The Scarlet Letter | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Debra Parkes

A prison protest might seem like a moment of rebellion, but for Debra Parkes, it’s a window into a much bigger story about justice, rights, and power. In this episode, legal scholar Debra Parkes unpacks the deep structures of power and punishment, why prisons operate as “accountability-free zones,” and how legal wins don’t always translate into real-world change. She challenges us to reimagine a system grounded in care rather than control, flipping the script on how we think about rights, responsibility, and the role of law.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

Find out more about the Feminist Legal Studies Group

Transcript | The Scarlet Letter | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Debra Parkes

Becky Batagol: [00:00:00] Good morning. I'm Becky Batagol. Welcome to this episode of The Scarlet Letter, the monthly podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today, we're recording from Vancouver in Canada. Beautiful outlook here in a misty day, looking, overlooking the water there. And I'm joined by Professor Deborah Parks, the Chair of the Feminist Legal Studies and Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at the Peter Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.

Welcome, Deb. Professor Parks joined the Allied School of Law in July 2016. She was a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba from 2001 to 2016, where she served a term as Associate Dean. She's also been a visiting researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia and the University of Sydney.

She was Editor in Chief of the Canadian [00:01:00] Journal of Women and Law, and she's been President of the Canadian Law and Society Association. Professor Park's scholarly work examines the challenges and possibilities of addressing societal injustices through rights claims, with a focus on the criminal justice, corrections and workplace context.

The lens she brings to this work is feminist, intersectional and socio legal. Professor Park's takes a particular interest in the incarceration of women, the limits of prison reform and the framing and adjudication of prisoners rights claims. So Deb, perhaps you could start by telling us about when you first realized that you were a feminist?

Debra Parkes: That's such a great question. Yeah, I grew up I would, Pinpointed as sometime in high school, I can't remember exactly when, but this would have been in the 1980s, so I'm dating myself. And I grew up in a relatively small community in British Columbia in Canada. And, my family, I actually grew up in a very fundamentalist religious family Christian family.

And so I was [00:02:00] actually someone who, you know, Particularly when I got into high school and I started thinking and I had some great teachers and I'm a shout out to public education because for me some of the teachers I had in, in high school really challenged me to think in different ways about the world and ask different kinds of questions than I had before.

I've been able to ask in a quite, closed environment and way of thinking that I had grown up in. And, but I always had questions about injustice, unfairness, and particularly as a girl, and what I saw in terms of the treatment of women, and the opportunities for women around me in the religion that I was in, but also more broadly in society.

And so I remember, and I had a teacher, a social studies and history teacher in high school who really opened up my thinking around and helped me to connect to some, reading even in in high school about feminism, and in fact socialism and for me, Questions of injustice have always been interconnected, [00:03:00] and certainly I think of myself as a committed to intersectional feminism.

I think I've, I think I probably started out with a fairly narrow way of thinking about that intersectionality. And it certainly didn't have that language for it. But but for me feminism must be intersectional. And and I was always thinking about, some of the early questions I had were about economic unfairness, poverty, and I saw those as related to questions of unfairness that that as, and opportunities for women, but I didn't have much of a lens on race or some of the other things that I think I developed or am developing more later.

But yeah, it was that, those early days. And then I actually went to a Christian university where I, again, was. Exposed to some while again, it's a narrow, in some ways a narrow way of thinking. I had some really great professors who allowed, some of whom identified as feminists and were pro choice and in an environment that wasn't very conducive to that.

So I I spent those four years really [00:04:00] Extricating myself from that particular form of religion and and asking questions in ways that really made me solidify my commitment to feminism and social justice. And and yeah, and so then I, and then I went on to law school.

After that and found an amazing feminist community here actually at UBC when I was a student 20 years ago.

Becky Batagol: And you started out your career as a law clerk to justice at the BC Supreme Court. And you practice as a litigation lawyer. Why did you choose BC?

