Abolitionist University Studies

Undergraduate

Drawing on scholarship from “abolitionist university studies” and “critical university studies,” this course is dedicated to studying the university as a central institution of contemporary life. Over the course of the semester we explore the university as a(n) economic and political formation that all people are in relation to regardless of their institutional (non)status as students, neighbors, faculty, community organizers, artists, staff, etc. Through our engagement with scholarship, organizing guides, and cultural productions, we examine the conditions that grant the university its unique position in the fabric of the social world. In doing so we pay close attention to the institution's historical and ongoing entanglements with the projects of antiblack violence, settler colonialism, and corporate capitalism. We also study institutional and social movements of the past and present to demonstrate how actors challenge, refuse, and subvert the violent mechanisms of the university. In taking up abolitionism as a primary method and analytic, this course challenges students to reflect on their relation to the university and imagine the possibilities for an abolitionist alternative. SO Th 4pm-5:55pm