Big Ideas (Cross-Disciplinary)

About Big Ideas Courses

Big Ideas Courses take up a question, concept, or topic, a key intellectual and societal challenge, that cannot be adequately addressed by the perspective or methodology of one discipline alone. Big Ideas Courses are co-taught by two or more faculty from different departments, who expose students to multiple approaches to the central focus of the course, and teach them the excitement of grappling with a big idea, as well as the rich, nuanced, and illuminating results that arise when disciplines come into contact around a topic of mutual vital interest. Learn more about Big Ideas Courses here.

About 'Prison Abolition'

Ethnic Studies 181AC / Gender and Women’s Studies 181AC / Social Welfare 185AC 

Instructors: Keith Feldman, Eric Stanley, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Erin Michelle Turner Kerrison

Semester: Spring 2025

This course introduces students to the long history of the prison in the American experience, and does so by engaging ideas, movements, and practices to craft worlds of care and mutuality beyond the harms that the prison produces and legitimates. Students engage a range of literatures through which to reorganize the logics of an institution commonly accepted as the reasonable destination for those identified as “criminal.” Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, the course engages with the full range of “carceral geographies” in which social life is penetrated with the state’s power to surveil, arrest, judge, and punish its citizens; as well as the “abolition geographies” that, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms, combine resources, creativity, and commitment to create freedom as a place where all life/lives are precious. 

Final Projects

Generous support from the ACES program enabled the Big Ideas course to offer students an opt-in community-engaged learning component. Students were invited to put ideas from the course into practice by working with organizations on and off campus, from local school sites to climate justice-informed policy work to letter writing. A Chancellor's Public Fellow, Evan NAMI Sakuma, facilitated this work, and also staged an intimate speaker series, entitled "Abolitionist Futures, Rewriting Justice," with leading abolitionist scholars and practitioners.

Students' final presentations of the organizations they partnered with, including the struggles and barriers they faced while doing engaged scholarship, can be accessed at the slide deck here. The slides also contain information on the "Abolitionist Futures, Rewriting Justice" speaker series. 

Big Ideas: Prison Abolition Final Projects

Student Testimony

"I was drawn to the Prison Abolition course as a way to find interdisciplinary, meaningful, and relevant liberatory ideas. The unique pedagogy of the course, combined with the thoughtful concepts, made it such a rich experience and class. Our Engaged Scholarship program furthered these lessons, making them applicable and actionable in our lives.

Learning from and with each other, we each shaped a unique relationship with our communities and were able to bring our reflections back together throughout the semester. Hearing from incredible scholars, organizers, and advocates in our speaker series added depth to our work and learning. It became about how we sustain this movement -- outside of a classroom, university, or ourselves as individuals -- to build on a legacy of resistance, justice, and care. At the core, it was a reminder that we are never alone.

With such a welcoming and encouraging cohort of faculty, mentors, and peers, we were empowered to practice community care and see ourselves in our learning. In my own work with food distribution and political education, I learned ways to sustain energy, momentum, and celebration around our organizing. I never felt like we were each individuals with a "volunteering" project -- it really felt like this was a commitment -- to each other, to abolition, and to the world we want to see -- bigger than ourselves. I would encourage anyone who finds themselves engaging with this work, whether it be in the classroom or elsewhere, to consider how your own capacity and energy for taking care of one another might change from strengthening your abolitionist vision. I think all of us within the Engaged Scholarship left with a greater confidence in what we can collectively build." - Amelia Namita Pinto, Student