Debra Parkes: I didn't, when I went to law school, I always think it's interesting to think back on my original goals for going to law school and where I ended up.

I actually went, and I think in some ways it's useful for students to think about and to hear different stories along those lines. Because for me, I actually originally thought I was going to go into some kind of international law work, international human rights work. That's where I thought I was going and why I went to law school.

I was encouraged by some people who worked in, inter, International sort of [00:05:00] diplomatic corps and for NGOs that actually getting a law degree would be more useful than perhaps getting an international relations degree. So I went to law school originally with that, but when I got into law school, I really became interested in the questions about law and why we have the laws we do and Why there's still so much disconnect between inequality on the ground and these laws that we have and why, and why that continues to be the case and how we can work to make laws better for, for example.

And I I went, I clerked for judges and that was at the suggestion of a professor that I had worked for and for me, again, having an opportunity to work as a research assistant in law school was also really important to my feminist development and my thinking about what kind of careers were available because after first year, I was hired by my criminal law professor to do work on feminist criminal law.

Thank you. And that's Professor Isabel Grant, who is a colleague of mine now, and, she's been a mentor to me. For many years, [00:06:00] and so I went on to clerk, and then I, I had some idea, oh, maybe an academic career, but it seemed like a long way off, and it seemed not something that I would pursue right away, that I actually did have an interest in seeing What it was like working with law and trying to do work that I thought was important.

Now, I also had a lot of student debt so I, the job that I took was was working in a large law firm in Toronto but I specifically was able to get a job in a firm that had a litigation practice that did mostly public law litigation and union side labor and employment law. And that was to, more in keeping with my sort of political commitments and interest in doing work.

With and on behalf of workers rather than I didn't really want to be doing, for example, employment law on the side of employers because I had been quite, I was quite committed to labour rights and that sort of thing. So I had the opportunity to work in this firm that did great work and and I liked a lot of the work I did, but what I found myself returning to [00:07:00] was an interest in doing research, an interest in doing the thinking about the laws, and there's just increasingly less time to do that as you get more senior.

And I only spent three years in, in law school. In a law firm, but during that time, as an Art of Things student, at least in Canada, you are given a lot of legal research problems, and I love that. But as I became an associate, it was more expected that I would be doing client work, which I didn't mind, but it wasn't really where my passion lied.

I liked the research, and I liked the writing, so I realized that meant I needed to go back to school. And so I did. And I went back to do graduate work. And I'm one of the last few academics in Canada that was hired with an LLM. So I don't have a PhD. Now everybody we hire has PhDs.

So I got in under the wire with that degree. And then just started, writing and publishing and developing my career. My research areas from that, but that was my trajectory to the academic work. I feel very lucky. I think it was a it was a product of a lot of luck in terms of getting the job that I got.

Becky Batagol: [00:08:00] I am constantly amazed by how seren, serendipity and luck play such a part in where we end up. And you can never predict that when you are standing where you were as young. You can never know.

Debra Parkes: I wouldn't have known at all. This would be where I ended up and I wouldn't have thought. It was like, I actually thought I'd be more of a sort of a crusading, lawyer. And I have so much respect for the lawyers who do that work, the social justice work, the hard work. And I think it's really important and vital to, to feminist activism. But for me, I think that my place is I found my, a place that that I feel like I can contribute and certainly I like to be involved in litigation.

I've consulted on cases and particularly as a member of a feminist collectives that have that have done work on interventions that raise issues of of inequality and particularly women's inequality and intersectional claims. And so I have the opportunity to do that, but I also have the opportunity to research and write and teach and do the things that I really like to do.

Big picture.

Becky Batagol: Now, here at UBC [00:09:00] your title is Chair of Feminist Legal Studies and you're also Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies. You have the word feminist in your job title, so how do you explain feminism to a sceptic?

Debra Parkes: Feminism, I've just actually finished recently reading Sarah Ahmed's book, Living a Feminist Life.

