Foreword

This book is the result of overlapping collective, collaborative, and interdisciplinary journeys. It is primarily the work of three young scholars who set out to write about doing socio-legal research on violence and resistance in Canada. In presenting this work, the editors and authors also enjoin us to question the very terms that hold the project together: socio-legal research, violence, and Canada.

Socio-legal research has become increasingly visible as a distinct field of study defined by core questions, critical sensibilities, and theoretical commitments shared across a range of institutional and disciplinary affiliations. Earlier generations of socio-legal scholars might have been the only researchers in their home department or faculty—whether law, sociology, political science, or communications—to pursue interdisciplinary law and society scholarship. This relative isolation throughout the years heightened the importance of scholarly associations, conferences, and journals dedicated to socio-legal scholarship in order to think and write across disciplinary divides. Later generations of socio-legal scholars built collaborative research centres as well as specialized departments and programs for undergraduate and graduate studies. The editors, as well as many of the contributors to this book, have studied and taught at some of these specialized socio-legal research hubs, such as York University’s graduate program in socio-legal studies and Carleton University’s graduate program in legal studies. These relatively recent institutional foundations provide new platforms for asking about and narrating the history of socio-legal studies: how do we talk about the histories and theories on which we build our work? The focus is no longer on communicating across disciplinary divides but on critically examining the theoretical foundations inherited from earlier generations.

When socio-legal studies emerged at a set of loosely connected institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and various settler colonies, the shared theoretical affinities frequently clustered around small groups of mostly white and mostly male theorists. Their work has proven insufficient for understanding the operations of law, power, and politics in settler colonies, let alone beyond them. In their introduction, the coeditors emphasize their intellectual debts to settler-colonial and Indigenous studies, to critical race theory, and to Black studies. These debts are also symptoms of historical omissions and refusals by previous generations of socio-legal researchers. Contemporary law and society scholarship needs to reflect on the limitations of its institutional roots as it embraces a broader set of intellectual foundations. Several chapters in this book provide excellent avenues for addressing these gaps, silences, and exclusions.

Professional organizations, conferences, and journals are frequently organized along the lines of nation-states. Yet what, for example, does the “Canadian” in Canadian law and society research refer to? Does “Canada” denote the citizenship and/or place of employment of the researchers or the geographic focus of their work? In this volume, the authors do not consider “Canadian” to refer to an uncomplicated subject position or a self-evident focus of their research. Rather, they use “Canada” as a starting point, a complicated relationship, and a responsibility.

The chapters by Stacy Douglas and by Carmela Murdocca, Shaira Vadasaria, and Timothy Bryan thematize the interplay between myths and violence in the foundation and constitution of Canada as a settler colony shaped by dispossession, genocide, and intersecting logics of racialization. Read together, these chapters powerfully illustrate that law cannot be reduced to either violence or language. The force of Western law is derived from its ability to appeal to “jurisfictions” backed by the threat of physical violence, but the metaphors and narratives on which legal language is based exert their own force: they shape our imagination of what is possible and thinkable as law, of how we imagine persons, relationships, and humanity. Here, the role of socio-legal research is not only to show how violent and arbitrary these foundations of Western law are but also to create space for us to imagine different futures built on different relationships, laws, and responsibilities.

Other contributions to this volume decentre Canada by taking an explicitly transnational approach: the introduction frames racialized police violence as a North American problem without denying the Canadian specificities, the chapter on #MeToo by Emily Lockhart, Katrin Roots, and Heather Tasker takes a transnational perspective rooted in an understanding of how racial and gendered hierarchies are expressed in Canadian law, and Heather Tasker’s analysis of photographic projects in humanitarian spaces is rooted in an analysis of complex global hierarchies in which the images produced by refugee children are read, circulated, and repositioned. In these works, “Canada” is not the unquestioned frame, but it becomes framed, contextualized, and questioned through multiple methodologies.

In centring violence and resistance, the volume draws on a range of traditions of theorizing the boundaries of violence, the use of power, and the place of resistance. In arguing that (Western) law is inescapably tied to violence, the afterword by Mariful Alam and Irina Ceric challenges readers to think about forms of justice and community beyond the law as well as forms of law beyond the worn models of Western legality. At the heart of law’s violence, we sometimes find silence: the quiet bureaucratic machinery that produces legal classifications of “terrorism,” as the chapter by Yavar Hameed and Jeffrey Monaghan shows, or the insistence on state secrecy in the face of access to information requests by researchers and activists, as described by Alex Luscombe and Kevin Walby.

Read together, the contributions in this volume provide a valuable snapshot of methodological directions, theoretical foundations, and practical orientations in contemporary socio-legal studies in Canada. They highlight the work of researchers who are reshaping the field through careful, imaginative, and collaborative work.

Christiane Wilke