AP/SOSC 3395 3.00

Legal Geographies

This course introduces students to the field of legal geography, which focuses on spatial and place-based aspects of law and legal regulation. By drawing from the critical perspectives of legal studies, disability studies, feminist and critical race studies, this interdisciplinary course offers an overview of contemporary debates in the field of legal geography. Students learn to think and write critically about how law shapes the spatial and social and how the spatial and social shape the legal.

The course examines how the law creates places, establishes boundaries, and decides who belongs in these places and who may cross these boundaries. Topics covered in this context include: the production of public and private spaces; housing, redevelopment, and property; race, space and the law; the spatial in colonial and imperial projects; gender, property and the law; everyday law on the streets; policing and surveillance of space; place and embodiment; place and national identity; spaces of violence; neoliberalism and urban spaces; transnational identities and space; the environment and slow-death; museums, parks and buildings; and spaces of exception. Throughout the course, we draw from a range of materials including case law, archival documents, media, film, fiction, and Canadian and international legal geography literature.