'All the World’s a Stage, And the Men and Women merely Players' Community Legal Outreach CLOCK; A Transformative Methodology
Transformative, creative pedagogies are urgently needed in legal education. Far from the cutting-edge of pedagogical practice, legal education is heavily shaped by conservative notions of ‘professionalism’. This, in turn, has often constrained the pedagogical imagination of staff who teach in the field. Where cutting-edge practices are present, they are rarely captured in literature on legal education. Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are pushing for changes in legal education that could enable students to learn differently, creating forms of ‘professionalism’ that demonstrate a deep commitment to social justice and inclusivity. In this blog series, Who said that learning law is boring? Bringing Creative Teaching Methods into Legal Education, we explore how arts-based, affective and embodied teaching methods can deepen students’ learning of law and enrich socio-legal teaching. These blogs start from the premise that everyone is creative, and that taking creative approaches to legal education can build critical analytical, vocational, and civic skills. Read more about the blog series and our motivations here.
Jane Krishnadas, Keele University
'All the World’s a Stage, And the Men and Women merely Players' (As you Like It, William Shakespeare, Act II Sc VII)
Audre Lorde’s groundbreaking assertion “The Masters Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” has sparked my search for transformative methods founded in feminist legal strategies.
During the post-earthquake rehabilitation process in Maharashtra India, I traced the ‘tools’, the ‘methods’ by which people understood their lives through the intersection of their rights in a range of familial, cultural, charitable and formal settings.
Street Law was one such method, through which the local students and children from the villages spontaneously created short dramas to share the struggles they faced in the reconstruction process. This echoed the Indian Peoples Theatre Association’s landmark production of ‘Nabanna’ in 1944, which depicted the plight of the Bengali famine victims at the hands of British settler colonialism.
Like the production of Nabanna, this contemporary street theatre created powerful portrayals of the struggles of the earthquake victims within the divide and rule policies of the neo-liberal World Bank and international organisations. In the midst of the everyday neo-liberal imperialism of post-disaster reconstruction processes, identities were eroded, capacities devalued and locations erased- a process that we are also witnessing in the Middle East from Iraq, to Syria and Palestine.
From living in tents to tin shelters before finally moving into their homes, I spent time with affected communities, engaging in a participatory research processes that blended research and legal education.
Through this work, we explored the role that rights could play in reconstruction to help people rebuild identities, capacity and positionality. The range of arts methods we engaged with were broad, including dance, street plays, handicraft skills, which were accompanied by legal literacy classes, and the hosting of make-shift legal courts within the villages. Alongside this, residents also engaged in road blockades, hunger strikes and the most remarkable ‘theatre’ of the public interest litigation case S.Krishnadas v Government of Maharahstra, (1995) where the local villagers arrived in their traditional farm attire to directly cross-examine the suited Chief Minister of Maharasthra – who held briefcases of papers bursting open - in shock because he was, for once being held accountable to the people.
Based in a tin shed, we worked with local students who took the lead to create inter-faith, inter-gendered, inter-caste, inter-generational spaces; to create ‘Nadaks’ (street plays) to raise awareness of their rights to food, medical supplies, housing, sanitation, education and income-generation activities.
Raising legal consciousness through street plays broke the liberal constructs of the law. It enabled legal subjects to become ‘actors’ in their own reconstruction process, and they were able to break out of the constraints and hierarchies of the traditional court structures by enacting the violations of rights and injustices they faced in the open-air settings. The audiences of the local villagers could also join in with the street play, shifting the hierarchical relations of the legal subjects to become participants and actors in the process.
These street plays provided an accessible and entertaining space to expose the experiences of rights bearers when they confronted dominant systems of power. Within each play, characters developed with different identities forged around caste, gender and sexuality, widowhood. They tackled the impact of harms such as domestic and sexual abuse, drug and alcohol dependencies exposing and confronting the systemic harms including neocolonial capitalist markets, religion, and the patriarchy.
Rooted in these experiences, we ran an India-UK exchange to develop a transformative methodology, which I applied to design the curriculum-based Law in Action module which underpins the co-creation of the now judicially endorsed CLOCK Community Legal Companion Role.
We arranged outreach visits to community-based charities, working on everyday crises of domestic abuse, homelessness, welfare and immigration. The students then translated the issues raised to develop ‘street plays’ to perform in local High Schools, raising awareness of every day lived experiences of injustice. Through participatory methods such as ‘Hot Seating’, University students and High School pupils would enter into dialogue about the asylum process, sexting, the manosphere, racism by centring lived experience through walking in peoples’ shoes.
During the Law in Action module the students’ also listened to the self-help group “Voices of Experience”, which shares stories of how victim/survivors travel across an ‘Island of Abuse’ to dive into the ‘Shark Infested Waters of the Legal System’, in which fellow survivors became ‘Mermaids’ to guide them through.
While they were not necessarily ‘survivors’ themselves, our students became mermaids through their street plays and have now embodied this imagery through their active role as Community Legal Companions embedded and transformative in the Court System in Stoke on Trent, and beyond, over the last 15 years.
Reflecting on their work, I return to Audre Lorde’s assertion and my initial question: can feminist legal strategies be transformative? The answer that emerges from the arts-based methods of the anti-colonial India Street Theatre movement through to the enactment of the CLOCK Community Legal Companion Role in 8 Court Centres in England and Wales today, is yes.
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