An FYS course that dissects notions of freedom and the denials of freedom in carceral systems.
4 units
Students enrolled in this course will earn credit for the Fall first year seminar requirement.
Taught by Prof. Blake
Mariame Kaba, an anti-violence activist and advocate of abolishing prisons and policing, has said, “As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.” This course revolves around Kaba’s insight. To imagine a freer and more just world, we begin by discussing concepts of freedom. Then we use these concepts to discuss the many ways that those in the prison system are denied freedom, as well as the ways that people are manipulated toward complicity in an unjust status quo, even sometimes in our own oppression. Then we will examine how certain social movements have developed practices to resist social and political coercion, with special focus on how their work enables us to discuss and imagine more freely.
At the end of the course, students will engage in a social justice project that will give them the opportunity to envision and work towards a more just world.
Image: "The Four Freedoms," etched onto the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington DC. In the twenty-first century, do we consider these freedoms as already achieved? As something to which everyone is entitled?
Alt text: Text engraved on stone blocks reading: "Freedom of Speech / Freedom of Worship / Freedom from want / Freedom from fear"