WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2020-2021       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Abolitionist University Studies
SOC 399M
Spring 2021
Section: 01   02  
Crosslisting: AMST 270, FGSS 311, EDST 399

This course explores historical materialist theorizations of the practices and future possibilities of the U.S. university as a tool of social reproduction and space of potentially revolutionary thought. In so doing, the readings, assignments, and discussion will be inspired by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's provocation to reinterpret abolitionism as "not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society." Students will consider how conventional renderings of the university in higher education studies, critical university studies, and the popular cultural imaginary are predicated upon an often romanticized and fundamentally limited geographic and historical understanding of the work of colleges and universities. In response, the course cultivates a more capacious conceptualization of the historical and contemporary function of the university as a social form. In taking up abolitionism as both a method and critical analytic, the course will challenge students to imagine the revolutionary possibilities of an abolition university that aligns itself with movements beyond the institution, while reflecting on the particular importance and challenge of enacting such a vision in our current political moment.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS CHUM
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (EDST-MN)(EDST)(FGSS)(SOC)
Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459