AUTUMN 2018
CHID 250: Representations of Incarceration in Film (AM Weatherford)
This course examines the relationship between the medium of film and representations of incarceration in feature, short film, serial, and documentary styles. It asks how the cinematic apparatus participates in and disrupts carceral violence. Focusing on race, gender, sex(uality), class, and indigeneity, the course introduces students to Apparatus Theory in addition to Marxist and Feminist approaches to cinema. Selected films represent a range of political geographies, and include Orange Is the New Black (2013-present), Darabont’s The Green Mile (1999), Babenco’s The Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985), and local Seattleite and queer documentary filmmaker Elliat Graney-Sauke’s Boys on the Inside (2017). Students will be encouraged to participate in opportunities with the Social Justice Film Festival and Northwest Film Forum.
CHID 480: From Slavery to Incarceration: Race and the Afterlife of Slavery (Caleb Knapp)
Americans usually agree that slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment. This course
engages work in history and cultural studies to refuse this dominant narrative in lieu of a theory of the “afterlife of slavery,” exploring how slavery’s racial logics and carceral practices continue into the present. The course examines how cultural texts, theoretical writing, and activist movements connect black enslavement and contemporary forms of incarceration. Readings include Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007), Angela Davis’s prison writings (1970s-80s), and the recent documentary by Ava DuVernay, 13th (2016). Tracing historical continuities, students will develop an account of the long durée of racialized carceral practices and resistance to them across periods and objects.
WINTER 2019
CHID 250: Race, Sexuality, and Criminalization: Biopower & Biopolitics (Caleb Knapp)
This course introduces students to theories of criminalization and modern state power via work on biopower and biopolitics. It frames criminalization as a form of biopower to examine how discourses of criminality pathologize racial and sexual difference, marking some as deviant and subjecting them to premature death. The course traces a genealogy of the concept of biopower beginning with History of Sexuality, and explores how thinkers have reworked Foucault’s theories to account for the plantation, the colony, the concentration camp, the prison industrial complex, and the security state. Students will deepen biopolitical theories by analyzing instances of state violence such as Stonewall, the Holocaust, Apartheid, and the proposed US/Mexico “border wall.” Emphasis will be placed on developing theories in relation to particular historical moments across a range of periods and political geographies.
CHID 480: Colonial Carceral Logics in the Americas (AM Weatherford)
This course analyzes the emergence of the carceral state through a comparative framework. It links carceral logics to colonial processes across the English, French and Spanish Americas from the fifteenth century to the present. Taking up Foucauldian theories of expulsion and confinement, students will read primary texts by Cristobal Colón, Hernán Cortés, Jacques Cartier, and Samuel de Champlain to examine how colonial maps and legislation mediate emergent carceral ways of thinking that develop into the modern carceral state. Students will identify the limits of nationalist rubrics and generate comparative frames for thinking variations and continuities in carceral histories and practices.
SPRING 2019
CHID 250: Anti-Incarceration Activisim in the PNW (Caleb Knapp & AM Weatherford)
Taking up the call by This Bridge Called My Back to produce “theory in the flesh,” this course examines how anti-incarceration activists and organizers in the Pacific Northwest theorize resistance to the carceral state through lived experience and practice. While it treats recent scholarship on state violence, the course emphasizes reading the cultural productions and practices of local abolitionist communities as theories in themselves. We will discuss the Women of Color Speak Out Collective, the No New Youth Jail movement, the #BlockTheBunker campaign, the Tacoma Detention Center hunger strike, the Black Prisoners Caucus at Monroe, the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound and University Beyond Bars. The course will invite speakers from these communities to guest lecture, including those behind bars via Skype. Along with traditional academic assignments, the course includes a final project in which students will collaborate to produce a mixed-media showcase for display in the UW Libraries on the meaning and possibilities of critical justice education.