaries. The work is in working on the relationship between an established game and a new form.

 

 

RJ:  I note here that if you look at the video monitor in the room, you will see a rotation of photos capturing additional projects that are not in the room.  Included there is a photo of me playing a game with a friend and our young boys. That photo leads me to echo some of what Gillian said about difference between looking at a game and playing a game. One of the challenges for marking a game as a project is that games are often most pleasurable when one knows its rules and is able to play creatively within the structure of the game. So sometimes from a marking perspective, it is interesting that it is often quicker to mark a paper than a project, particularly if the project is a game. But a game teaches you other things. One game will go by on the monitor at some point, a simple game with basic tools.  But its magic was in the playing.  In the photo, you see me and friend Stacy, harnessing our young boys to the work of ‘evaluation’: the four of us tried to play this game that involved a continually re-working of the rules themselves (with each round, the group had to first decide what rules of governance or decision-making would apply). We adults watched our young teens invent new rules, like, if you didn’t say, “All hail the king!” at the beginning of your turn, you lost points. Realizing the randomness that came through the playing was part of the pleasure of the game.

 

 

You can see other game-engagements on the table, including this one, a modification of a Monopoly Board with a written paper on the bottom of the board, talking about the history of Monopoly or Anti-Monopoly. So you could see again people taking up games and actively shoving them or pushing them to be not exactly something you would play, but rather something you would use to think through a problem. So, games and gaming is a category of things that students have thought through and played with and learned with.  We have certainly learned much from them in those engagements.

 

 

GC: At the next table, we have a series of objects. I am going to talk about this piece which was also a 40% question in a family law project. The question again is how does law regulate our understanding of the family. This project was done by a student, a trans-man, who is the birth mother of his 2 children having given birth to his children before transitioning.  And for his project, he produced this object: a pregnant body.

 

 

There are many stories that circulate around and with this object.  One is that, in his first year of law school, his parents sued him for custody of his children because of this gender identity.  He did this project as an attempt to capture and to document what it is to be at the same time a birth mother and a trans man.  What you see in this project also depends on your position.  Some of you are positioned as if a midwife or doctor, looking up the stirrups. This is the position through which people will first see this object when they come enter this room.

 

 

The project also includes a book, which is part of the argument.  Here, he begins with P.D. Eastman’s classic book, Are You My Mother?, but he has changed the book to play with the notion of the gender binary.  In this way, he raises questions about what it is to be someone’s mother. And what was amazing is that after he did the project, there was a time at the law school where there was some concern raised in the student body about our ability to change our bathrooms to be gender inclusive.

 

 

And our student took the opportunity to remind those of us with cisgender privilege about what it means, every day, to carry that privilege.  He talked about his experience, as a man, in the changing room at his local pool, with his children calling him mom.  The object and its stories flowed out in ways that were transformative; modelling how creativity in law enables unique engagement on some of law’s most pressing issues.

 

 

GC: Next is a Museum Box project.  This one was a final project in Sexual Orientation and the Law, which students affectionately call Sex-O. It comes with a guide to the museum box of items and what appears to be a tape recorded story of this student coming back to the school in 2057 to discover the challenges of gender and trans-identity being a museum item.  That is, the box is full of objects once central to gender binaries, objects that no longer function as anything but artifacts of a time past.  In this way, the museum box has captured the idea that we might be able to live in a different world. We have here the idea of transformation captured in different forms. Both the trans-man and the Museum Box projects push the boundaries of different kinds of questions. Both projects draw from personal experience of the students and I can say that I have felt very shaped by both projects.

