The alternative is engaging with stories and critique to reconceptualize our relation to biopolitics. Stories allow reflexivity which is key to transformative education models where students can critique the world around them and create alternative modes of thinking about law. A permutation is impossible, it separates our “rational” and “moral” selves and serves to kill biopolitical awareness.

Sharp 23 Cassandra Sharp is a Professor of Law. Her research is based in cultural legal studies, and focuses on interdisciplinary explorations of law as it is constructed in the public imagination through popular texts. Cassandra has interdisciplinary qualitative expertise in the field of law, popular culture and public perception, with a particular interest in the interaction between individuals, communities, and governments. Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education, Chapter 13, Law as Relation and the Co-emergence of Beings: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Legal Education. 6-29-2023 https://www.dubraybooks.ie/product/biopolitics-and-resistance-in-legal-education-9780367775247 sb<3

To be educated is to invite the continuous ‘self-learning that involves the mind, spirit and body of the whole person’.19 Education is inexorably ‘interwoven with living and with the possibility of retelling our life stories’,20 and contributes to the construction of self-narratives with which we identify.21 This operative concept of self-identity is understood as a reflexive and discursive construction of self22 that concerns a culturally contingent production that is specific to particular times and places.23 One’s identity is a continual rehearsal of narration and practice of re-narration.24 The enduring narration of self is ‘always held in context, shaped by contextual factors’ that frame and mediate it.25 It is within the ongoing transformative stage of studying law that students can experience this surge of understanding about their self-identity. Following Anthony Giddens,26 a connection between identity construction and transformation can be explored within the context of the ‘identity project’.27 An identity project builds on what we think we are now in the light of our past and present circumstances together with what we think we would like to be, to form a trajectory of our hoped-for-future.28 By reflecting on what it is they value, and ‘about how matters of value are shared and disputed in the world we inhabit with others’,29 students will be pushed to evaluate, defend, and sometimes reconstruct their self-identity in relation to the way they view the world of law. The identity project is therefore inextricably linked with the transforming work of law school, which should be seen not simply as a place where a legal curriculum is offered, but as a very powerful social environment in which transformation takes place. As Pommersheim argued many years ago, law schools should be places where ‘students not only learn but also change. Change not only their ways of thinking but also their understanding of their values, their sense of what is meaningful, and the social obstacles that limit what is possible’.30

Importantly, it is through stories that self-identity builds up a consistent feeling of biographical continuity.31 This makes sense because life is lived through stories—they are enormously commonplace, yet at the same time they can be unique. They can entertain and inform, they can involve and motivate us, and they can challenge us to reflect on the lives we lead. Yet, what is the place for stories within legal education? Can a story truly be used to affect change in the affective realm, on the way students feel; in the behavioural realm, the way students act or behave; and in the cognitive realm, on the way students think? Can story have an effect on a student’s identity development and help them to be biopolitically aware and engaged? In my experience of teaching students over the last two decades, the answer to each of these questions is categorically affirmative.

In recognising that stories are the medium through which persuasion is enacted, and through which critique of societal practices and processes occur, my research has consistently sought to demonstrate that individuals use stories to frame and contextualise normative expectations of the legal system, and in so doing, they concomitantly participate in a transformation of meaning about law.32 Examined through a legal lens, stories enable us to reflect on, question, and shape foundational legal assumptions upon which our legal system has been legitimised and authorised.33 Stories therefore have enormous potential to shape experience,34 and provoke, animate, and unmask biopolitics at work. In legal education, when students are invited to discuss stories, whether contemporary or historical, popular or disfavoured, they are prompted to imaginatively assess and reflect upon not only the various dimensions of life, but also upon the greater ethical, emotional, spiritual, and practical impacts of the world in which they live. As I have previously argued, students not only utilise the transformative power of stories to construct identity and grapple with ethics,35 but also, by discussing their views on the stories of law that are portrayed in popular culture and media, law students share and challenge each other’s interpretations of law.36 It is my contention that this process should be harnessed for the purposes of shaping biopolitical awareness. That is, to deploy stories in legal education towards biopolitical engagement is to value and yearn for diverse conversations about cultural, social, and political perspectives that are brought to bear on the law; and importantly to disrupt and strip bare dominant assumptions that regulate our collective existence.

This is the power of stories for shaping biopolitical awareness and engagement in the study of law. Of course, the use of stories in legal education is not new. The increasing prevalence of using stories to supplement traditional case teaching and analysis since the late 1980s to early 1990s,37 is a result of a burgeoning recognition that storytelling is a form of active learning where the student listens to the story, absorbs the story at an emotional level, participates in the telling of the story, and then takes ‘responsibility for his or her own learning by connecting it to what is familiar’.38 Yet, it is by no means common place to adopt a story-based curriculum framework; nor is it prototypical that stories be deployed to develop biopolitical awareness or critical self-identity. This should be a cause for regret because there is much to be gained from incorporating storytelling and conversation into a curriculum. When students share their stories with one another and seek to jointly make sense of what is being learned and experienced, they are quite literally, ‘talking’ their selfidentity into existence. It is in the referential circulation, transformation, and (re)production of stories the students tell one another that opens up a relational space to comfortably question and challenge ideas of oppression, injustice, and dehumanisation perpetuated through the law.

