Instructor:
Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot (they/them),
Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Anthropology,
CUNY Grad Center
Email: Eisenbergguyot@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Office hours: If you would like to schedule office hours, please email me and we can find a time to talk via Zoom, Google Hangout, or telephone.
As mass uprisings against state violence have continued unabated since the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks, bipartisan consensus has coalesced around the need to end mass incarceration and reform prisons and policing. Simultaneously, the revolutionary movement to abolish prisons and policing entirely has gained momentum (again), drawing on a lineage of Black freedom struggles, from the movement to abolish slavery to Black Lives Matter. Yet, many are unfamiliar with prison abolition or concerned about its impacts on their safety. In this course, students will engage with the contemporary prison abolition movement as both a vision for the future and a concrete set of strategies to create safety and undo incarceration in the present. With New York City experiencing a resurgence in brutal broken windows policing while the city is poised to build four new jails over the next six years (and maybe shut down the notorious Rikers Island jail complex), this course will provide Black feminist insight into a contemporary political fight with profound consequences for the lives of working class communities of color in NYC.
Note: This class is asynchronous, meaning that there are no formal class meeting times. Students can participate in optional Zoom-based discussion sessions once a week.
Descriptions of all assignments, grading rubrics, and where to submit assignments are located in this Google Drive Folder:
http://bit.ly/AbolitionAssignments
Pre-Recorded Lectures (where it says “listen” in the syllabus) will be posted in this Google Drive Folder:
http://bit.ly/ProfessorLectures
All readings and videos will be posted on our course website at https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/wgst3550/home
Optional Zoom Discussion Sessions: Students can participate in optional one-hour Zoom-based discussions of course materials and any other topics related to prison abolition.
Date | Topic |
---|---|
8/26-8/30 |
Introduction |
8/31-9/6 | The Origins of the American Prison |
9/7-9/13 | Crime, Criminology, and Policing: A Brief History |
9/14-9/20 | The Myth of the Gender-Responsive Prison |
9/21-9/27 | Recidivism, Rehabilitation and Punishment: Do prisons actually “respond” to harm? |
9/28-10/4 | Are Prisons Obsolete? |
10/5-10/11 | Prison Rebellions, a Brief History |
10/12-10/18 | Prison Abolition and trans/gender liberation |
10/19-10/25 | Movement Histories |
10/26-11/1 | Rejecting Rehabilitation |
11/2-11/8 | “Care Not Cages”: No New LA Jail |
11/9-11/15 | Communities Over Cages: Shut the Jail ATL |
11/16-11/22 | No Cop Academy Chicago |
11/23-11/29 | No Class this week |
11/30-12/6 | Shut Down Rikers |
12/7-12/13 | Abolition Dreams |
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Numerical grade | Letter Grade |
---|---|
97-100 | A+ |
93-96.9 | A |
90-92.9 | A- |
87-89.9 | B+ |
83-86.9 | B |
80-82.9 | B- |
77-79.9 | C+ |
73-76.9 | C |
70-72.9 | C- |
67-69.9 | D+ |
63-66.9 | D |
60-62.9 | D- |
Below 60 | F |