I don't know if others have read it, but I would highly recommend it and a lot of that resonated me with me. She talked about feminism as a life question and she talks about feminism as a movement and there's lots of really interesting images that she She uses there, but for me, it's about thinking about seeing injustice, seeing inequality, and particularly inequality based on gender.

So where you still see that the world is not equal and that if you are a woman, you are less likely to be, you'll be paid less than men. There's, the gender pay gap there. You're more likely to experience intimate partner violence, all these things. And then when you bring when you look at the kind of different women and [00:10:00] where they're situated as well as other Minority, sexual minorities, for example, and trans people, non binary, you look at how gender constructs our world in ways that disadvantage that disadvantage people and particularly women.

And so I see that in, in all kinds of ways, in my own field of criminal law, but I you see it even in the academy, right? And so I think feminism is just a really relevant lens. To see the world, and you can't, once you start seeing it, you can't unsee it, and I think that's how feminism is for me, it's it's a way of seeing the world and it's questions that you ask okay, why is it that we still don't have very many women in leadership positions in law firms, for example, why is it that we see indigenous women are vastly overrepresented among women in prison?

Why, what is it about the experiences and the way that the laws construct and constrain the lives of Indigenous women that means that they're more likely to be in that position? [00:11:00] And what might we do about that, right? And so feminism is, to me, asking those questions and thinking about and dreaming a different world and and one that is more fair and just and equal.

Becky Batagol: Wow, if I was at a dinner, across the dinner table from you, I'd be totally with you. So a lot of your work focuses on the incarceration of women and the limits of prison reform. How is that a feminist issue?

Debra Parkes: Yeah, oh yeah, thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about that because this is what I'm, I have a particular interest in.

That's actually how when I, looking back to when I was in law school, I, again, as a feminist, I took a course called Penal Policy, and it was the only prison law course of any law school in Canada at the time, and now there's only a few of us that have those kinds of courses, because we don't really teach about imprisonment in law school, and I actually think that's a big gap, because it's what, The criminal justice system is all focused around is deprivations of liberty and we talk about that in the abstract, [00:12:00] but we tend not to talk about it in the ways, the concrete ways that actually plays out and what goes on in our prisons and what relevance the law and rights have in that context.

So when I was taking this course by my colleague, now retired, Professor Michael Jackson, who developed this first course called Penal Policy. And it was about imprisonment, it was about the law, and it was about prisoner rights, and I was really interested in it. But I kept asking, where are the women?

And the vast majority of prisoners in Canada are men, right? It's somewhere between, depending on whether you're looking at local provincial jails and federal penitentiaries where people serving longer sentences are. But it's somewhere between 5 and 12 percent of the prison population in different places is women, in women's prisons.

And we weren't really, and Michael's work has been with men, and so I started asking those questions. And through that, he connected me to some women who were at that time, and this is in the mid 1990s, who were [00:13:00] incarcerated, a small group of women were incarcerated in a men's maximum security prison in a segregated unit.

And this was because These women were designated max under our maximum security and the old prison for women was being closed. We used to have one prison for women in all of Canada for people serving longer sentences and women from all across the country had to go to Kingston, Ontario. Now there was There's some feminist there's lots of campaigning and concern about the conditions in that prison.

There were a rash of suicides. Many women died in that prison. And in any event, in the 90s there was a really important report that was written with lots of feminist principles in it about closing down the prison for women and opening up gender responsive prisons. Corrections prisons, and the original goals of that some of the women who participated in that feminist work, and it was a government task force but had a lot of feminists involved in it had a strong focus on getting women in the community and having much having [00:14:00] not necessarily prisons like we think of but more women centered prisons but spaces where there'd be more community involvement and connection, recognizing that women are generally.

What the law calls high high needs, low risk. And but what ended up happening was some women, and it ended up being disproportionately Indigenous women, were not seen as able to be incarcerated in those new Supposedly feminist, women centered prisons. And they ended up being put in these segregated units inside men's max prisons.

