This stream analyzes how society and law shape each other, using lenses from historical, literary, political, and anthropological research.
Students will also have the opportunity to work with a community organization in the legal non-profit sector. For those interested in law, community work, and social justice, this stream is a good fit.
The law and society stream put legal principles into various contexts that were immensely absorbing. CAP has also given me a much clearer understanding of where my interests lie. Before entering the program, I thought I wanted to major in political science; upon leaving the program, I’ve decided to major in anthropology, which is a field I knew nothing about before coming to UBC.
Courses: Term One
In the first term, students will enrol in CAP 100 (fulfills the academic writing requirement), Anthropology, and History. In CAP 100, you will be introduced to the research practices and features of academic writing at the university level. By looking at the political and anthropological background surrounding our society-at-large, you will examine the current relationship between law and society as well as learn about how it came to be.
CAP_V 100-L01 (MWF 11-12), and CAP_V 100-L02 (MWF 10-11) - Instructor: Dr. Adrian Lou
Persuasive Species
CAP 100 is an introductory writing course for students in the social sciences and humanities. The course equips students with the foundational skills to conduct scholarly research and to produce academic writing at the university level.
Throughout the term, we will be thinking about the ways in which language influences and shapes our thoughts, attitudes and behaviors within the context of law and society. Specifically, we will be investigating how persuasive tactics and strategies, such as metaphors and rhetorical framing, are employed by both individuals, state actors, and institutions in an attempt to change how people speak about, understand, and conceptualize laws, justice, and morality. The course will culminate in a research project where students will apply the concepts of rhetorical criticism to analyze the techniques of legal, social and economic persuasion.
CAP_V 100-L04 (MWF 1-2) - Instructor: Dr. Kasim Husain
In this section of CAP 100, we will engage with the growing body of scholarship that responds to the widespread movement of our mechanisms of economic exchange online, and seeks to evaluate what it means for how we think about how we organize and govern social life that we use digital interfaces to interact and transact with one another and the wider world. We will explore scholarly debates about how states and companies make use of the data we often freely provide when we update an app, create a profile to make a purchase, check our daily step counter, post to social media, and so on.
On the one hand, expanding access to the means of economic and information exchange online can have a democratizing effect, levelling the playing field for communities and individuals who have historically lacked access. On the other hand, in an era where the influencer has perhaps superseded the entrepreneur as a cultural ideal, we will read scholarship that prompts us to ask how to responsibly govern and fairly adjudicate the economic and legal implications of digital economies. In other words, if data really is the new oil, are we all equally well-placed to take advantage, and what are the implications for our individual wellbeing and civil society if we take this extractive metaphor for data seriously? In assignments, discussions, and lectures, we will ask these questions and more about living in and through systems where the stakes of maintaining our own digital footprints seem increasingly consequential to human lives and systems, aiming to conduct original and informed research that contributes to scholarly debates on the digital economy.
ANTH_V 100-A_002 (TTh 11-12) - Instructor: Dr. Amirpouyan Shiva
Cultural anthropologists are famous for their interest in a very broad range of subjects. This course will help students think like an anthropologist and discover strangeness in our familiar categories and familiarity in strange practices. To appreciate the genre of writing that defines anthropology as a discipline, throughout the term, students will be reading ethnographic accounts from around the globe to learn about anthropology’s central concepts, theories, and methods.
HIST_V 104-A_227 (TTh 3-4) - Instructor: Dr. Bradley Miller
This course examines the development of international law in the last 250 years, and how it has structured global affairs. It looks at pivotal developments and the ways in which international law has come to be a defining force in world history. It also examines the resistance to international law and the ways in which international law has been minimized and in some cases defeated as a project of global order. Topics include the role of international law in imperialism; the development and then the abolition of slavery; the creation of international institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court; the emergence of international humanitarian law, the role of law in war, and the emergence of crimes such as genocide.
Courses: Term Two
In the second term, students will transition from CAP 100 to CAP 101, and be introduced to the studies of Political Science and Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. Students will acquire a new perspective of our laws and society by studying it through the lens of anthropological and feminist frameworks.
CAP_V 101-L01 (MWF 11-12), CAP_V 101-L02 (MWF 10-11) - Instructor: Dr. Evan Mauro
Building on CAP 100’s research-based approach to law and justice, this section will deepen students’ understanding of issues raised by different social movements’ critiques of the law. We will do this in two ways: (1) we will read and learn to write about literary accounts – novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, and short films – written from the perspective of people targeted or abandoned by the law. Our close reading of these literary texts will lead to new, expanded avenues for student writing and research that we started in term one. (2) We will also work on community-based learning project in which we partner with community-engaged researchers in Vancouver to do a form of knowledge translation, publicizing research about social justice issues in local communities. Students will learn to do advocacy research and writing to help create social change.
CAP_V 101-L04 (MWF 1-2) - Instructor: Dr. Adrian Lou
Course description TBD.
POLI_V 101-099 (TTh 9:30-11) - Instructor: Dr. Kenny Ie
The course examines the basic ideas on which the Canadian political system is founded, the institutions that structure politics, and the actors who work within these institutions. We will emphasize the constitutional framework of the Canadian government and the role of the judiciary and the Charter of Rights in shaping the country. We will also engage issues at the forefront of politics in Canada, such as Indigenous rights and gender politics. Students should be equipped to better understand the Canadian political system and engage in our democracy as active citizens and participants.
GRSJ_V 101-227 (TTh 12:30-2) - Instructor: TBD
This course introduces students to social justice approaches from theoretical frames and academic discourses to the media and everyday life. We will consider: how might we open up conversations and dialogues about power including anti-racist and anti-colonial approaches, especially through social movements? What are some of the ways in which we can respectfully engage with marginalized communities and what this means in terms of allyship? As the recent global pandemic has exemplified, which we are all experiencing in different ways, the inequalities and inequities between countries, communities and individuals. We aim to learn more about social justice, social movements, and importantly resistance to broader systems of power from our own investments, stakes and positionalities. This course thinks with art, the media and interdisciplinary scholarship to open up perspectives and worldviews about social justice. Students will become familiar with key terms and concepts, such as power, privilege, oppression and intersectionality to explore marginalization, respectful engagement, hashtag activism, memes and more.
Sample Projects
CBEL Project: From Classroom to Courtroom
As part of the first year experience in the Law & Society stream, students participate in community-based experiential learning (CBEL) in the CAP 101 class. This means that students have the opportunity to get out of the classroom and apply newfound disciplinary knowledge to a local community context, hearing from community speakers and visiting sites in the community.
Infographics to make research accessible
Students participate in a knowledge exchange project, translating scholarly research on the Downtown Eastside (DTES) into accessible infographics. Receiving direct feedback from research authors, students visualize and summarize published research articles for community audiences. This project builds student skills in research writing, introduces students to community-based research and knowledge exchange, and asks students to consider the role research can play in community organizing and in making social change. More on this project here.
