Published February 6, 2013
by iris_author
Date: Monday, February 11, 2013
Time: 2:30 - 4:00 pm.
Location: Room 2027. Ignat Kaneff Building Osgoode Hall Law School
R v. Kikkik, Take 5: Law/Art/Culture & the Canadian National Imaginary
University of Victoria
REBECCA JOHNSON
In 1958, international attention turned to the arctic, for the trial of Kikkik, an Inuit woman charged with murder and the criminal abandonment of her children. In this presentation, I explore four different tellings of this story: the 1958 trial transcript; Farley Mowatt's popular 1959 non-fictional account; a set of three Inuit sculptures (carved in 1959) long displayed in the Yellowknife courthouse; a documentary film made 50 years after the event by Kikkik's daughter (who had been the baby carried on her mother's back). The case, situated at the intersection of law/art/culture, opens productive space for questions about the place of the colonial encounter in the making and remaking of the Canadian national imaginary.
Professor Johnson clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Madame Justice L'Heureux-Dubé in 1993-93, and was a member of the Faculty of Law of the University of New Brunswick from 1995 to 2001, when she joined the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. Her book, Taxing Choices: The Intersection of Class, Gender, Parenthood, and the Law (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002) received the Harold Adams Innis Prize. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2009.
She teaches Criminal Law, Business Associations, Legal Process and Law and Film. Current research projects include a study of judicial decision making (and particularly practices of dissent); an exploration of the economic imaginary in legal and popular culture; a study of cinema as a site of intercultural legal encounter; and an interrogation of the operation of sexuality as a ?lashpoint in debates around religion and diversity.
Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP: adrgs@osgoode.yorku.ca
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