And then ultimately, those new women's prisons, which were supposed to be progressive, were built with maximum security units in them, and the women got transferred back into there. My point of telling that story was because when I was A student in the mid 90s, I wrote a paper about, after interviewing those women, two of those women in Saskatchewan Penitentiary, I also was connected by my professor with Kim Pate.

And Kim Pate is now an independent senator on [00:15:00] our, in our parliament, but was at the time the executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, and someone who you should try to interview for this podcast, because she is a feminist shero of mine, and she is someone who I I interviewed her for that research and I started to be able to think differently and about and ask different kinds of questions about what we might do to address this problem of Indigenous women being in maximum security and originally in these men's units and then now in segregated units within, within these regional women's prisons.

And to think about the fact that prison is clearly not a prison. working for these women. It's not working for any, I don't think it works very well for anyone, but it particularly doesn't work for women, and it, it creates more harms and risk than it actually addresses. And and so I started thinking, and Kim is someone who identifies as a feminist abolitionist.

Sort of [00:16:00] the idea of thinking about a world without prisons, and that was mind blowing for me at the time in the 90s, but I now identify in that way too, where I see our whole focus on trying to reform prisons to make them women centered as a very much a failed experiment. And we now have, compared to that time in the 90s, we now have more than twice

Every year, the proportion of them that is Indigenous is rising to the point where there are places in the country where it's 80 percent of the women in prison are Indigenous. Nationally, it's nearly 50 percent now. We're in the 40s. It is, it, and these are the same women that Canada is now Waking up to the huge issue of missing and murdered indigenous women how racism has And colonialism continued to shape their lives in ways that make them more vulnerable to violence both in their own homes and communities.

When they leave those communities to look [00:17:00] for safer places, they are exploited and subject to violence live in poverty. All of these kind of realities mean that they're more likely to be criminalized and imprisoned. And that's the place where we find them. increasing numbers of Indigenous women who, as I said, are the same women who go missing and are murdered.

And so this is this is for me one of the big social justice issues of our time in Canada, is thinking about how we move away from a model where we find all the money and resources in the world to put people in jail, and particularly, increasingly, Indigenous women. We've just had another report that shows that in our youth system, Canada has Vastly decarcerated youth, it's actually quite a very positive story of our youth incarceration rates have gone down in quite radical ways in the last 15 years.

But what hasn't gone down, what has gone up, is the incarceration rate of Indigenous young people. And Indigenous [00:18:00] girls are the fastest growing group among young people. incarcerated youth. And so there's a, it's clearly a problem when the most marginalized people are filling our prisons and jails.

And I, and to me it's a feminist issue because the because the, because what I think a feminist analysis brings to the over incarceration of Indigenous women is an analysis that looks to the Why it is that they are more likely to be criminalized, and why it is that indigenous women are more living in poverty, have inadequate education have experienced have alienation within their own communities through male leadership that has been imposed in some ways through colonial structures who are less likely to be employed.

And all these things, the intergeneral impacts of colonial practices such as putting putting young people in residential schools, children in [00:19:00] residential schools, and then the impact that had on parenting and how, all of this has contributed to this situation. So I think feminism and intersectional feminism allows you to say, what might a world look like where we actually looked at what the needs of those women's wo women were and directed some of the resources.

Ideally, all of the resources that are going to incarcerating them into the the services and supports and addressing the inequalities they experience. And we would have, I know, and the research shows this, we would have less crime, we would have less victimization, we would have safer societies for everyone if we would do that.

And so that. That to me is why it's a feminist issue. And the other just final point is that thinking about prison reform, again, as feminists, we have been advocates, and again, I don't blame the feminists who were involved in those early reform efforts, because I think I probably would have been in the same, probably would have been in those thinking the same thing, that okay, if we actually could [00:20:00] build, if we could only build These places that were truly addressing women's needs.

