Bridging Disciplines: Insights from the Critical Times Summer School at the University of Lucerne
By Steph Belmer
This post can also be read at the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities website: cnlh.ubc.ca
I arrived at McGill Law School in September 2020 with graduate degrees in Art History and Social and Political Thought. While my interdisciplinary background fit well with McGill’s bijural approach, I struggled to combine my previous Humanities interests with my legal training. Of course, my Humanities instincts were still at play when I completed my assignments — and McGill was welcoming to less conventional ways of thinking about law. But my own research path felt disjointed, as if I was once a scholar who combined art history and critical theory, and I was now a confused law student who could not ‘think like a lawyer’ nor write a scholarly paper on a legal problem. Attending the Critical Times Summer School (2024)— a one-week summer program organized each year at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland) and open for postdocs, early-career scholars, and graduate students from across disciplines — felt like a revelation. I hadn’t encountered the field of law and visual studies before, and yet I was reading many of the same texts and pursuing many of the same threads as the people in the room.
My hunch is that my experience of discovery is less common in the traditional disciplines, such as History or Philosophy, whose methodologies are more clearly defined and which often require their disciples to begin their initiation at an early stage in their career. Law and Visual Studies, poised as it is between disciplines, created an openness and generosity toward new conceptual paradigms.
The Critical Times Summer School brought together a wonderful mix of disciplinary and methodological approaches. Every day began with a three-hour seminar on a topic drawn from the arts and humanities, including film, geography, economics, architecture, history, and law. The afternoons were devoted to workshops, at which each student presented their latest research. By the end of the week, we knew each other’s work well and were energized by the many conversations about how to push our ideas further and how to collaborate in the future. Despite living in different countries, studying different disciplines, and working in different departments, we were drawn to a shared lexicon of ideas and texts and practices.
Each of the seminars — while treating very different subjects, histories, geographies — contributed to a form of inquiry unique to this field. To give you a sense of the week’s diversity: Scott Veitch started us off with a presentation on “Metaphors of Visibility in Law, Politics, and the Economy; Julen Etxabe followed up with a session on “Images, Imaginings, and the Imagination of Judges.” Desmond Manderson presented on the problem of time for law and the image; Shane Chalmers examined the idea of “projection” as a technique of the colonial imaginary in a session entitled “The Eye of History”; and the week ended with a presentation by Greta Olson on “Visualizing Legality: How to Unpack Multimodal Legal Texts.” In two special events, we were privileged to view two short films by cultural theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal, as well as a Spanish documentary entitled El Jurado (Virginia Garcia del Pino, 2012) in a session run by Mónica López Lerma.
Refreshing, too, was the encouragement to discuss our experiences as academic workers. In one session, led by Laura Petersen and Valeria Vázquez Guevara, participants shared their methodologies, including how intuition operated in their selection of an object of study and how difficult it was, sometimes, to pursue a project within the confines of a well-established field. The conversation then turned to the entanglement of private life with academic pursuits, and the challenges that women in particular face as disproportionately engaged in care work. An academic job is often treated like a gift because it comes with so much freedom. But it comes, too, with many unseen demands, which are unpaid and put unequal pressure on junior faculty. This was my third summer school since entering academia, and it was the first time I was asked to participate in a formal conversation about the nature of our work and its stakes for our personal lives.
The conversations during the week were so rich that I think I am not alone in saying that I left the summer school compelled to begin new projects and to think in more creative ways about my legal scholarship. I was particularly drawn to Emmanuele Conte’s presentation on public monuments in Rome. Many of Rome’s most impressive buildings, he explained, are the result of spolia — they are built from stones (the spoils) taken from other buildings and repurposed. Hidden behind the visible, then, are invisible institutions: an ongoing recycle is an inherent feature of the ancient and medieval monument. I think of Conte’s talk on spolia often, as I clerk at Canada’s apex court. I have begun research, for instance, on two examples of spolia, “Veritas” and “Justitia,” flanking the Court’s entrance, which were originally designed by Walter S. Allward for the King Edward VII monument in 1912.
My cohort will be one of the last to work in the building designed by Ernest Cormier and constructed between 1938 and 1941, before a massive ten-year restoration project begins. The Court will be moved for at least five years to a building across the street. Its temporary home will be thoroughly renovated to include a more spacious courtroom with historical touches — red carpeting and the Judge’s bench — and modern elements like nine free-standing portals to frame the room and access to the latest technology. As I work in a job that has me focused on legal questions and judicial decision-making, I am informed, too, by the arsenal of concepts left to me by the Critical Times summer school. Thanks to my experience there, I now work in multiple registers, thinking not just about legal concepts, histories, and precedent but also the broader visual imaginary within which apex courts are situated and judgments take shape.
Steph Belmer attended the Critical Times Summer School at the University of Lucerne in June 2024.