AP/SOSC 4370 6.00

State Of The Art In Law And Society

F/W 2021-2022

Mondays 2:30-5:30 pm online

Co-Instructed by Natilie Richer and Kimberley White

This course will unfold in two complementary parts. In the first term, students will engage with a range of scholarly and non-scholarly materials to explore the politics and power of ‘the visual’ as key to the formation and continued dominance of colonial institutions (law, government, art, and education) in Canada. We will begin to unpack the concept of visual colonial grammar as a way of seeing, representing, and reinforcing certain forms of colonial discourse, identity, and experience. Centering the museum and the gallery as key to Canada’s nation-building project, we will then consider the important ways in which contemporary Indigenous artists and art practices have worked to resist and reclaim settler-colonial representations of Canadian history and present-day colonial institutional structures. In the second term, students are invited to experiment directly with arts-based methodologies and processes of research-creation to contemplate the potential for the arts to unsettle traditional (colonial) educational spaces and generate new forms of socio-legal knowledge. No artistic knowledge, experience or skill is required for this course.