Why we do the things we do: Global Law and Governance course explores social conformity
by Kathryn Martin
A self-described child of the 60s, Dr. Gloria Filax traces the roots of her own intellectual activism back to the formative years she spent growing up in Edmonton, Alberta and attending a private Christian School. Since she has left that particular path behind, she has made her way through the world concentrating on issues like global education and human rights.
"I think the Christian years gave me a sense of the world being an unjust place," Gloria says. "Growing up in my teens, we saw the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the American Indian Movement in the States. All those things were a part of my growing up years. They're the building blocks of who I am today."
In true Flower Child form, she rejected university-based education early in her life, deeming it too institutional. But Gloria later returned to university, and by the time she completed her master's work, she had become fascinated by pedagogy and social change.
Her coursework had pulled her into the world of philosopher and social activist Michel Foucault, and the business of global peace and human rights education - the stuff on which the MAIS course GOVN 540 Global Governance and Law is based.
Course explores roots of global governance.
Based in Foucaultian theory, Global Governance and Law takes students through a study of how collective paradigms regulate collective and individual behaviour.
"It's about social regulation, how do we regulate ourselves and others," Gloria explains, pointing to examples like gender - and age. "We have certain expectations, beliefs and values that regulate each other in terms of age norms. It's also encoded in legal mechanisms. Children and youth don't have the same rights under the Charter that adults do because other legal discourse - family law for example - effaces or trumps charter rights."
She continues explaining that it takes a great deal of energy to alter these societal norms and expectations because "norms are built into governance, into legal and political systems but as well norms are built into who we think we are as well as who we think those around us are." For example, during the scientific revolution, now respected scientists were criticized for their ideas.
"Things don't change because a newer paradigm moves into place," she says. "There is something else operating. There has to be a critical mass of people changing their thinking and behaviour so that legal and political, governance changes.
"It begs the question, 'Do laws help produce social stability?'" she continues. "Laws don't change either until there is a critical mass to move somewhere."
The approach she takes in Global Governance and Law, she says, is to look at these issues, by "start(ing) out very small."
"We look at the norms, values and beliefs shape who we are and who we think other people are. Then we take the idea of norms and why people conform, and apply it to the global level. We look at global governance as a way of looking at the way things are governed by government, social realities and the private sector. We try to understand how international law works to prevent violence. Does law prevent violence?
"Of course it does and it doesn't."
Course offers something for everyone.
Gloria lists the people who can benefit from the course. It includes just about everyone.
"I'm biased, but I think everyone should take it," she says. It's for people who are interested in governance, conformity and understanding how it works, the mechanisms of social control. It's for people who are interested in law, people interested in sociology, globalization, or its newer critique globalism, but especially for those interested in the how of social and global order and change."
Students that have already completed the course include teachers, military and medical professionals, plumbers, government workers, and the retired. She adds that it can assist these students in creating a blueprint for social change in their own worlds.
"I love this course and I've had wonderful students coming through," Gloria says. "What each has brought is their own experience, their own sense of the world, and their own burning issues they want to take up through course learning and content. That's been a wonderful experience for me. The background of students I get through the MAIS program has been amazing."
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