That was the idea. What happens is, you in an, in a system that is all about punishment it is fundamentally about punishment, the Western criminal justice system. And so in a system that is about punishment, if you try to do something different within that, within the structure of a place called prison, whatever you call it, or a place where you're putting people under the power and control of other people, essentially in cages.

When you do that, you, and you try to make it more humane, you try to make it more rights respecting, you try to make it more women centered and responsive to needs. You are always going, the security and the punishment logics are always going to trump those. And we see that over and over again.

And I'm, I'm strongly of the view that we need to be looking outside of prisons for to address the needs and issues that have, that bring women in conflict with the law and men too for that matter. I just start with [00:21:00] women and that's where my feminism, it brings me to start with women because I think one, I'm most interested and I can see the intersectional connections so clearly with women.

And I think that we can. Women are a smaller group relative to men and we can pilot new initiatives there that we can then roll out into, in, in other ways that would address, again the ways that prison harms, harms men too, right? And I think it's the logics of putting people in cages creates so many of the of the problems that we see in society.

And if we could move away from that, I think we would be all better off. So yes.

Becky Batagol: So on that idea of prison abolition, you've recently argued for the possibility of a prison abolitionist lawyering ethic. So what do you mean by this?

Debra Parkes: Yeah. So I'm trying to develop that that idea and it's, what I mean by that.

And I started talking in those terms because There's a lot, what I think is really good and really exciting right now, particularly in Canada, is that there's [00:22:00] rising awareness of some of the issues going on in our prisons. And we have a, I think, really important rising public awareness around, for example, the use of solitary confinement.

And there's been I held a conference when I was at University of Manitoba in 2013, where we brought together people from a number of different jurisdictions around the world and in Canada to talk about Solitary confinement as a, a violation of human rights and as something that ought to be abolished.

And there, it was an amazing conference, and at that time there was not much in the public eye at least in Canada or in the media about solitary confinement. There's now been lots of research to show that putting people in isolation is It's very harmful to their physical and mental health, that it actually creates new mental illnesses that people are less able to cope in a general population, and certainly even less able to cope in in a world outside prison when they've been in in solitary confinement.

So it's something we recognize, [00:23:00] the UN recognizes as harmful, as something that should be eradicated. And yet, it's not. It's something that's widely practiced in Canada and there's been rising awareness about that. And so there's been also rising attention by lawyers and I've been someone who's been interested since those days back in the 90s when I was a law student in doing prisoner rights work.

I have advocated for more prisoner rights litigation because I actually think it's one of the ways we can identify and address some of the injustices that are going on inside prisons, issues around strip searching and solitary confinement. It's called segregation here, but it's essentially solitary confinement.

Other forms of use of force. The discriminatory conditions that experience. They're more likely to be, for example, in maximum security harsher maximum security environments even than men. And while I never would suggest that the situation is good for men, women, because of their small numbers are in more isolated units.

so called general [00:24:00] population. So women in, a woman who is a maximum security woman prisoner in Canada serves her time in a harsher environment, generally speaking, than a man. And that's because of the numbers and the way that those institutions have been built with small segregated maximum units inside the women's prisons.

Whereas for men there's whole prisons that are maximum security and again, not suggesting those are great places but I'm just suggesting that there's a difference in terms of how how they serve out their sentence and the more secure environment that women tend to be in, notwithstanding the evidence that they as a group are generally lower risk.

Now with this kind of rising interest in prisoner rights litigation in Canada, which I think is a good thing there's also a worry that I have and that I see manifest sometimes

The sometimes if folks who are doing that litigation aren't connected to The broader campaigns and community work around thinking about whether prison, whether prisons work [00:25:00] and the harms that of incarceration and why you might think in an abolitionist way or you might want to advocate for at least decarcerating options or having people out in the community and less focus on improving prisons to make them better in, on an assumption that actually truly will help.

