ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore some of the experiences of pandemic on legal education through two lenses. First, we analyse the insights that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope has for our understanding of the pandemic. In the work of Valverde, de Sousa Santos and others, we see the chronotope’s infiltration into the domain of legal critique, where the intersections of space and time and their effects on legal jurisdiction and method are analysed. In legal education, the abrupt shift of curricula to online forms of learning and teaching has resulted in spatio-temporal configurations that appear to have disrupted the settled conventions of the relationships between digital and conventional legal education in individual law schools. The shift has also significantly disrupted our sense of community and identity within law schools. Second, we analyse the shift in our experiences of community and identity brought about by the unique circumstances of living and learning through the pandemic. Identities, formed out of sense of self, are also the result of social interactions – this applies to professional identity as much as to scholarly identities. We compare the opportunities for the formation of student communities, of student relationships, and of changing student identities in an online and in-person context and offer suggestions for how those might continue to be formed within an online context. Third, we explore a case study, namely a digital lecture, to unfold the often paradoxical space/time complexities of digital learning. By treating the lecture as a chronotope, we will consider how, where and when learning takes place both within and beyond the digital affordance, and reflect upon how pandemic has changed the nature and opportunity for that learning. We also set out how such environments can be improved for students, post-pandemic, to allow for development of identity and community.
