The Next Best Step – Collective Imagination, Collaborative Practice, and Spaces to Dream

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Session Type: Workshop

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza B

Floor: Lobby Level

In recent years, the legal community has faced an unchecked pandemic, a racial reckoning around the murder of George Floyd, the erosion of public institutions such as the CDC and a runaway Supreme Court that has taken away the bodily autonomy of millions of women, while racism continues to ravish communities targeted for exclusion and oppression. The law can be used as a tool to stem the tides of fascism and to create transformative change through movement lawyering that can help to restore our democracy and improve it by centering abolition.
Law school clinics can serve an important role as sites of critical pedagogy, helping students, community partners, and clients build towards an abolition democracy. Abolition democracy—as W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis have argued—involves creating an anti-capitalist democracy, based in racial and social justice, where, instead of the hierarchy of material deprivation produced by racial capitalism, all communities achieve self-determination and have adequate housing, educational and work opportunities, healthcare, food, schools, and childcare.
This Workshop will focus on ways law clinics can help dismantle systems of control & oppression while creating counter institutions that allow for systemic and liberatory justice. Participants will hear from presenters & be given space to share other concrete ways their clinics are using law as a tool to create transformative change through collaborative and creative movement lawyering. Through examples from our work, we will explore how we can, as practitioners and as people, create spaces to dream so as to harness the collective imagination to act affirmatively in this moment of history.
This workshop will use grounding techniques, music, sharing of presenter teaching strategies, hypotheticals, and breakout rooms to respectively explore the implementation of our framework. We will also focus on wellness practices to sustain lawyers as we do this heavy work.