Professor David Sandomierski named among inaugural Western Massey Fellows
September 06, 2024
Professor David Sandomierski is one of two Western University professors who will maintain a presence at Massey College during his 2024-2025 sabbatical thanks to a new partnership between the two institutions.
The new Western Massey Fellows program enables Western professors to access senior resident privileges at the college during the academic year, participate in the life of the college and serve as a mentor to a junior fellow.
Established at the University of Toronto in 1963, Massey College is a unique graduate college that fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing between graduate students, distinguished academics and established leaders from all disciplines, industries and backgrounds.
For Sandomierski, this fellowship provides a fitting opportunity to carry out his ongoing interdisciplinary research projects shoulder-to-shoulder with colleagues and peers.
“Massey is an interdisciplinary learning community, which fits well with my architecture of law schools project, as well as my other ongoing work on public advocacy among lawyers and doctors,” explained Sandomierski.
“One of Massey’s missions is to ‘nourish learning and serve the public good,’ which aligns with these projects and with my broader mission of cultivating critical and engaged citizens through legal education.”
Sandomierski will dedicate the majority of his fellowship to work on the architecture of law schools project, which brings legal educators and architecture scholars together with practicing architects to uncover what the built form of law schools implies about their role in society.
He looks forward to working alongside research team member and architecture professor Marcin Kedzior, also a senior fellow at Massey College. During the fellowship, the pair will co-host an informal session on the project to engage junior fellows studying law and architecture and will work alongside research colleagues to develop the project’s conceptual framework and consolidate observations from law school site visits.
“I’m particularly excited to engage in informal conversations with junior fellows from across the disciplines to deepen and expand the inquiries of the architecture project,” said Sandomierski.
“Massey is also a signature architectural space designed by the famous architect Ron Thom. Massey College is a testament to the impact that architecture can have in conditioning its members to reflect on how to serve the public good. Both the interdisciplinary nature of the community and the intimate relationship between architecture and learning will be immensely inspiring.”
To mobilize this research, Sandomierski will work with research team colleagues Kedzior and architecture professor John McMinn to develop a studio course on designing a law school offered at the University of Waterloo in Fall 2024.
Rounding out the fellowship, Sandomierski and his partners will continue to research public advocacy between doctors and lawyers with the support of Western’s Interdisciplinary Development Initiatives grant. As an extension of their research paper on how lawyers and physicians approach public advocacy work, the team will develop a pedagogical intervention to help medical and law students think about the similar and distinct roles that public advocacy plays in their own professional identities.
