Violence

(4 Credits)

This course takes an interdisciplinary look at violence and social suffering, focusing first on how societies produce and define violence and then on the consequences of violence for those who suffer injuries, those who commit them, and those who have neither directly committed or suffered violence, but are still implicated in its occurrence. Topics to be covered include animal violence, the climate crisis, colonial violence, gender, trauma, torture, pain, punishment, and non-violence. Our overall concern will be how violence encompasses more than bodily harm and becomes a long-term process that is part of everyday life: in other words, why and how societies accept or sanction or leave visible certain forms of violence, but castigate, denounce, or make invisible others?