Biopolitics Supplement - Michigan 2024 CGO

AFF – FW
Legal Education Good
A creative and human-focused method for legal pedagogy solves – allows us to focus on the material effects of policy and law while also learning how to be empathetic through engaging in legal practice.
Hews et al. 23 [Dr. Rachel Hews is a Senior Lecturer in the Law School at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Her research focus is on human-centered lawyering and legal design. Dr Gnanaharsha Beligatamulla completed his PhD at QUT. His PhD research focused on design thinking pedagogy, and he is currently engaged in a research project with the QUT Law School to explore design thinking in legal education. Professor Judith McNamara is a Professor in Law and the Dean of Law at the University of Adelaide. She is a former practicing lawyer and was previously the Head of School in the School of Law at the Queensland University of Technology. “Creative confidence and thinking skills for lawyers: Making sense of design thinking pedagogy in legal education.” ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871187123001219] //ahuero
Our participants sensed design thinking pedagogy as enabling alternative mindsets and developing empathic, creative, and innovative thinking skills. In this way, design thinking pedagogy can potentially address gaps in traditional legal education by supporting students to move beyond the constraints of rational thinking and legal reasoning and to avoid more litigious and adversarial approaches (Haapio et al., 2021). Design thinking also offers a valuable methodology for interdisciplinary creative work, by enabling multi-professional teams to establish common ground and perspectives (Lindberg et al., 2010, p. 35).
Legal education has largely operated outside of the affective domain, a ‘catch-all phrase’ for aspects of behaviour including: Self-concept, motivation, interests, attitudes, beliefs, values, self-esteem, morality, ego development, feelings, need achievement, locus of control, curiosity, creativity, independence, mental health, personal growth, group dynamics, mental imagery, and personality. (Martin & Briggs, 1986, p. 12)
With affect often seen as “irrational, and antithetical to core Western ideals of rationality”, legal education and curricula have traditionally remained in the domain of knowledge and reasoning (Maughan & Maharg, 2011, p. 1).
Spencer (2022) argues that traditional methods of teaching law ‘may be producing lawyers who are not equipped with the emotional intelligence required for modern legal practice’ and advocates for more progressive approaches that require ‘more contemplation, more active listening and less aggressive advocacy’ (p. 99). Design thinking pedagogy appears to enhance legal education by incorporating the affective domain in ways that draw on emotions to diversify and broaden law students’ thinking skills. It creates space in the curriculum for alternative and reflective thinking, active listening (especially when empathising), creativity, innovative problem solving, collaboration rather than competition, and a non-litigious, non-adversarial approach to complex legal problems.
With its focus on empathic, creative, and innovative thinking skills, design thinking pedagogy appears to harness emotions rather than suppress them. It provides real-world experiential learning where students focus on humans and emotions, while deferring their focus on the solution (Thanaraj et al., 2023, p. 151). This helps to position students as humane professionals, where an overlap between personal and professional value systems allows students’ “emotions [to] command attention and facilitate memory” as they “actively car[e] about what they are learning and its consequences” (Maughan & Maharg, 2011, pp. 223–228; Ferris & Huxley-Binns, 2011). Design thinking has the potential to facilitate students' focus on both the emotions of their future clients and their own emotions, fostering the development of emotional intelligence and resilience (Thanaraj et al., 2023). This includes enhancing their understanding of existing mindsets, cultivating diverse modes of thinking, and embracing a holistic perspective of themselves (Bleasdale & Humphreys, 2018).
