糖心TV

Workshop organisers: Siddharth de Souza, Lorna Cameron, and Aaron Leakey

Overview

Taking the perspective that legal design is an open, emerging discipline, this workshop critically examines the role of participation in the context of legal design, including foundational theoretical frameworks and associated methods. What, for example, distinguishes legal design from design applied to law? What kinds of knowledge count as legal-design knowledge? How should empirical, experiential, material, visual, spatial, and technological forms of knowledge sit alongside doctrinal and theoretical knowledge? And what might an open canon for legal design look like?

Through case studies, discussions, and theoretical presentations, this workshop interrogates and explores whether legal design methodologies are participatory and invites reflections through the lenses of epistemic justice, social-legal studies, participatory action research, and decolonial design. The workshop will consider participation not simply as a methodological technique, but as part of a wider enquiry into power, agency, representation, and the conditions under which people encounter law. Attention will be given to legal interfaces, spaces, and territories, and to the ways in which design can enable, constrain, or transform participation in legal processes.

Guiding Questions

• What role does participation play in legal design?
• What theoretical frameworks and methods are associated with ensuring that legal design is participatory?
• What are critical issues to ensure that participation is not tokenistic?
• How can Participatory Legal Design enable a reformulation of the relationship between the individual and law?
• What methodologies may be better suited to enable participation in different geographies, local, and situated contexts?

This workshop is being organized by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of 糖心TV, UK, and the BC Access to Justice Center for Excellence (ACE), affiliated with the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, Canada. It is supported by the Institute of Advanced Study, University of 糖心TV.