Title: Violence and Law
Course code: LAWS 5903 X
Semester: Winter 2019
Professor: Dawn Moore
About: From the Attica prison riots to #metoo, the migration ‘crisis’ and attempts at cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples, this class explores all manner of state, extra-state and interpersonal violence. Students will learn to use a variety to theoretical tools to explore questions such as: who defines violence? What does it mean to perpetrate and experience violence? How is violence documented? How is violence adjudicated and what counts as evidence of violence? Is resistance violence? Students will also be exposed to a variety of ways of ‘knowing’ violence through both traditional means (i.e. academic research) as well as unconventional epistemologies (documentary, images, personal writing on experiences of violence). Students will be encouraged to reflect on violence not only as a socio-legal phenomenon but also as a universal human experience. Students will be invited (but not expected) to explore their own engagement with violence in a variety of different ways.
Students should anticipate exposure to graphic materials and images. The class will include a guest lectures from people with lived experience of violence, both interpersonal and state-based.
This class is well suited to students who wish to explore different ways to understand violence through social and political theory as well as research and reflexivity. This is an intersectional class.
Title: Law, Power, Indigeneities
Course code: LAWS 5903 Y
Semester: Winter 2019
Professor: Dr. Sébastien Malette
About: This seminar will investigate Law through the work of Michel Foucault, especially in relation to the politics of rights in the contemporary era. The work of Foucault will be used to further investigate various rationales we find embedded in juridical narratives on what constitutes indigeneity (i.e. “regimes of truth“), as well as the power/knowledge strategies and tactics involving various indigenous actors aiming at defining–and often limiting–the scope of such concept in the Canadian context.
Title: Global Legalities
Course code: LAWS 5903 Z
Semester: Winter 2019
Professor: Doris Buss
About: This course considers the different dimensions and debates about ‘globalization’ and law. It draws from multiple disciplines – law and socio-legal studies, geography, anthropology – to explore the constitution of the legal in relation to the ‘global’. What makes law global, transnational, or national? Do these terms even have descriptive currency? How are global interconnections generating different normative relations and what implications might these have for the values accorded to rule of law, equality, democracy? To anchor these discussions, the course will focus on some specific examples such as the global dimensions of efforts to regulate resource extraction, (oil and gas and mining), human rights and global supply chains (in clothing, electronics, food), migration, and so on.