Resolving Social Justice issues

So thankful for the generous provision of time, attention and comment from Sam Cavallaro and Vanessa Camerlengo from Resolve Divorce for the benefit of Flinders University law students studying our Innovating Social Justice topic. This participation shows the value that practice places in helping develop future talent and giving back. Resolve itself adopts a nicely innovative model. This makes it a great match for this topic, where we are teaching students further human-centric design thinking for law skills: enabling them to identify and attack problems in a more sophisticated and deeper fashion.

Our groups have self-selected important access to justice and social justice issues across fields such as workers’ rights, age of criminal responsibility, police bail for indigenous youth, job insecurity in the gig economy, and assaults on health care workers. There were also multiple presentations on housing related issues – for vulnerable cohorts such as the disabled, domestic violence survivors and the aged. Naturally these are wicked problems not subject to any easy fix. But it is nice to be able to give an opportunity to creatively explore potential new paths to assist, albeit in modest ways.

Students also did a bang-up job as a cohort in effectively – and concisely – pitching their interim ideas about the problems they are examining and their prototype solution ideas. I am always hot on “less is more” - and they delivered. They also showed some deep thinking, and strong primary research engagement. Very pleasing 😊. Sets the bar high for the City Campus cohort who will present on Thursday!

Thanks also to support from the principals from Resolve Rose Cocchiaro and Chanel Martin - and to Tania Leiman for suggesting Rose and Resolve as a good match for what we are doing: I know they have other things planned too.

Megan Ryan Susannah Tidemann Samantha Kontra