AFRS 220 - Policing the Planet

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Can we imagine safety without the police? This course reflects upon the political and social implications of our reliance on policing, surveillance, and criminalization to keep the peace and promote public safety in U.S. culture. By placing policing philosophies such as broken windows theory, the war on poverty, and the war on drugs, in conversation with intersectional accounts of the casualties of state-sanctioned violence, vigilante culture, and homeland security, this course challenges students to put domestic policing practices in global perspective. In addition to drawing on science fiction, social science, film, and national histories of policing whose geographic landscapes shift in accordance with pressing political concerns of the day, students also study the emergent critical prison studies literature to better contextualize how common sense notions of care, privacy, and the common good become exclusionary constructs that shape imaginations of what keeps us safe, especially in the places we call home. Jasmine Syedullah.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS