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Place-based pedagogies of hope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2022

Bronwen Morgan  and
Amelia Thorpe
Bronwen Morgan
Affiliation:
UNSW Law & Justice, Australia
Amelia Thorpe*
Affiliation:
UNSW Law & Justice, Australia
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: a.thorpe@unsw.edu.au
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Abstract

The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham – we use context in an effort to cultivate what Giroux calls ‘educated hope’. Our starting point is what the law does (and also what law does not do and what it could do), not what the law is. Instead of taking a field of law and then using examples to illustrate how it works in context, we discuss three courses that start with the context of a particular place. Our courses cover a range of laws that work together to shape that place, spanning multiple fields, and emphasise their peopled and place-based specificity. After discussing teaching and assessment strategies that we have found productive, we reflect on implications beyond our courses, and the potential for broader place-based legal pedagogies.

Keywords

hopejusticecontextagencycritiquepedagogy
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 18 , Special Issue 4: Contextual Legal Pedagogy , December 2022 , pp. 427 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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