Given that stories connect us with the world beyond ourselves, and help us to work through big problems of human existence, when prompted to articulate our position, we are forced to think through not only our own ethical, spiritual, and biopolitical position on key societal issues, but also on how our bodies are positioned, disciplined, and controlled in this world. Such reflection has the resultant effect of character transformation, and refinement of selfidentity. When we better understand who we have been through the past and in the present, we increase our capacity for imagining, explaining, and assessing who we are becoming in relation to this lived reality; and understanding the subjective experience of others. The deliberate use of stories and storytelling towards a biopolitically aware legal education is so that students can be empowered to share this burgeoning (and ongoing) narrative of self with others, and in turn, to listen, engage, and reflect on the stories of others. As they read, interpret, and pursue the narratives around them, students begin a story production of their own, thus enabling them to begin addressing (and critiquing) biopolitical questions of character, human nature, and power relations.

Conversation as Pedagogy

As the previous sections have demonstrated, stories are fundamental to the way we learn, to the way we communicate,39 and to the way we construct identity. As individuals tell stories of their experiences, they actively engage in a sense-making activity; as they narrate, they give meaning to their experiences and make sense of what is happening in their lives. It is therefore of central importance to facilitate for students the space in which to have meaningful dialogue and conversation. It is argued that in order for students to construct and understand their personal identity, it is incumbent on legal education to facilitate story-telling and story-listening. Through conversation, much can be explored by students about the conditions that affect life.

Interestingly, Rorty views a ‘conversation’ as a metaphor for culture. To him, an individual’s ethical justifications are made within conversation and are bounded by community warrants. The words, opinions, and ideas we use in conversation to tell the ‘story of our lives’ is what Rorty terms our ‘final vocabulary’.40 In this sense, the interconnectedness of story and identity cannot be ignored.41 As students learn how to use their ever-developing skills of critical reflection and analysis to interpret law’s activity, they will also actively and consciously contribute to their reflexive project of the self.42 In valuing the dialogue of students, legal education has the potential to empower student awareness of their own final vocabulary and to help them grow by developing and expanding it.

A story approach to engaging biopolitical awareness within student identity formation facilitates student reconceptualisation of their ‘relationships among themselves, the profession, the law, its users, and the broader social and moral order’.43 This provides a counter-balance to the danger that law students will learn to separate their professional and personal lives to the point of ‘unreflective complacence and compliance’.44 Such a permutation of student development must be avoided if the facilitation of biopolitical awareness and engagement is to be achieved. Elsewhere I have discussed my own deployment of stories in dedicated subject curricula at my institution.45 Rather than simply treating popular fiction as legal and cultural texts to evaluate critical legal issues, practices, and institutions, I have developed two distinct subjects that use popular stories as an avenue for contextual learning and student exploration of ethics and identity.46 My experience in teaching these subjects is that by allowing the communal generation and reproduction of meaning about life, love, and the community through conversation, students are enabled to actively engage in a transformation of stories. As they participate in classroom discussions, conduct informal conversations with friends, and engage in writing tasks, students are caused to re-evaluate and shape their lives and responsively adjust their ideals and paradigms. In this last section of the chapter, I wish to reflect on two particular interventions in my classroom pedagogy that rely on conversation to help shape biopolitical engagement: (i) student led ‘roundtable’ conversations using popular stories; and (ii) igniting reflexivity.

Conversation by Roundtable Encouraging students to discuss and evaluate their perceptions and responses to stories engages them ‘in the spoken, everyday world of connective, communal, constitutive talk’.47 It enables students to explore the ways in which various values might be shared and disputed within their cultural community ‘when we act by speaking, the dimension of our character “shows through”’48 and we can explore the ways in which various values might be shared and disputed within our cultural communities. The pedagogical frameworks in my teaching are squarely based on providing opportunities for mutual discussion and growth along these lines. The aim is to regularly expose students to stories of law from a variety of non-traditional contexts49 and to ask them to use ‘conversation’ to tell the ‘story of their lives’ in response to the stimulus material. The selection of stories for each class is based on the potential of each to challenge and explore the constructed nature of both law and culture, to highlight diverse cultural and political perspectives, and to provoke student reflection on their own perspectives. Practically, this meant for example, developing curricula and class programmes that would provoke discussion about not only the dramatic ingredients in a particular text, but also a reflection about how these ingredients contribute to student responses and interpretation of legal stories. This ‘pragmatic awareness’ by students’ cognitive, affective, and social selves50 encapsulates another key objective for my teaching, and it became the stimulus for the roundtable experience.

