In the final seminar of our series with the Warwick Centre for Critical Legal Studies, Stina Soderling and Carolina Alonso Bejarano present a compelling analysis of our practices of grading. Subscribe to Critical Legal Media here.

This video accompanies their article “Against Grading” (Feminist Formations, August 2021), making an intervention into critical pedagogy by interrogating one of the foundational aspects of the modern-day university system: the way we grade. Based on our combined two decades of teaching in Feminist Studies, as well as the work of Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire and Michel Foucault, we argue that the grading regime implemented in higher education disciplines not only students but also faculty members, perpetuating a capitalist ethics of production and profitability. The video concludes that a critical approach to teaching and learning requires a move toward alternative modes of learning assessment as part of a larger reconfiguring of the university, and it closes by inviting the viewers to join us in an organized movement against the practice of grading.

Critical Legal Thinking and the Warwick Centre for Critical Legal Studies present the International Critical Legal Seminar Series: Bringing together critical scholars to cultivate community, build ideas and facilitate discussions at a time when the normal spaces for discussion are foreclosed.

The Warwick Centre for Critical Legal Studies is a research and teaching collective committed to centring critical race, class and gender critiques in analysing contemporary social, political, economic and environmental problems, and interrogating law’s complicity in creating these problems.