5.2. Creative confidence
Our participants perceived design thinking pedagogy as developing creative confidence in a safe-to-fail environment. This potentially enhances law students’ thinking skills and fosters emotional intelligence and resilience. Creative confidence refers to the “natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out” (Kelley & Kelley, 2012, p. 115). While this is something we are said to be born with, it can diminish over time due to socialisation, formal education, a tendency to become analytical, and fears of judgement, the “messy unknown”, the first step, or losing control (Kelley & Kelley, 2012, p. 115). Creative confidence can also be understood to mean “a development of trust in one's own creative skills” (Rauth et al., 2010, p. 6). In terms of learning, it is the repetition of design thinking that creates creative thinking which translates to creative acting, and vice versa, both of which lead to confidence and competence in creative behaviour, that “in sum build creative confidence” (Rauth et al., 2010, p. 6).
Our findings suggest that design thinking pedagogy may provide an environment that promotes creative confidence by encouraging play, making students feel ‘safe to break the rules’ and encouraging them to experiment. There is strong support for educational curricula to incorporate creative thinking and interdisciplinary creativity, with play and games recognised as tools that “enhance individual and collective creativity” by addressing the “cognitive, emotional and social dimensions of learning” (Moirano et al., 2020, p. 6). Critical elements of playing games for the purpose of creativity can include the role of warm-up activities, generating ‘good spirit’, and engaging all players, including those with different knowledge, backgrounds, and perspectives (Moirano et al., 2020, p. 6). For our participants, it was the ‘play’ and games that provided an opportunity to reconnect with their creative selves and break down discomfort and barriers. This reinforced the theory that educators need not necessarily teach students to be creative, but instead help them rediscover their creative confidence, overcome their fears, and develop their creativity through practice (Kelley & Kelley, 2012, pp. 115–116). This approach allowed our students to develop their creative mindsets and thinking, engage in creative acting and, in doing so, develop their creative confidence and competencies.
Design thinking pedagogy also appears to help students tackle their fear of failure. Our findings suggest that, with practice, students became increasingly comfortable with the ‘messy’ process of design thinking and with not knowing solutions at the outset. In a recent study, Allbon and Perry-Kessaris (2023) similarly found design thinking helped their students become: ‘more willing to give things a go rather than obsessively overthinking’; more ‘aware that answer[s] may lie … anywhere … not just … in textbooks and journal articles’; and more ‘free to experiment with different ideas and be a bit more open’. When our students became comfortable with the pedagogy — which is so different to traditional legal teaching — they were able to embrace the experience, develop their creative confidence, engage in innovative problem-solving, and recognise that “early failure can be crucial to success in innovation” (Kelley & Kelley, 2013, ch. 2). By developing a willingness to see failure as part of learning, students can build a ‘resilience toolkit’ containing the characteristics they need to ‘keep going’ through difficulties, discomfort, or failure and ‘not give up’ (Bleasdale & Humphreys, 2018, pp. 19–21).
Fiat Good/Hope Good
Futures are created by imagination and hope – only theorizing possible futures with [less/more aff impacts] can allow us to transform society.
Goldman 24 [Loren Goldman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is centered around German Idealism, Hegelianism, Western Marxism, and American Pragmatism, with emphasis on time, history, and political agency. He is the author of The Principle of Political Hope. “Experimentation and the future(s) of political hope.” European Journal of Social Theory Volume 27, Issue 2: Special issue: Social Theory and the Future. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/13684310241229653] //ahuero
Kant sets the course for a pragmatic vision of the future – any future – as an indispensable foundation for social action in service of its realization, against thinkers who posit it merely speculatively or dispense with it altogether. The future looms not as a constitutive threat but as a regulative postulate for orienting practical reason, a vital albeit revisable guide for the creation of a better world. For Kant, one may hope for that to which one actively aspires. Appropriately pluralized and brought down to earth, as it were, we may in like fashion hope for unattained utopias, for possibilities blocked in the past that may still in time become real as well as for the prospect of a brighter tomorrow wrought by action in concert.
