Beyond the Prison | Legal Studies
UC Berkeley undergraduates interested in the Carceral Geographies Course Thread should contact course-threads@berkeley.edu.
Prison and its affiliated domains — probation, parole, intensive policing, a totality of human experience we are calling “carceral geographies” — have long and complex genealogies.
This Course Thread examines the nature and experience of these spaces, the distributional geographies of carceral systems, and the relationship between the carceral in its totality and the state.
Students will explore a range of foundational questions including: How do we understand the historical and juridical relationship between carcerality and conceptions of human being? How do the domains of carcerality move across a range of global sites and scales? How does this relationship inform concepts of time, place, culture, policy, etc.? How have artists, scholars, and activists, including those who have experienced incarceration, produced representations of, knowledge about, and challenges to carceral life?