Abolition Architecture

This graduate/undergraduate seminar introduces students to histories of abolition through constructed environments and artistic, material, and spatial practices. We study abolition of slavery, prisons, and borders during a period from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the distinct social movements and discourses sparked by these very different abolitionist targets, we examine the political, ethical, and aesthetic intersections that emerge. We investigate these problems through architecture, landscapes, material culture, and art, studying primary works, secondary texts, and methods. The course emphasizes study through historical reasoning as well as analysis of sensorial and affective material. This multimodal approach is necessary in studying forms of injustice in order to comprehend unfreedom, a paradoxical concept that produces cognitive dissonance and counters liberal reason. (A)