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Teaching Material: Symposium on The Pedagogy of Political Economy in Australian Law Schools

by Ntina Tzouvala on April 28, 2022

Teaching Material: Symposium on The Pedagogy of Political Economy in Australian Law Schools

Ntina Tzouvala | April 28, 2022

Tags: pedagogy
pedagogy
| 0 491

Australia’s political and economic system is built on exploitation. From the violent foundational occupation of Indigenous lands, to the ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty over those lands; from the destructive extraction of natural resources, to the profound devaluation of the care work that sustains human life and non-human nature; from dependence on the cheap and precarious labour that sustains complex global value chains, to the inequality generated by credit-fuelled asset acquisition: across these and many other domains, the exploitative structures of Australia’s political economy are plain to see.

Significantly, those structures are at least partially maintained and legitimated through legal arrangements. The bases of those arrangements span the entire law school curriculum: property, contracts, torts, administrative law, constitutional law, corporations law, equity, criminal law, jurisprudence, labour law, international law, and much else. As legal academics, we believe that providing students with the tools to understand and critique the legal arrangements underpinning Australia’s political economy should be a central goal of legal education. Such an approach is also being demanded by a growing proportion of our students. Their concern reflects the fact that many young adults feel excluded from old expectations of prosperity and perpetual growth, and from a political economic system built upon them. At the same time, legal education leaves many students dissatisfied, as it frequently does not provide them with the tools and vocabularies they seek to articulate their frustrations and work toward their resolution.

The Australian legal academy has a long and vibrant, if turbulent, history of critical legal research and pedagogy. However, the relationship between these two dimensions of academic work is often strained. First, the wealth of critical legal work produced here does not always carry over into teaching, which often re-mains anchored in formalist, rule-centred understandings of law and subordinated to the (perceived) needs of vocational training. This reality often finds critically minded academics running conventional core law courses. Secondly, while critical legal work in Australia has produced indispensable insights into settler colonialism, racism, colonial modernity, and patriarchy, work focused on ideology, aesthetics, and culture has come to predominate, with less attention given to the material underpinnings of these phenomena. Critiques of the Australian legal system that centre questions of production, circulation and distribution, class inequality, material deprivation and interests, have less readily found a place in core law curricula.

We believe that teaching itself can be a valuable source of original thinking about the law, and that this generation of students is owed as rigorous a critical education as any other, if not more so. We also believe that valuable practices of heterodox teaching about the law and its role in the construction, reproduction and contestation of Australian settler capitalism are already in practice in law classrooms around the country.

Accordingly, we are organising a symposium to share such practices and to facilitate their development and proliferation. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore:

  • The history of critical legal education in Australia from a political economic perspective;
  • Indigenous legal orders and the political economy of settler law;
  • The impact of national and international political economy on Australian legal education (content and structure);
  • Contemporary examples of courses that adopt a progressive political economic lens;
  • Practical recommendations on how to incorporate progressive insights on political economy into the Priestley Eleven and other commonly compulsory courses (for example, legal theory or international law);
  • Comparative insights, especially with other settler colonies/common law jurisdictions/Pacific states.

Submissions

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted by the 30th of June 2022 to Ntina Tzouvala (ntina.tzouvala@anu.edu.au). Please write ‘Teaching Material’ in the subject line. Limited financial assistance may be available upon request, and priority will be given to casual academic workers.

The symposium will take place on 29 and 30 November 2022 hosted by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at Sydney Law School. We are currently envisaging that the event will take place exclusively in person. The symposium will be accompanied by a launch event for Australian Progressive Legal Studies, a network which aims to centre progressive political economic re-thinking of legal research and legal pedagogy in Australia.

Organisers

  • Coel Kirkby, University of Sydney
  • Dylan Lino, University of Queensland
  • Eddie Synot, Griffith University
  • Ntina Tzouvala, Australian National University

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Author: Ntina Tzouvala

Ntina Tzouvala is an Associate Professor at the ANU College of Law and, between September and December 2023, a KFG Senior Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. Her work focuses on the history, theory and political economy of international. She is author of Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She is currently working on two projects: one on dollar hegemony and the international legal order and one on the political economy of the laws of violence.

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  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Making Global Society
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • PPExchanges
  • Pedagogy
    • IPEEL Of The Environmental Crisis
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)