Kant laid the groundwork for this perspective, but he was not alone in taking it. Writ small, the sort of generative prophetic hope he suggests appears mundanely in William James’s observation that there are instances ‘where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming’; ‘faith in a fact’, he emphasizes, ‘can help create that fact’ (James, 1979, p. 29, italics in original). Politics, and any collective endeavour for that matter, is an archetypal domain of such hope, for ‘[w]herever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the pre-cursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned’ (James, 1979, p. 29). James’s example is of passengers acting in concert to foil a train robbery; scaled up, democratic participation likewise requires a provisional trust in the capacities of one’s fellow citizens for responsible participation.
Writ large, Kant’s prophetic history offers inklings of the philosophy of history of August Cieszkowski, who projected Hegel’s largely backward-looking Geist into the future. With Hegel, that is, history culminated in his own moment, and the state sketched in his Philosophy of Right reflects a mildly reformed vision of his contemporary Prussia. Cieszkowski criticized Hegel for his myopia, writing that instead of humans enacting a supplied script in the theatre of the world, the true realization of Geist as freedom in the world would involve humans authoring and improvising it themselves in performance. Just as Marx (2000a, p. 82) wrote in his own commentary on Hegel’s political thought that to transcend philosophy means first to realize it, Cieszkowski argued that realizing Geist means transcending its conceptually distinct ontological priority over us, transforming speculation about the future into its active facilitation. In short, the realization of the philosophy of history for Cieszkowski (1979, p. 54), like Kant, means that humans collectively become the ‘executors of history’.19
The ultimate upshot is that pace presentism, the resolution to the problem of the forgotten future is to recognize that desired states of affairs cannot be expected to simply happen. Amidst the myriad contingencies and potentiality, interrupted trajectories and synchronicities of nonsynchronous temporal vectors, many futures lay dormant in the present, but not just any future can be realized. If our endeavours are to be anything more than blind groping or shots in the dark, they must connect to prospective tendencies present within reality but not yet drawn out of it; if we are to have concrete utopia it is only through our participation in its effectuation. As Bloch (1977, p. 519) writes in his own commentary on Hegel, whether the actual becomes rational ‘depends on the phenomenology or history of appearances of true action’.20
Benjamin offers a version of this view in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, a work that is not a testament to historical despair despite its celebrated equation of civilization and barbarism. Rather, it seeks hope in the prospect of reviving the unfulfilled futures of the past, not to reprise them point for point but to take solace and inspiration from their utopias, to read them forward out of the past and into the future.21 For Benjamin (2019, p. 205), hope for the future involves the recognition that history does not occur in ‘homogenous, empty time’ time; instead, it is primed for rupture, ‘filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]’. This ‘now’ is the domain of the instantaneous, of the possible irruption of action, the promise of ‘blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history’ (Benjamin, 2019, p. 207). Crucially, while Benjamin (2019, p. 208) describes this other temporality as ‘Messianic time’, the historical continuum is broken not by a supernatural power, but by humans working in concert22; in his case, by the revolutionary working class, who may divine the future because they create and arrange it themselves.
The fact that the time of the erstwhile future, understood solely as the fulfilment of the Enlightenment progressive project, has likely passed (though, to be fair, one could never exactly know this to be the case) does not mean that other possibilities do not remain for the time to come. After all, the world contains multitudes, events flow unexpectedly and the future lasts a long time, even forever.23 The question of hope accordingly becomes not merely what stymied-cum-novel interpretations of the world allow us to fully make sense of it, but also, and more importantly, what sorts of experiments can push our world towards rendering these interpretations compelling, to give them more purchase in concrete practice.24
Law Is Redeemable
Only through critical legal education can we learn to be advocates for change and remake law – including IPR law – to be emancipatory.
Klare 11 [Karl E. Klare is a Matthews Distinguished University Professor of labor and employment law and legal theory at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Massachusetts, and the current coordinator of the International Network on Transformative Employment and Labor Law. Klare focuses on labor and employment law, human rights and legal theory. “Teaching Local 1330 -- Reflections on Critical Legal Pedagogy.” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Vol. 7, pp. 58-78, Winter 2011. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1998129] //ahuero
The lesson is that in legal reasoning there is no escape from moral and political choice. If things have gone according to plan, time conveniently runs out, and the class is dismissed on that note.
