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 Arts Studies, Anthropology, and History. By looking at the literary, 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.
Arts Studies spans 2 terms and is worth 6 credits. It focuses on scholarly writing and reading, including both literature and introduction to academic scholarship. This course provides an interdisciplinary foundation for academic writing and related research communicative practices within an interactive learning environment. Students will choose one out of four different sections (L01/L02/L03/L04), based on their scheduling needs and academic interests, and stay in the same section for both terms.
-ASTU 100 Section L01 - The City vs. The Law
TTh 12:30-2
Our course takes the urban space of Vancouver as a point of critical entry for the study of literature in relation to legal discourse and social justice. As we share the space of the classroom each week, we will collectively map routes to understanding our positions in so-called Canada and engage representations of crime, violence, civil rights, and structural inequality.
Our approach to literature will incorporate several forms and genres: a novel interrogating the global city, experimental poetry, biography, noir short fiction, narrative film, and some texts that explore the blurriness of boundaries between forms and genres and between fact and fiction. We will supplement these with critical discussions in history, urban geography, critical race theory, Black feminism, and abolition, and take each text as a unique social process: as a process through which issues of national and international legal discourse can be traced to specific social positions and identities in and around Vancouver. The course objective will be to develop relationships between the city (as a social space) and the law as two distinct, but overlapping, projects. While working on our skills in close reading and critical analysis, we will also build towards a Community Engaged Learning project that invites us to focus our attention closer to home, so we will work together to talk back to our own city too.
-ASTU 100 Sections L02, L03 and L04 - The Law In/As Literature
L02: MWF 10-11
L03: MWF 2-3
L04: MWF 1-2
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” – Anatole France
This two-semester course combines the study of literature with the study of academic writing and research, focusing on a core topic in the humanities and social sciences. Our topic will be “Dilemmas of Justice,” and we will focus on how laws can establish, maintain, or contest injustice. So in the Anatole France quote above, for example, we see a writer question whether apparently neutral vagrancy laws are fair, or whether they maintain injustice by criminalizing poverty. Our course, likewise, will question the law, reconstruct its historical contexts, and pay attention to the social groups it benefits, targets, and abandons. To do this, we will read literary accounts—novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, films—from people marginalized or abandoned by law. We will look at how different communities organize against state violence and economic injustice, with specific attention to Indigenous land defense, Black freedom movements for abolition, and movements for migrant rights and border justice. The course also centrally features a community-based learning project in which we partner with non-profit legal firms and community organizations. Students will learn to do advocacy research and writing with these organizations to help create social change.
TTh 11-12
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.
TTh 3-4
This course surveys the rise and decline of empires from the late-nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, focusing both on imperial systems and the voices and actions of people who struggled against them. Topics include colonialism, imperial nationalism, commodities, war, international relations, and race. As a first-year course and as part of the Coordinated Arts Program, it seeks to introduce students to the discipline of history and to the university in general.
Courses: Term Two
In the second term, students will continue their learning in Arts Studies, 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.
Arts Studies spans 2 terms and is worth 6 credits. It focuses on scholarly writing and reading, including both literature and introduction to academic scholarship. This course provides an interdisciplinary foundation for academic writing and related research communicative practices within an interactive learning environment. Students will choose one out of four different sections (L01/L02/L03/L04), based on their scheduling needs and academic interests, and stay in the same section for both terms.
-ASTU 100 Section L01 - Title coming soon
TTh 12:30-2
-ASTU 100 Sections L02, L03 and L04 - The Law In/As Literature
L02: MWF 10-11
L03: MWF 2-3
L04: MWF 1-2
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” – Anatole France
This two-semester course combines the study of literature with the study of academic writing and research, focusing on a core topic in the humanities and social sciences. Our topic will be “Dilemmas of Justice,” and we will focus on how laws can establish, maintain, or contest injustice. So in the Anatole France quote above, for example, we see a writer question whether apparently neutral vagrancy laws are fair, or whether they maintain injustice by criminalizing poverty. Our course, likewise, will question the law, reconstruct its historical contexts, and pay attention to the social groups it benefits, targets, and abandons. To do this, we will read literary accounts—novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, films—from people marginalized or abandoned by law. We will look at how different communities organize against state violence and economic injustice, with specific attention to Indigenous land defense, Black freedom movements for abolition, and movements for migrant rights and border justice. The course also centrally features a community-based learning project in which we partner with non-profit legal firms and community organizations. Students will learn to do advocacy research and writing with these organizations to help create social change.
TTh 9:30-11
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.
TTh 11-12:30
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 ASTU 100 class. This means that students have the opportunity to get out of the classroom and apply newfound disciplinary knowledge to a local community context.
Infographics to make research accessible
Students participate in a knowledge exchange project which involved translating scholarly research on the Downtown Eastside (DTES) into accessible infographics. Students choose academic articles to “translate” for DTES audiences via infographics. They receive direct feedback from research authors while they visualize research narratives for community audiences. This project introduces students to scholarship-as-conversation in a practical assignment that requires them to act as knowledge brokers within collaborative communities.