I don't say that we should never be trying to improve conditions in prison because I think there are real harms that are done and people are in environments that, that actually kill them and that are that are very harmful. But I think that encouraging reflection as lawyers, it's part of this, even this idea of being a reflect, a self reflective lawyer or a thoughtful lawyer that's, that reflects on especially if you're interested in social justice in what is the place of the work that I'm doing as a lawyer in broader sort of social justice struggles and social movements?

And is there a way that in making an argument, for example, that that the use of segregation in a particular jurisdiction is unlawful or violating the Charter, that I might be, In some of the [00:26:00] arguments that I make be reinforcing carceral logics in that, okay, if we just put this limit on it, or if we just do this thing, then we're going to have a humane prison and we're going to be able to wash our hands of that and move on to another social justice issue.

I think that prison abolitionist lawyering is self reflective lawyering, and I know people who do this work and is thinking about, okay, how can I make an argument that the law is being violated, that this person's rights are being violated, in a way that that always looks for opportunities to have a remedy that would be outside of prison.

For example, is there a way that I can argue here that that this person has mental health issues and that they're being discriminated on against on the basis of disability and then it might be an intersectional claim and that instead of saying, This person needs treatment in prison that we should advocate for this person to be in the community and that if there are inadequate resources, which is what often comes back, then why are there inadequate resources in the community and why can you only get certain kinds of treatment if you're criminalized?

That can't be right. And so how [00:27:00] can we make our arguments in legal cases and how can we as law professors training a next generation of lawyers, how can we encourage them to think and all of us to think in ways that that don't reinforce the idea that we just have to make this prison a more rights respecting place and we then will address the These sort of deep inequalities I was talking about earlier around Indigenous women filling those prisons now.

It can't be right that we just need to make those places better for those Indigenous women. We need to get those Indigenous women out of there in my view. And we need to think about how and why it is that that the laws continue to allow and perpetuate injustices in prison? And how can we, in our lawyering efforts, be connected more to social movements and to Struggles and campaigns, for example, to close prisons, to to divert resources into community based supports that [00:28:00] people need, right?

And there's, again, there's some people doing this work. I've was just came back from an international conference on penal abolition in London, where there, we heard from activists, lawyers, academics, all working on these issues. And it was actually really, it's sometimes it's good to hear and see what some of the examples are, but I think this idea of prison abolitionist lawyering and in my view it's I, it's a feminist inspired and feminist infused kind of approach too that also looks at again, what are the alternatives that we might advocate, but also keeping at the forefront of our litigation and advocacy efforts.

And analysis that identifies how and why it is that. Certain people are in prison in the first place, more likely to be there, more likely to, for example, indigenous women are more likely to be there. Be denied parole, do not even go for parole because they know they're less likely to get it.

They don't get the, they get higher security classification, which means they have a longer way to go to cascade down to get [00:29:00] parole. They are more likely to be detained till the very end of their sentence, for example. All of these are realities of a system that kind of cries out for an analysis that, That is is feminist, intersectional, and I would say decarceration and abolition of prisons as the horizon.

And again, lots of people think, abolition Is a utopian sort of idea and No, at least I'm not suggesting that we seem to throw open the doors of prisons and let everybody out But I think what we need to be doing is having a world without prisons on our horizon and where we think about what is the gap between that world where people are safe and you know a Harms are addressed in ways that are productive and that don't make people actually more likely to commit harm when they come out, for example, of prison.

And what does that look like? What's the gap between that and our world and how can we, in our advocacy, in our teaching, in our [00:30:00] research, in our work, Try to narrow that gap and move towards that kind of a world and to me that is Thinking about decarceration in serious ways and all across men women Young people but again in my work I start with women.

Becky Batagol: It strikes me dead that in choosing to become an academic and a law professor you have remained very close to your communities and to creating change and that it's certainly the opposite of Deciding to go away and research in peace. It's certainly changing the world that you're part of.

And so you're here, you're director of the Center for Feminist Legal Studies and it's, I can see a very thriving feminist community here at UBC. How did the center come about?