 

 

RJ: The next two objects on this table were handed in for a Business Associations Class. Both projects were an engagement with JK Gibson-Graham’s book, Take Back the Economy. The book was assigned reading for the course, and students were asked to use the book as a launching point to explore the contours of the economic imaginary — wondering how one might creatively re-imagine business and its challenges. The book explores markets, property, finance internationalization, subjectivity and economic rationality.  One person engaged with the book by making a Matryoshka. You can see the person has taken an 8-piece matryoshka doll, and has repurposed it.  It has been painted over, and each nested doll has been papered with texts or images to represent a different layer of our economic universe.  The first layers takes us to selected provisions of the Business Corporations Act, and then picks down through layers, taking up work, finance, international economic flows, commodities, networks, human relations,  and then there is a little bit of copulation and reproduction going on down here at the bottom of the matryoshka, and finally moving down to the centre, the final black box, which contains a secret scroll which presumably holds a clue to the ultimate answer. Of course, it is a single question mark. One of the things that was interesting about this project is this student was very concerned or worried about the requirement for words at all times. His argument was, we should be able to stand without words and so he handed in this project with no textual support. Usually in my classes, for this kind of work, the argument to the student from me is, it is not about the product you produce, it is about the process. So you can have a product that completely fails to do what the student imagined it would do, that comes in conjunction with textual support or a paper that talks about what they learned in the process of attempting something that didn’t work. So the goal is really on having the process problems being central to the work, not so much the object itself.  But this object came with no additional text.  This student actively made the decision to deny me access to any text beyond the object.  [insert big smile here].  In short, his argument was simply, “Here it is.  You figure out what to make of it.”  It was interesting, starting to have this idea of, what is it to mark, evaluate, or simply engage with a project where no words are offered to you?  So from this project, I learned so much.  It required me to think about what assumptions I was bringing to the interpretation of each of these layers. This opened me up to the idea of lawyering is precisely this, that we don’t often have the guide that tells us how we are to interact with the various layers we can pull apart, and that the project pulls itself up, pun intended to these many levels.

 

 

RJ:  The next object is a pair of beaded feathers.  It also came with textual support: a paper where the  student talked about learning how to bead a feather and what additional things she was learning in the doing. She beaded two feathers, and used the occasion to explore both Indigenous law and teachings, and challenges around the commodification of (women’s) labour in a global economy. So she chose to work on the first feather only after she had already completed a 12-hour day of work. And then, she monitored the amount of work, the time, the felt experience of doing the work.  For the second feather, she did the beading on a day where she had cleared everything else off her plate.  She worked at her own pace with her own imaginative tools to produce the feather. Then she reflected on the actual cost of materials and the question of value. And of what consumers are prepared to pay for these pieces. The two feathers are objects of beauty.  I note that the paper also engaged with the question of feathers, and which ones she could (choose to) use or not use.  This opened up space for an engagement with Indigenous law and pedagogy.  All of that was layered in the feather beading project. She explained what she learn from working with the importance of the feather as a sign of law itself. So in some of these projects, when you look at them, there are pieces of text that accompany them, that not only  explain the work, but take up the processes through which a person learns through engagement with a project.

 

 

GC: We could take the whole time just talking about this next table of objects.  You can see as you look that there is a question about whether the piece you create makes the argument in and of itself. Not all of them have to be accompanied by something that explains it. And that is part of the assignment; part of how we are training students to be legal advocates. If it doesn’t stand alone, then maybe you should have chosen a different medium in order to make your argument. It is not just about doing art. It is about choosing the right medium for your message. This mask, for example, was accompanied with a text of teachings that the student who is Metis had given for her niece.  One part of the project was this mask conveying the effects of family law on a Metis person. The other part of the project was a teaching that was tape recorded, and then given given to the student’s niece. So I don’t have that piece of the project. So some of these objects are partial works, partial works of incredible work.

 

 

RJ: The next object is a modified dress.  This dress is an example of something that might make its argument through performance. The dress came in a lovely bag with tissue around it, leaving me to perform the pleasures of unwrapping a beautiful new dress. It included the tag at the underarm of the dress, suggesting it had been marked down to only $3.00.   There was also a booklet (with a barcode on the front) asking how much discount fashion was worth. The reverse side of the booklet tells you the actual cost of the dress: 12 hours of labour and $65 worth of materials.  It also invites you to turn the dress inside out to see the hidden costs of the fast fashion industry.  There, you encounter a mass of tags, each of which speaks to the hidden costs, including the production of super weeds, the cost of suicide, poorly made clothing, increasing anxiety and depression, temporary labour, it goes on and on with all of the hidden costs. On the inside of the booklet are reproductions of the tags, along with footnotes to where the person found citations about these ideas. You should absolutely go closer and take a look underneath. Seriously.  Take the dress and turn the skirt up and you will see what are the hidden costs of fast fashion.  So here you see the argument being explained and performed in a fashion that nicely matches the work, though certainly everything here is something people already know. But there is the act of  pulling a dress up out of a bag and turning it inside out to see its hidden costs that punches the argument, that makes it hard to unsee once a person has seen it.

