AUTUMN 2021
Writing the World, the Digital & Otherwise (Rivera)
How does the digital produce the world? This class situates digitality in racial capitalism and settler colonialism for the purpose of understanding how the digital mediates how and what we know about the world. This course draws from the critique of racial capitalism and settler colonialism for the purpose of understanding the politics of knowledge production that circulate throughout digital platforms. In doing so, this course illustrates the stakes and material impacts of digital and visual representations of Indigenous peoples’ lands and bodies.
Indigenous Storytelling and World-Making in the Global Pacific (Bourgette)
The historiography of Pacific history has changed markedly in the last few decades. Whereas historians of the maritime Pacific world once focused primarily on male heroes and villains who sailed the seas, technological innovations in seafaring, and European voyages of “discovery,” this course will highlight the vibrant interconnections between story and place told across the Oceanic world. Blending oral histories with written discourse of the peoples Indigenous to our “Sea of Islands” we know today as the Pacific, this course will provide another lens into transnational approaches popular in world histories. More than antiquated stories confined to the archival record, Indigenous storytelling provides living communities today with avenues to communicate directly with ancestors to co-create futures beyond empires and exploitation of life beyond humans.
WINTER 2022
Abolition Geographies (Rivera)
This course engages what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “freedom as a place.” This course foregrounds abolition geographies as a place-based practice aimed at spatializing the presence of collective-social life. By exploring a range of place specific struggles for abolition, including from the Black Radical Tradition and the American Indian Movement, this class introduces students to the life-affirming practice of abolition. From prison abolition to environmental justice efforts, this course provides a space for unlearning the language of punishment, and for building life affirming institutions instead.
Environmental Histories and Futures of Black and Indigenous Abundance (Bourgette)
Native Hawaiian ways of knowing, in common with worldviews cultivated by Black and
Indigenous populations across the world, highlight abundance as a life-affirming frame by which communities enact abolition futures in their own time. Expressed through genealogical relationships to lands, waters, and communities, Black and Native populations cultivate abundance through providing care and mutual aid to each other and their environments. The course provides a framework for observing abundance created with Black and Indigenous communities both in historical and ongoing contexts through engaged readings of critical texts and embodied practices of storytelling through art. By rejecting models of scarcity and loss of knowledge and power projected by five centuries of colonial violence, students will build a practical toolkit for creating abundance in everyday life.
SPRING 2022
Abolition & Abundance as Method (Combined)
This class situates abolition and abundance in geographical and historical context. Drawing from the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) internationalist origins, this course foregrounds Indigenous nations’ political orders as the starting point of resistance. This course will train students to think critically about the proliferation of borders, including its vectors that exist as infrastructures of empire, such as military bases, forts, railroads, and prisons. Further, the course will posit worldviews of cultivating abundance through balanced relations with beyond-human communities, rejecting scarcity-driven, humancentric models promoted by racial capitalism. With a particular focus on Turtle Island (North America) and Moana (the Pacific), this class will train students to counter-map, and methodologically understand the contours and parallels of abolitionary struggle and Indigenous peoples’ efforts of self-determination. By engaging with texts and invited guest speakers from the American Indian Movement and Pacific Islander communities, this course aims to enroll students as active participants in pursuit of relational and reciprocal engagements for planetary liberation and freedom.