Course Details

Course offered Autumn 2020

HONORS 230 D: Prison Logics and Abolition Futures (SSc, DIV)

HONORS 230 D: Prison Logics and Abolition Futures (SSc, DIV)

SLN 16135 (View UW registration info »)

William McKeithen (Geography)
Email: wmck@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 35 students

Honors Credit Type

4 seats reserved for incoming freshmen

In the United States today, more than 2.3 million people are living in prison. More than 324 million are living in a prison society. In this course, we will study both – the prison and the US prison society – to ask how did we get here? what does this mean for everyday life? and how might we create alternatives beyond the prison? This course focuses on mass incarceration in the US, but also interrogates the complex and transnational forces that underpin and undermine this reality – social control, power relations, cultural politics, resistance, and hope. Together we will engage this study through a mixture of classroom dialogue, multi-genre writing and peer review, and in-class and out-of-class activities that will ask you to consider your own place in relation to the prison. Drawing on a wide range of materials – evidence-based research, prisoner memoir, government policy, architectural design, social theory, activism, and science fiction – this course will ask you to consider what you think about prisons and how prisons became thinkable.