CJ 298 - Crime and Racialization

Although race is commonly understood to be a fixed and natural category, its origins and social consequences are relatively recent inventions. This course explores the processual co-development of racism, capitalism, and crime/criminalization in the United States as colonial projects that have continuously made and remade the ever-changing boundaries of racial categories. By engaging thoughtfully with historical and material analysis, students will learn about the institutional and discursive transformations that enabled shifts from the systems of enslavement to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, culminating in contemporary reactionary political movements. Students will also engage with waves of (enslavement, prison, police, etc.) abolitionist theorizing and movements that have sought in various ways to challenge and disrupt white supremacist political and economic structures and institutions in American life.

Credits 4

Notes
From time to time, departments design a new course to be offered either on a one-time basis or an experimental basis before deciding whether to make it a regular part of the curriculum.

Compass Attributes
Social Science, Structures of Power and Inequality, Taylor and Lane Scholars