Feminist Legal Studies Workshop I
(Winter term, 2013), 1 credit
Course description:
The Feminist Legal Studies Workshop is designed to enable students to work closely with faculty in analyzing and discussing with leading feminist theorists and scholars visiting Queen’s Faculty the topics of the speakers’ papers.
The Feminist Legal Studies Workshop course is offered for one course credit per term. In the fall term of 2012, it is designated as Law 692; in the winter term of 2013 it is designated as Law 693. Students may enroll for one credit in the fall term, or for one credit in the winter term, or for a total of two credits in both terms combined. This course can also be combined with an ISP for students who may wish to carry out in-depth independent supervised work in relation to one or more of the areas discussed in this workshop.
Scheduling details:
The workshop speakers will be scheduled for the regular visitor slots on Mondays and Fridays, which run from 1 to 2:30 pm, and one or two additional meetings per term will be scheduled around everyone’s class and other commitments. Speaker dates and locations are listed below.
Nature, mode, and content of evaluation of student participation:
Students will attend all the speakers events (4/term or all 7-8), will prepare advance reading for the first session of each term and two advance questions for the rest of the speakers in that term, plus 1-2 pages of briefing notes after each session (60% of course credit), will participate in the discussion at the speakers visit (10% of course credit), and will prepare a short term paper of approximately 10-15 pages on a topic that relates to any one of the speakers events (30% of course credit). To be taught by Profs. Amani and Lahey.
Winter term speakers (2013):
Monday January 21, 2013
1-2:30 pm, Macdonald Hall Room 201
Dayna Scott
Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
Winaaptae (It is Blowing Dirty): A Corporeal Feminism for Environmental Justice
Abstract. This presentation explores the significance of an emerging type of experiential knowledge based on the sense of smell. Environmental justice activists organizing the resistance of residents in pollution hotspots around the world now employ a citizen science tactic known as the “bucket brigades” to collect data by taking advantage of residents’ spatially-ordered and place-based knowledge of the “smellscape”. On the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, downwind of Canada’s Chemical Valley, a phrase in Ojibwe — winaaptae -- is employed to mean “it is blowing dirty”. The bucket brigade strategy depends on a series of actions triggered by this initial olfactory observation grounded in residents’ finely honed experiential knowledge of the place. Some of those actions in fact mobilize a new set of tools, primarily oriented to the observation, measurement, and sampling of pollution according to norms developed outside the community, under a foreign system of expertise and according to western scientific standards. But as the author will discuss, the knowledge that is critical to the strategy’s success is not only experiential knowledge, but is actually collectively held, which means that the validation of that knowledge and the challenge it presents to positive notions of science and evidence is a potent one that can be bolstered with recourse to a corporeal feminism.
Dayna Nadine Scott is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. Her research is in the areas of environmental law and policy, risk regulation, and the distribution of harms from industrial pollution. Her empirical research project in partnership with the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, downwind of Canada's Chemical Valley, has generated insights for environmental justice scholarship, feminist theory of the body, and feminist torts. Since 2008, she has been the Director of the National Network on Environments and Women's Health, which, until Budget 2012, was a federally-funded Center of Excellence in women's health research.
She is the editor of 'Consuming' Chemicals: Law, Science and Policy for Women's Health (forthcoming from UBC Press) and the author of "Gender-Benders: Sex and Law in the Constitution of Polluted Bodies," which was published in Feminist Legal Studies in 2009.
Friday March 1, 2013
9am, Macdonald Hall Room 201
Belinda Bennett
Professor of Law and Medicine, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney
Women and Health Law: Issues and Challenges
Friday March 1, 2013
5pm, Macdonald Hall Room TBA
Isabel Karpin
Professor and Chair Technology University, Sydney, Australia
Public Health and Bodily Conceptions