UNCANNY LORE: DECOLONISING LAW THROUGH A SOUTH AFRICAN AND SCOTTISH WILD JURISPRUDENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE TRIBUNAL.
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This project is incubating innovative practice-based co-engaged research for the creation of a decolonial liberatory environmental law pedagogy. The intention is creating a transgressive legal conduit that embraces cultural and legal fluidity as a pathway to protect access to natural livelihoods and sacred sites for indigenous peoples, including opening up the cognitive, physical, aesthetic and spiritual spaces needed to foster growing wild jurisprudence education within South Africa and the UK. This generative space, explores the rights of indigenous peoples and the natural world they inhabit through expansive transformative and transgressive learning. South African and Scottish sites and will incubate the pedagogical development of nuanced, uncanny, and embodied ways of knowing and being that currently fall outside mainstream legal curriculaof legal channels. The tribunals will be used as a catalytic ‘germ cell’ process to launch an annual Summer School in ‘Decolonising Libratory Law for wild jurisprudence and environmental justice’.
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The threat of re-colonisation through law is a recurring problem for countries in the Global South. Despite Kennedy’s appeal more than 30 years ago to diversify legal teaching, modern legal teaching still focuses on unifying the legal curriculum and often ignoring law’s contribution to colonialism and the persistent agent-subject relationship between the Global North and Global South. Law schools in the Global North and their ideology of mainstreaming the legal positivist curriculum resembles what Freire calls the ‘banking model of education’. Law students in former colonial countries are indoctrinated in the authoritarian ethos of the legal practice and the legal curriculum does not leave any space for alternative legal stories. Although some aspects of critical legal studies has been influenced by radical pedagogical practices influenced by postcolonial scholars like Henry Giroux, Ngugi Wa Thiongo’o and Antonio Gramsci, more needs to be done to decolonise the mind of legal students so they have the tools to resist oppressive legal regimes and transform societies in a progressive way. As well as decolonising the systems and structures that underpin their education. Anti-imperial and radical legal scholarship is not a new phenomenon in British law schools, testified by the foundation of the Social and Legal Studies journal. Editors returning from ‘third world’ law schools had experienced radically different legal systems in former British colonies and inspired by legal pluralism rebelled upon return to the constraints of their own legal education which kept holding ‘Western’ positivist law in the highest esteem and silencing other normative systems and values.
Despite critical legal studies influencing the legal curriculum, legal education in both the Global North and South is still characterised by colonial characteristics. For example, African law schools have suffered from structural adjustment policies and the initial euphoria of decolonisation has been tempered by a curriculum that has justified and mobilised the neo-liberalisation of legal education. Related developments make a renewed critical engagement with legal education urgent. With Britain stepping out of the European Union, there is a desire to renew contact with the old empire. This development takes place within the context of growing xenophobia in Britain. This has, on its turn, led to a growing demand from students to decolonise the curriculum at British universities, a movement that seeks inspiration from ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’. At the same time, industrialised societies are destroying ecosystems and the Anthropocene is characterised by acts of genocide and ecocide. There is a growing awareness that colonial law has not only silenced non-western legal systems but for humanity to secure its existence, it must radically change its relationship with nature. Colonial law has appropriated, commodified and exploited nature and even the foundation of environmental law is deeply anthropocentric and reflects a Descartian dualism. Ironically, the values and norms that have been silenced by legal colonialism can provide insights how to transform law so it respects other ways of being, based on respecting the intricate continuum between human, non-human and more than human relationships. The philosophy of legal education must open itself to these other ways of being that often reside amongst indigenous peoples whose worldviews have barely been included in the legal curriculum.
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The urgency of the Anthropocene shows us that the decolonising project is not just epistemological but is also deeply ontological. Enrique Dussel’s analectic method of injecting otherness and embracing alterity in pedagogical enquiries resonates with our own proposition to include indigenous knowledges into the legal curriculum and more specifically into the environmental law curriculum. While the inclusion of indigenous laws in legal systems is currently hotly debated at universities of settler states such as Canada and Australia, this debate is still in its infancy in Britain. We are seeking to mainstream indigenous peoples’ ‘land based environmental ethics’ into the legal curriculum as a way to decolonise our racialised, imperialistic, gendered and appropriating legal system that is currently being taught in legal schools. Re-educating lawyers requires including indigenous knowledges, worldviews and holistic systems in order to improve the wellbeing and the natural world of all peoples. ‘In the words of the indigenous Miq’maq education scholar Marie Battiste: ‘the pedagogical challenge of education is not just reducing the distance between Eurocentric and Aboriginal ways of knowing but engaging decolonized minds and hearts.’
Establishing a decolonial pedagogy worthy of the longing of both indigenous people, the global south and the law students, requires an emergent and innovative approach. Considering this we will undertake two tribunals in South Africa and Scotland, which will explore decolonial approaches to wild jurisprudence (WJ) and environmental Justice (EJ) The tribunals will act as a transgressive and transformative social learning or t-learning laboratory for decolonising law (- See www.transgressivelearning.org). Key to a t-learning approach the curricula emerges from a contextual profiling process, of co-defining matters of concern together. Here students work with their own questions and contradictions, as well as working with the call for transformation coming from indigenous groups and the more than human world. The tribunals hold the space for a variety of legal practitioners, activists, indigenous peoples, ecological citizens and the more than human, to encounter each other and their multiple ways of knowing and being and directly channel these into various forms of innovations in law and law education. This expansive learning approach carefully considers cultural historical drivers that create worldviews and values, as an inherent part of developing a decolonial response to learning. The tribunals aim to develop emergent embodied social learning processes, that draw from indigenous law/lore, social sculpture, empatheatre and critical ecological justice processes. Among other methodologies and processes. The co-defining matters of concerns and particular curricular emergent from this call, will be used to begin fundraising the development of a short course/programme/summer school for law professionals as well as other policy makers, practitioners that can be later expanded into a postgraduate course hosted between the two lead researchers and their respective universities. Immediate outcomes will include a peer reviewed publication, the development of a basic initial online platform which hold the emerging curriculum and pedagogical innovation. This platform can be used to later develop and online course, and will inform the development of a later summer/monsoon school programme in WJ and EJ. 
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