 

 

Our curator also paired the dress with a second project: the necklace you see on the mannequin.   She thought it worth putting the two projects into conversation.  It is a necklace called The Golden Cage.  It is a piece of jewelry, with the flowers of the community garden trying to emerge  but being constrained by the shell of the structure that impedes movement. The student was grappling with the challenge of whether we make change with individual action or whether individual actions are inadequate to help us untangle the structures that hold us in the same place. So again, performing that kind of tension of the argument in the piece of jewellery itself is a project.

 

 

GC: One other category that we have is visual arts.   You can see three projects here on the board: one in family law, one in constitutional law and one in business associations.  All three paintings are asking different questions. Again, there are stories behind each one, and each merits a long conversation.  Let me chose the middle painting.  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.

 

 

GC: Let me add that, in my courses, when students turn to the visual, or to popular culture for a project, I require them to engage with literature on the image and law, or popular culture and law, in order to be able to justify why they are using any particular form to make the argument. And I will say briefly, I am not an artist. I cannot paint myself out of a bag.  But it is possible to develop the ability to evaluate the work of others at translating an argument into another form.   It is a challenge to develop the courage and ability to evaluate a different kind of work, to measure it  against something that I can more easily mark (like a thesis or a 40 page paper with footnotes). So, that has been a learning journey about how to offer critical feedback.  In the process of doing this project pedagogy event this week, I have gone back to some of the comments I offered the students when I originally handed back their work. It is interesting for me to have some distance to see my ability to offer them critical feedback. Not every project in this room got a great mark out of 100 because not all of them achieved their goals. But at the same time I know that the projects included a different form of learning, and for many of these students, deep learning.

 

 

Sara Ramshaw (SR): This is also a project by an Canadian-Iranian student, this time for Family Law. We take for granted the idea of adoption as being a joyous occasion. Judges often say that adoption ceremonies are the most/only pleasurable thing about Family Law. In Iranian culture, though, there is a stigma against adoption, as it marks the inability to give birth to one’s own children. The student was trying to portray this. If I remember correctly,  her sister and brother-in-law were visiting her and they had a child who had been adopted. She had them act out the various struggles, anguish and joy that comes with International adoption to create a photo essay, which included a brochure evidencing her research and bibliography.

 

 

RJ: On the visuals, let me just a point over to this corner for a moment, where you see a painting covered with brown paper. This project arrived totally wrapped in brown paper.  It also arrived with a pair of scissors in an envelop, and the dare (written on the brown paper) to see if I was brave enough to “break down the blinders”. I was left with the question about how to open the project.  What was I to do with the scissors?

 

 

This brown paper seemed a piece of the work, itself. But the question was, do I have the ability to break down the blinders and the courage and the ingenuity to emerge and reveal what is behind it?   So I did start with the question, what would I cut out? How would I do the cut?  I cut out four different sections of the wheel/pie, before I finally I couldn’t stand the suspense (or the cutting!) and I took one side of the paper off so I could see this beautiful haunting work that is behind it.

 

 

I was left with many questions.  At what point do I make the whole thing visible? Do I cover it back up for other viewers to take off their blinders? What is the relationship between me and those who come after. So when we put this up in the gallery, I placed the brown paper with the outer cover folded down so that the painting can be revealed.  Almost everyday the week, I walk into the space and see that someone has been worried that it has fallen down and then has placed it back up.  I do love seeing which way people think the paper should lie (or even if they try to look beneath.  It raises the question.  What  is the relationship that is going on between art/projects and ourselves?  When do we think it is done? How does art invite us to interact with it? Is looking behind the brown paper cheating? I worried about that. Is that kind of cheating to be celebrated as a pleasurable act? And offered to others?

