About
The Prison or Prison Abolition Big Ideas Course (African American Studies 181AC / Ethnic Studies 181AC / Legal Studies 185AC / Social Welfare 185AC) 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.
The pilot course, which enrolled 300 students, was an innovative development in the AC curriculum and was designed to allow for both enrolled students and the faculty teaching the course to learn more from one another. This is also the first 'Big Ideas' course to involve local Bay Area community organizations in the student learning activities, as well as a host of artists and social media practitioners in the design of research-based internships.