Arts-based methods of socio-legal studies
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.
Sean Mulcahy, La Trobe University; Hamsini Marada, O.P. Jindal Global University; and Maria Federica Moscati, University of Sussex.[1]
Keywords: art, photography, dance, theatre, performance, legal education.
‘Arts-based methods of socio-legal studies’ was an international collaboration aiming to explore how arts-based methods of socio-legal teaching, research, and practice can be applied across different legal systems and legal cultures in the Global North (namely, the United Kingdom and Australia) and the Global South (namely, India) and what this means for the discipline of socio-legal studies. The project has received generous support from SLSA under the International Collaboration Funding Scheme, and took the form of a scoping workshop hosted by Jindal Global Law School in Sonipat, India on 3-4 September 2026.
The workshop brought together researchers, students, and artists, led by three convenors from the three continents. The setting of India is notable because the integration of art and law is made visual though the calligraphic forms of its founding constitution, which has a dedicated museum at the University. There is also burgeoning scholarship and pedagogy on art/law across the country, including on painting, imagery and performance, and theatre. While the United Kingdom and Australia have established associations and networks in law and art or humanities, this field is now becoming more establish in India.
Arts-based approaches to socio-legal studies have the potential to radically shift modes of teaching, researching, and practising law:
arts-based methods of legal teaching can instil empathy, creativity, and critical thinking in students;
arts-based methods of legal dispute resolution can foster more collaborative, settlement-oriented mindsets in disputants, including through the use of music and dance; and
arts-based methods can also be deployed to further socio-legal research in ways that can generate new knowledge and widen perspectives of law, including in relation to design, participation, and imaginative thinking.
The workshop was divided into four, half-day sessions, with the opening three on different artforms: theatre and performance; dance and movement; and visual art and photography. Each session involved presentations, performances, and workshops exploring each artform.
Dr Sean Mulcahy (La Trobe University, Australia) led the session on theatre and performance. The session focused on legislative theatre – a form of interactive theatre developed by Brazilian theatre-maker and politician Augusto Boal. The legislative theatre process starts with citizens debating specific issues that impact their livelihood and wellbeing, which are then depicted in a theatrical performance. The citizens are then empowered to explore approaches and changes necessary by coming on stage and trying out ideas. Finally, the citizens are invited to brainstorm and propose specific legislative changes based on the play developed. These changes are assessed by an expert group aware of laws, legal terminology, and legal processes. Finally, the audience are invited to vote upon which proposals should be sent to the relevant legislative authorities. During Boal’s term on the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro, 13 out of 40 laws collected from these processes passed.
In the development of this form of theatre, Boal places an emphasis on games. Games, Boal writes, ‘deal with the expressivity of the body as an emitter and receiver of messages.’ So, the workshop played a series of games – taken from Andreea-Loredana Tudorache’s Using Theatre to Make Politics: Legislative Theatre Manual – that invited reflection on the spaces we occupy in the law and the lack of balance between different actors in these spaces; how rules are formed, applied, and legitimised in and through law; and the concept of power and the danger of its abuse. The session concluded with participants creating images – abstract or concrete – that portrayed the power roles within law and the relationships between these roles. This exercise invited participants to reflect on who has power in law and why, whether there is balance or dominance, and how citizens can get more power and be more present in the power structures in law.
Dr Maria Federica Moscati (University of Sussex, Europe) led the session on dance and law. The session addressed questions concerning the impact of dance in legal pedagogy and learning, and participants were involved in a mix of conversation, choreography, and dance. Marica started by sharing how she draws on dance in her law teaching. She then moved to talk about how she and Sean have started to work together on Dance/Law. This encouraged a lively conversation during which participants reflected on the differences and similarities between teaching law and teaching dance and how they would like dance to be used and taught in law classes. Participants pondered further on how embodied pedagogies can help to raise spatial awareness (physically, metaphorically, and within the law) and respect for the other, but also to convey legal topics like legal pluralism, access to justice, negotiation, and gender equality. As several of the participants had a background in dance, participants also compared different dance styles and their relationship to law.
After so many words, we felt the need to dance! And so, the second part of the dance and law session engaged participants in dance and choreography. The first dance exercise combined body-mapping with improvisation and self-led choreography. Marica asked the participants to draw/write/map their somatic response to some legal words, including justice, discrimination, and equality, and then create a dance movement with the part of the body they felt connected with those words. The group then created a dance phrase combining all movements and danced it while listening to Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’. While working on the dance movements and the dance phrase, constant links to law were made.
The second dance exercise focused on supporting each other in dance and in law. We started with movements to build trust in pairs. These included lifting, pushing, pulling, falling (I fall and you must catch me, but do I trust you?). Between exercises, the group reflected on the importance of listening, both physically and energetically, in our work with law and on how, in both dance and law, enhancing equality and justice is a shared responsibility; it’s about showing up and holding on. Thus, participants moved from pairs to the group and, in connecting the physical experience of dance with the legal and social duty to ensure fairness and equal access, the dancers had to collectively decide how to hold one person together, symbolically and physically.
Assistant Professor Hamsini Marada (O.P. Jindal Global University, India) led the session on visual arts and law. This workshop stemmed from Hamsini’s pedagogical inquiries on teaching law through art and the benefits and challenges of using painting and photography as methods in the law classroom. She noted that while visuals will not replace the traditional legal text in learning the law, they help in understanding the law more holistically, owing to their aesthetic and emotive qualities. She further discussed how reading photographs in a law classroom breaks the otherwise “monochromatic” representation of law in text.
Her framework was threefold: understanding the image from the perspective of (a) the viewer; (b) the artist or the photographer; and (c) the subject of the painting or photograph. With this backdrop, Hamsini started the workshop by discussing the work of famous Magnum photographer, Raghu Rai, to acquaint the audience with the art of reading a photograph by borrowing Roland Barthes’ concepts of studium and punctum. These are two ways in which the viewer responds to a photograph – studium is a shared and common knowledge, that contextualises a photograph, and punctum is a sharp detail that pierces the viewer to create a lasting impact and intensity. Hamsini applied this to further delve into legal and ethical interpretations that ensue out of photographs such as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square, Robert Doisneu’s Kiss by the Hotel De Ville, and Sebastian D’ Souza’s photo of Ashok Mochi from 2002 Gujarat riots. This led to a very a passionate discussion among faculty members and students about how images can prompt one to think about legal and ethical implications of the subject in the photograph beyond the bare text, how the interpretation of a photographer and the viewer can have ethical consequences, and how these broader issues must be taken into consideration while introducing images in a classroom.
These sessions were followed by a roundtable discussion that explored how arts-based methods have been deployed in teaching, research, and practice across different institutions and international contexts, including the challenges and benefits (including mental health benefits) of integrating arts-based methods in these contexts.
Collaboration with artists was key to the ethos of the workshop. Thus, we invited Bangalore-based queer and disabled artist Sonaksha to produce a graphic recording of discussions and presentations in a visual map combining words and images. In addition, students in a course taught by Asst Prof Marada – ‘Law, Art, and the Camera’ – who developed creative outputs as part of their assessments, had their work showcased in a creative exhibition along the walls of the workshop venue. This put into practice the aims of the workshop by showcasing arts-based methods of legal studies in the form of students’ art developed through their legal studies.
[1] The authors wish to thank SLSA for their support.
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