 

 

SR: In the witness box we are invited to listen to student compositions and songs relating to a particular legal issue. I have two Family Law examples here. One is entitled “The Music of Change: The Shifting Face of Marriage”. It is a piano composition, and the student explains what the movements meant to him. Even though I work with improvising musicians, I would not have known exactly what was going on and so I needed this explanation as to the choice of notes and how it related to this particular project. It was written in 3 movements. The liner notes provide the context and research.  Another project for Family Law was called “ReDesign”, again explaining the changing face of marriage. This particular student wrote the lyrics and music to a song played on the guitar and wanted to remain anonymous because they weren’t happy with their singing voice. So I have taken out the attribution of this, but I think the lyrics speak for themselves. Rebecca, do you want to speak to the Business Associations music projects?

 

 

RJ: Sure.  One thing to note is that projects often involve collaboration.  For one of the musical projects in this exhibition, four students worked together to create an album of songs with lyrics that would show what it would look like if you imagined a sole proprietor, what it would look like if you imagined working in a partnership, or in a coop or in a corporation. So they are trying to musically map out four versions of the song that met what they would be thinking about in terms of the structure.  They also worked together through different instruments to produce the four songs.  In their small reflection that accompanied the music, they spoke about what it meant to have the space where they worked as people who had prior musical backgrounds together to try to produce something as a group. So the work of music? You can listen to it. Occupy the witness box. Think about what it means to witness through music, to listen to these tapes. But then to think again about what it means to have something we write down and enscribe and it exists in performance and it exists in collaboration. So there is so much learning for the students and for us as we are thinking about what it means to think about law through music, not only through the lens of intellectual property, but also through the lens of performance and law.

 

 

GC: Our curator, Lorinda Fraser, made some conscious choices about how to transform this Dispute Resolution Room, so that what happens here makes us think differently about how we engage with law. This room looks very much like a courtroom. So, to have the person in the witness box have the head phones on and be listening — that is an interesting transformation about what we usually think about when we have people in the witness box. As well, I have had music turned into me in classes and when people explain the music or explain the movements, one thing I have appreciated is their efforts to try to do it within the genre of what they are doing. For example, a student handed in album liner notes, including the textual, but in a way that fit wit the medium.

 

 

I would also say that one of the challenges of doing this work has been expectations of people or judgements in some ways that giving people the chance to do a project is a really easy “A”.   You know, “hand in a cake to Professor Calder and you will get an A.” There are people that believe projects are simple, or that they do not involve research work.  Certainly, it is easy to tell in a paper if the person hasn’t done the depth of research that they needed to do to make the argument or consider the argument. But this is also true for projects.   It is a challenge to think about how to measure some of these things across different formats.  Some of these projects are extraordinarily elaborate.  But with a paper, we might limit a student to, for instance, no more than 10 pages; we say, “you are going to lose five marks for every page over the limit”.  What kinds of limits, then, do we imagine for projects, to limit what they require of both students, and teachers?  There are programmatic questions one might ask about how are we seeing the connections between different ways of answering questions, and enabling people to do this kind of work.

 

 

RJ: The difference between worrying about the evaluation component and worrying about the deep learning component is a concern. They might not always match up. People have talked about this in academia for many years. Where to put our energy?

Let us talk about the judges’ bench since we are so close to it. At the front where the judges would ordinarily be sitting we have a variety of books to think about what resources, what texts judges might draw on as they think about justice and judgement. At one corner we have placed 4 different book projects.  One is a brightly coloured paper bag book: the  student stapled together paper bags and then produced a book engaging with the economy. Each of the paper bags has in it a pull-out, handout, and each of these responds to the questions that were raised in the assigned book for the course.  Each page provides another way to tell the story of the economy and how it might look different.  There is yet another book at the front you may wish to explore: a small coil bound book of poetry. It contains preambular and definitions sections, as well as poems for different forms of business.  As you might imagine, the poems for partnership come out in the form of couplets. And the poem for the sole proprietor folds out to extend beyond the range of the pages, marking how that form is unbounded by any formal choices. They can go on as long as they want. There are poems for Corporations, and for Cooperatives, along with poetic discussion of such things as font choices.