Students are encouraged in each class to first critique a narrative strategy they can identify in the assigned text. The class begins with a plenary discussion critical of the chosen text/story/topic itself, where students are then prompted to reflect on how these strategies might have contributed to the stories occupying their imagination and/or transforming their understanding of law and its practice. By using popular topics and stories as stimulus, the emphasis is placed not on the students’ responses to the stories per se, but instead on how those responses are constructed and then challenged by each other. The lesson then moves to student-led roundtables where students in small groups of 3–4 take turns in presenting prepared responses to stimulus questions within the theme of the week. Students are encouraged to humbly and compassionately engage in dialogue which would provoke their classmate to make sense of their emotional and intellectual experience of a text, ‘to draw conclusions about the value of that experience, and then to communicate that value to others’.51 As such, these focused roundtables are designed to direct the critical gaze to the ways in which these texts inform and transform ideas, values, and attitudes towards the norms that govern our collective existence. The concept of roundtables in the small seminar mode is modelled on key aspects of focus group methodology, which recognises that perspectives are not static, but are instead discursively generated in the moment and as part of an ongoing process.52 This means that built into the curriculum is the expectation that students will share their own responses to the prescribed stories, share speculations of the ways meanings are transformed in relation to those stories, and discuss the implications of those constructed meanings. By having an opportunity to express their responses to various legal issues as presented in stories, the benefits for students are twofold. First, students learn to take responsibility for their own thought processes, so that as they articulate their response or argument, they are taking a stand for their developing identity (even perhaps in the face of disagreement or conflict). Second, in being encouraged to hear and consider before responding, they are learning to actively listen to their peers and humbly provoke each other to challenge assumptions and provide justifications for their stance on a given issue.

As a dynamic point of access to student identity development, the idea of roundtables produces an environment that is mutually stimulative and encourages the expression of views in a spontaneous and reactive manner. Although each student will have a varied interpretation of the meaning they create about a particular story,53 Hall’s theory of culture would recognise that a group of law students within the institutional context of law school, would at least be able to express their ideas in ways that would be understood by each other.54 For this reason, class roundtables provide an opportunity to communally confront and critique these shared meanings and to expose the interpretive framework within which the students transform their individual expectations of life within the law. In my experience delivering these subjects, the benefit of conducting classes in this dynamic way enables exploration of the motivations and values behind student perspectives and expectations, and this is crucial for encouraging biopolitical awareness and engagement. As educators, we must allow space for students to question and reflect on the kinds of subjects that are constituted by discourses in law, including those of legal education. We should yearn for the re-assessing of dominant narratives through attention to ‘relationships and lives in the making, understandings of telling … if we want a different future’.55 This is a critical pedagogical framework that trades in honesty, transparency, and authenticity about the learning process that both teacher and student must participate in. That is why igniting the capacity for reflexivity is key.

Reflexivity

As the students articulate their storied responses to popular narratives, they participate in learning through reflection: ‘to narrate a story is already to reflect upon the event narrated’.56 Indeed, as referenced earlier, self-identity is constituted not by the possession of traits but rather as a reflexively sustained narrative of the self.57 But what does it mean to be reflexive? Giddens argues that reflexivity involves a continual monitoring of an individual’s activities and purposefully enabling oneself to constantly revise social activity in the light of new knowledge.58 This means that reflexive law students would reflect on their own experiences, as well as those of around them, and actively construct identity in light of those reflections.

Given that education itself is a ‘manifestation of power relations, co-extensive with the production of subjectivities’,59 law students will be active in the process of taking up subjective positions that help to constitute their subconscious and unconscious dimensions of the self. Indeed, the ‘degree to which individuals can “choose” forms of identity is circumscribed by social power relations’,60 and students will be using sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting discourses as contributors to their identity projects. On this basis, it is reasonable to expect that there may be contradictions in what the students say as they articulate the construction of identity while it is occurring, because ‘identities shift according to how subjects are addressed or represented’.61 This shifting, dislocation, and merging of identities is an exciting and integral part of the transformative process of law school and is a process that lays the foundation for developing biopolitical awareness. In turn, this requires significant training in reflexivity.

Encouraging reflexivity involves commitment from both the teacher and student to work together to produce alternative ways of thinking (and being) in a life lived with the law.62 It involves commitment, willingness, and courage to confront oppressions inherent within the law; to expose the heavy-laden political nature of terms and concepts that often embody political positions but have been obscured by the context; and to fundamentally question political subjectification processes and activities. A classroom that seeks to expose the inequitable access, practices, and technologies that control and dominate our existence is one that pursues biopolitical awareness.

Emphasising reflexivity in the classroom means requiring students to produce evidence of that reflection. As I have described in this chapter, by assigning tasks that require students to question their assumptions, understandings, and ethical awareness, students are drawn one step closer to being aware of their personal identity construction, and to becoming biopolitically engaged. Apart from the benefit of encouraging students to engage actively in selfreflection which enhances understandings, challenges perceptions, and maps emotions; reflexivity that is provoked through the pedagogical strategies outlined above, validates the notion of reflection and critical awareness within the context of formal legal education. Doing so facilitates student modulation and synthesis of the wide range of influences and resources that are informing their understanding of the law and legal culture.

Law school can (and should) explicitly nurture biopolitical engagement within student construction of identity. When students actively recognise and engage in the re(construction) of stories within their own realities, they are catalysed to stimulate critical reflexivity and subjective attentiveness. Pedagogical innovation can and should be developed to allow students to examine the practices that constitute subjectivities, and in so doing, develop their own biopolitically aware sensibilities.