Debra Parkes: Yeah, so that the center was actually, we just celebrated our 20th anniversary and in 2017. And so it was, it was created by Dean Lynn Smith, actually, no, sorry, 25th anniversary.

It was created [00:31:00] by Dean Lynn Smith who was the first woman dean and a feminist dean of law school when I was here. And she and a a coalition, a group of mostly women lawyers, but some men as well, who were considered Concerned with and interested in equality and social justice fundraised for a chair in feminist legal studies initially.

And Susan Boyd, who is now retired and Professor Emerita here and another mentor of mine she was the first chair. And then she was here for a few years in the chair, and then they were able to fundraise for the center. And the center, yeah. So it's a, it's a. physical, we have a physical space on campus, but it's also much more than that space.

We're very fortunate to have a room for students here called the Marlee Kline Reading Room, which is named after one of our feminist colleagues, Marlee, who died very young of leukemia and is whose work addressed intersectional feminism before it was really [00:32:00] popular or even thought about.

She, as a, did critical race feminism many years ago and her work continues to be really influential. Anyway, we have the the room dedicated to Marlee and is a place for all students who are interested in feminism and social justice and a place to be Away a bit from the pressures of law school and all the, the pressures to get a job and to go in a corporate direction, for example.

The students have that place. We have tea and cookies there, and it's a, it's an informal space. It's also a place where we have a li a feminist library. And then the centre is also though a broader community of faculty, students, alumni, community members, feminist groups in the community that do work that is relates to law.

And we have a speaker series on Tuesdays throughout the term where we try to have a mix of [00:33:00] lawyers and some community people. Folks working in the community and academics and try to have a really diverse group on all kinds of grounds in terms of race disability different kinds of disciplinary work.

We want to have as diverse a group as possible and expose students and faculty to new research, new feminist research across a range of legal areas, as well as, students to the possibility of working and advocating for feminist causes across a different range of legal issues and topics.

We also hold symposia and workshops and we just recently held one in honour of another colleague who died recently, Judith Mosoff, and that, and her work was very much on bringing a feminist lens to disability law, and advocacy. So we had a really great workshop on family, law, and disability.

And we are going to be holding another workshop [00:34:00] this year and pretty much every year, and we have we have some sustaining funding from the law school. So a shout out to a feminist dean who, Katherine de Vern, who supports our work. And to donors that also support feminists, donors who support our work.

As a feminist center, we run on a relative shoestring, I think, compared to some other kinds of centers that are maybe more funded. But but we are pretty proud of the work we do and we We're always looking for new sort of ideas and initiatives. We're going to be having a book club this year and some film screenings and think about other ways to to expose our students to a range of feminist ideas and intersectional feminist causes, advocacy, research.

But I think one of the things that we want to do more of and why I'm also delighted to be part of this podcast is to reach out and connect with folks who are at other law schools especially other feminist centres and have some connections through research, possibly teaching just sharing of ideas and [00:35:00] information.

I think that's a really exciting, right at an exciting time where there are a few more feminist centres growing up and research groups around, around the world. And and our students, I think, and faculty members are interested in those kinds of international connections too.

Becky Batagol: Thank you, Deb.

Thank you for your time today. It's been really good learning about your work and about, work here at UBC. So Deborah Parks is Chair of the Feminist Legal Studies and Director of the Centre for Legal, for Feminist Legal Studies at the Peter Allard School of Law at UBC. If you're interested in reading more of some of Professor Parks work, one of her most recent pieces is an article with Isabel Grant, who she's mentioned forthcoming in the Dalhousie Law Journal in 2018, and it's titled, Equality in Defence of Provocation, Irreconcilable Differences.

And thank you all for listening to this episode of The Scarlet Letter. You can catch us again next month on iTunes or on our blog, which is found at feministlegalstudieswordpress. com. And don't forget to subscribe to The Scarlet Letter to [00:36:00] make sure you never miss an episode.