Creative Activism for Kincentric Justice

This interdisciplinary course applies artistic and poetic inquiry to international law and earth jurisprudence with (at least) two intentions:

1) to decolonize carceral legal systems—to deconstruct systems of injustice constructed by colonialism, capitalism and the bureaucratic, legislative strategies and policies that uphold and perpetuate coloniality

2) to envision, imagine, speculate and weave webs of co-existence, co-becoming, and pluriverses of mutual thriving of people, land and sea; and to reformulate an ecocentric legal system that nourishes these worlds.

The course will inaugurate our collective inquiry with the question, how can the dominant, criminal justice system be utilized to undo the carceral state that made it? And what can move the human-centric legal system towards an ecocentric law? The following seven weeks will be shaped by your questions, which might be: how can I make beauty with our plant kin to heal the wounds of colonialism? What if we sang with whales and flowers and microbes? What new worlds could we bring into being? worlds of mutual respect and relationality? How can I dance with microbes and mycellium to nourish a culture of reciprocity and an ethics of consent? Questions are the medicine that lead us into deep reflection and creation. Crafting questions hones our skills of deep listening.

Following fish philosopher Zoe Todd’s call to center Indigenous laws and sovereignty, the course takes an unapologetically anticolonial approach to design and pedagogy/andragogy. The majority of resources will draw on Indigenous knowledge and culture-keepers, BIPOC elders and activists, and Rights of Nature advocates working in solidarity with Indigenous environmental activists.

This course emerges from a generative fission between artistic process and jurisprudence to co-create protocols that disinvest from coloniality/modernity and bridge partitions between humans from “the rest of nature.” Students will learn with and participate in ecosocial justice movements through poetics, interdisciplinary arts, social sculpture, legislative action and/or narrative arts.

We will create a learning community for creative organizers, educators, activists, communitarians and dreamers who want to rebuild a healing justice paradigm that challenges the carceral state and opens up “the possibility of a refoundation of international law beyond states,” as Rigo and Montella wrote. This “course” is for those who long to build with others in collective creativity to concoct forms of justice that affirm life, Indigenous kincentricity and reciprocity. It is for visionary makers, performers, writers, ready to embrace imaginative action to conspire towards a radically liberatory world.