INTS 475: Special Topics

INTS 475-002: Policing Black Bodies
(Fall 2022)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W

Thompson Hall 1017

Section Information for Fall 2022

This course considers how the policing of Black bodies has shaped America. From the nation’s inception to the present, Black bodies have been objectified, racialized, criminalized, lynched, dominated, and policed. Through interdisciplinary approaches, students will explore the roots of racial terror and how Americans remember racial trauma and anti-Black violence. This learning opportunity encourages students to examine historical and contemporary issues of racial violence and policing by listening to the voices and perspectives of African Americans who experienced, survived, and resisted racial violence and extermination. We will take seriously Katherine McKittrick’s intervention that compels us to rethink the “mathematics of Black life” and Kevin Quashie’s imperative to invest in Black aliveness.

This course, therefore, situates the spaces and places of Black bodies in America in relation to slave and post-slave systems. It closely reads theorists of race, afterlives of slavery, Blackness, post-Blackness, surveillance, Black feminist thought, social death, and Afro-pessimism, as well as thinks about the ways in which ongoing historical anti-black logics shape 21st-century structures of dehumanization. We will also examine the modalities through which scholars probe and theorize anti-Black violence and death as well as the modes of resistance, Black worldmaking, and Black critical care with which individuals respond to life under duress.

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 1-18

Studies topics of special interest to undergraduates. Notes: May be repeated for credit when topic is different. May be repeated within the term for a maximum 18 credits.
Specialized Designation: Topic Varies
Schedule Type: Lec/Sem #1, Lec/Sem #2, Lec/Sem #3, Lec/Sem #4, Lec/Sem #5, Lec/Sem #6, Lec/Sem #7, Lec/Sem #8, Lec/Sem #9, Lecture, Sem/Lec #10, Sem/Lec #11, Sem/Lec #12, Sem/Lec #13, Sem/Lec #14, Sem/Lec #15, Sem/Lec #16, Sem/Lec #17, Sem/Lec #18
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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