Governing Space: Confinement, Circulation, and Surveillance

Harvard FAS

How do states, empires, and institutions exercise power through space? This course examines the infrastructures, architectures, and atmospheres through which governance operates, tracing how spatial arrangements shape collective life, regulate conduct, and materialize domination. Drawing on political theory, urban sociology, carceral studies, and legal geography, we explore how spatial regimes take form—from colonial enclosures and internal colonies to national monuments, urban displacement,…