ABSTRACT
Personas, vignettes and visual technologies of communication offer us ways of telling memorable and engaging stories about the law, making them a useful tool in legal education. 2 In addition to diagrams and other visual forms, fictional renders of characters in the form of personas, and their intentions and motivations in the form of vignettes, can complement text-based materials by illustrating and interrogating core concepts. They illustrate by empirically grounding the conceptual, offering a tangible embodiment that brings three principal benefits to both student and teacher: the simplification of complexity, the reduction of text fatigue and the provision of spaces for knowledge co-production. Used in combination with visualisations, two further interrogatory benefits can be noted for both students and teachers. Firstly, these approaches offer short cuts to sites at which meaning is created and shared, allowing students to engage critically with the law as a social institution and site of shared expectations. 3 Secondly, visual approaches allow us to sidestep some of the limitations of linguistic framing. This chapter will address each of these through the experiences of Academic Ann—one of three fictional personas I am developing in my own research into the relationships between law, economy and society—as she uses visual methods to teach legal concepts.
