Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

This paper draws on an eight-year ethnography (2016–2024) of a legal aid clinic for precarious migrants in Paris, organised by an activist association. Beyond providing legal and social support, the clinic came to embody a new kind of “clinic” at the crossroads of law, policy, and medicine. It functioned not only as a site of assistance but also as an alternative training ground, where students in law, medicine, and pharmacy learned alongside volunteers, interpreters, and migrants themselves. Through everyday practices such as WhatsApp exchanges, sketches in asylum narratives, and the co-construction of legal files, students experienced learning by doing. They developed practical skills of listening, interdisciplinary reasoning, and relational ethics that cannot be taught in the classroom. They also confronted the ethical challenge of hearing traumatised voices and translating them across legal and medical frameworks. As both a militant and pedagogical space, the clinic revealed tensions between activist commitments and educational goals. Yet these very tensions enabled students to grasp the complexity of socially engaged practice. Migrants, in turn, participated as active contributors and co-producers of knowledge, making pedagogy a reciprocal process. The clinic thus acted as a bridge between academia and civil society, between disciplines and communities. By situating this case within the broader outward turn of academia, the paper argues that experiential, interdisciplinary, and activist practices not only transform legal aid but also renew the pedagogical mission of higher education — reconnecting law, policy, and medicine with the human realities they seek to govern.