 

 

Some times, students hand in books with the feel of a coffee-table book, or a photo essay.  Here is one by a student who engaged with their own family farm to think about what they learned through a series of photo commentary. You will also see a Trans-Zine (submitted in Criminal Law), done by the same student who did the trans-man project we began with.   The books capture multiple forms – children’s books, colouring books, found object books. You will see many forms in which the book can be thought of as a resource for other people: books as resources.

 

 

SR:  Another project from Family Law is a play script by one of the students who also acted in this year’s Lawyers on Stage Theatre production of Treasure Island. Basically, the student looked at the changing ideas of family and gender diversity at three points in time: 1970, 2015 and 2050. She was working towards the time in the future where diversity in family forms and gender identity would be taken for granted. We also have a children’s book. The narrative is quite simple, but the student did a lot of research around law and children’s literature, especially Des Manderson’s work, about how literature teaches children law and norms from an early age. In this book, she not only performs how law is taught to children, but theorizes it in her performance. And another is a short story called “The Prenuptial Agreement”. The genre taught me so much more about what the issues are in relation to the prenuptial agreement that the student was trying to work through.  One of the works that is not here is an epic poem written about a case of which many of you may know, a blood transfusion case of a Jehovah’s Witness child. I have read this case and ones like it many times. This particular student wrote about it from the perspective of the child and put it into poetic verse. By the end I was bawling my eyes out. The poem brought so much more insight to this case than I could ever imagine, because it made me feel it in my body, as did “The Prenuptial Agreement” — I could physically feel the dilemmas. Thus, I am learning as much from the projects as the students are.

 

 

GC: There 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.

GC:  Thank you for your questions. We love your intimate engagement. Thanks to those who have done work in this room this week: to Sara whose energy has been extra-ordinary; to Lorinda for her curatorial eye; to all of the students whose bravery has taken up these genres, paper writing and projects.

 

 

SR: I would like to add one thing about bravery.  I want to speak about law student Kristen Lewis’s dance performance, which has been caught on the screen behind you. Talk about brave. Kristen danced her Family Law assignment in front of her family law class.  Danced.  In front of her fellow students who didn’t quite know how to take a performance like this. As the backdrop to her dance, she had Bikers Against Child Abuse come to the class and stand at the front of the class with their faces against the blackboard for 20 minutes. And she also produced explanations about her performance on paper. Kristen is here today. Would you like to say something about your experience, Kristen?

 

 

Kristen Lewis (the Dancer): I will say that just the opportunity to do something other than just write a paper helps me to understand how Family Law impacts children. And it helped me to understand how Family Law impacts my own body. I believe this will make me, as a Family Law lawyer, able to see some new possibilities for others. When I read child protection cases, I noticed the gestures that would come up in my body as I read them. In my first year of law school, when I started to get sad as I read cases, I would just compartmentalize the work. When it came to family law, I would just get very sad. I would take 5 minutes to cry and then go back to the case and read again. So instead of pathologizing my emotional reactions to the cases I decided that I would use body gestures to amplify the reactions I have to the material in the cases. And that helped me get stronger. It is not like I want to be able to handle some of the things that the body is not built to handle: the horror of these cases. To be able to handle those things would become problematic. But dancing gave me the strength so that instead of being numb or just crying on the floor, I could practise having this fluid movement with my body that would let me see a lot more into family law cases. I don’t think that end product would have been possible without the dance. Nor even going down to Starbucks late at night to meet Bikers against Child Abuse and that actual interaction with the people there is really what law is made out of. So I loved the opportunity for this project and feel grateful to Sara Ramshaw and also grateful for all the people in the law school who make this theorizing this kind of thing possible. We aren’t shunned. So to have a theoretical basis and an understanding of this work, it makes me glad that I choose UVic for a law school.

 

 

RJ:  In closing, let us say again, that we have  been nourished by the work we have seen today and we too, are so grateful for the context of a law school that makes it possible for us to do this without us being seen as radical or on the edge, but just as part of the work of thinking about pedagogy.  Thank you for joining us.