* * * * *
What am I trying to accomplish in a class like this? What are the objectives of critical legal pedagogy?
Legal education should empower students. It should put them in touch with their own capacity to take control over their lives and professional education and development. It should enable them to experience the possibility of participating, as lawyers, in transformative social movements. But all too often classroom legal education is deadening. The law student‟s job, mastering doctrine, appears utterly unconnected to any process of learning about oneself or developing one‟s moral, political, or professional identity. Classroom legal education tends to reinforce a sense of powerlessness about our capacity to change social institutions. Indeed, it often induces students to feel that they are powerless to shape and alter their own legal education. Much of legal education induces in students a pervasive and exaggerated sense of the constraint of legal rules and roles and the students‟ inability to do much about it.
In capsule form, the goals of critical legal pedagogy are—
• to disrupt the socialization process that occurs during legal education;
• to unfreeze entrenched habits of mind and deconstruct the false claims of necessity which constitute so-called “legal reasoning”;
• to urge students to see their life‟s work ahead as an opportunity to unearth and challenge law‟s dominant ideas about society, justice, and human possibility and to infuse legal rules and practices with emancipatory and egalitarian content;
• to persuade students that legal discourses and practices comprise a medium, neither infinitely plastic nor inalterably rigid, in which they can pursue moral and political projects and articulate alternative visions of social organization and social justice;
• to train them to argue professionally and respectably for the utopian and the impossible;
• to alert them that legal cases potentially provide a forum for intense public consciousness-raising about issues of social justice;
• to encourage them to view legal representation as an opportunity to challenge, push, and relocate the boundaries between intra-systemic and extra-systemic activity, that is, an opportunity to work within the system in a way that reconstitutes it; and
• to show that the existing social order is not immutable but “is merely possible, and that people have the freedom and power to act upon it.”46
The most important point of the class is that social justice lawyers never give up. The appropriate response when you think you have a hopeless case is to go back and do more work in the legal medium.
Perm/No Link – Hope good
Foucault himself says even under a system of biopower, hope in the state and in the people is key to reforming this imprisonment, there is always action that can be done even if it is within the state. Even if the affirmative fails, it builds a way to breaking free. There is no margin of safety from control, so the alternative is in the same position as the state.
Hannah, 11 (Prof. Hannah has taught and conducted research for 20 years, first in the US (University of Vermont), then in the UK (Aberystwyth University), and, since September 2013, at the University of Bayreuth. His interests range across historical geography, political geography, critical human-geographic theory, and include regional specializations in the USA and Germany. Research projects carried out to date have revolved around two questions: (1) how geographically organised state knowledge (censuses, trade statistics, etc.) came to form a fundamental infrastructure for modern "arts of government", and, turning the first question around, (2) which sorts of spatial power relations have made possible (and what forms of resistance have hindered or altered) the development of such modern knowledge-infrastructures. These issues have been approached via a series of concrete empirical case studies: (1) a study of how the US Goverment attempted, during the 1870s, to re-shape spatial aspects of the lives of the Oglala Lakota ("Sioux"), in order to render them "governable" in a modern Western sense, and of how the Lakota circumvented and ultimately steered the process. Biopower, life and Left Politics pg. 144-147, 1/05/2011, accessed 7/31/24)//Ilake TY
James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” originally penned to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” The first stanza, which serves as the epigraph for this chapter, reflects the joy and hope of African Americans even though, as indicated in the stanza’s final line, “victory” remains elusive and the struggle for liberty continues. Johnson himself later took on the role of a national organizer for the NAACP. Yet, Johnson’s poem suggests that hope is not guaranteed. The second stanza revisits the days of slavery: “Bitter the chast’ning rod/Felt in the days when hope

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