We begin by asking why this course should exist in the university, what purpose it can serve, and how we might learn from past movements that have repurposed the university for their activist goals, or in the words of ‘Moten and Harney, “build fugitive study to contend and contest the capture of our intellectual lives”. We then build our analytical foundations of the ‘carceral core’, focusing on the logics which provide the political, socio-economic and philosophical roots of the carceral state.

In September 1998 over 3,500 people gathered at UC Berkeley - labor organizers, the formerly incarcerated, policy makers, academics, youth, families of the incarcerated, LGBTQ activists - at a three day conference to examine and challenge what was being named as the prison industrial complex (PIC). The conference was the beginning of a new political project, calling on the university, its presence, possibilities and limitations in movement building against prisons, policing and carceral logics, and for imagining and building a world without the PIC. Almost twenty five years later, and operating in the energy of a new generation of liberation movements against the state-sanctioned violence of targeted communities, our course faces the complexities and mutations of the growing carceral state and follows the lead and learns from those who are collectively addressing how to unfasten its logics. To absorb and consider the interwoven realities of the current carceral state, the course has several main avenues of exploration. After two weeks exploring the broad set of concerns that we will focus on throughout the semester, and with a swift dive into the most current of liberation movements, the Movement for Black Lives, we then first seek to understand the rise of the carceral state through its political, historical, structural and social roots in Native elimination, Black disappearance, racial capitalism, and gendered and sexualized deviance. Secondly, we examine the deep roots of mass incarceration in the state’s work against liberation movements and also the role that labor organizing and organizing from the site of the prison played both in these movements and in setting the stage for the abolitionist works that shape our movements across walls of the cage and cages of borders today. Additionally, practitioners, scholars and activists developing critical analyses and abolitionist strategies for social change will introduce their analytical connections between seemingly disconnected forms of state violence and liberation movement organizing. Finally but centrally, we seek to integrate the work of both the student’s own story and those directly affected by incarceration, detention and deportation. In the race to incarcerate and detain/deport what does it mean to live in a criminalized community, what does it do to the fabric of a family to have parents suspended in deportation hearings, and what does it mean to a community’s political influence when many cannot vote because of a felony conviction? Our collective charge in this course is capacious, ambitious, personal, intimate and so very necessary. It is only an introduction, but it is an introduction to how we learn, teach and practice carceral abolition.

This course was formerly offered under the course number ETHSTD 21AC.
You are not eligible to take this course if you have previously taken ETHSTD 21AC with Victoria Robinson.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills