CORE 311-01 - Identity, Power, and Equity in California Anticarceral Struggle-IPE

Modality: Hybrid

Level: 300 Level

Course Times: 12:00-2:40pm

Remote Days: Thurs, Jan 15 and Fri, Jan 16

Course Materials Fee: $30

Core Designation: This course fulfills the Identity, Power, & Equity (IPE) requirement

Instructor(s): Kiara Padilla
Email: kpp5@stmarys-ca.edu

This course examines the California prison population and system. Important questions to be explored are: Why are communities of color over represented in prisons? What is carcerality and how does it shape our societies and everyday lives? How have people contested carcerality and formed anti-carceral ways of being? How is this all shaped by race and race-making?

This course explores how the U.S. state of California became what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “Golden Gulag”. A play on words, “Golden Gulag” references the golden state’s carceral expansions over space and time and through systems of racial and gendered violences. We will trace the state’s carceral geographies by studying settler colonialism, westward expansion, and the border constructions in relation to racial formation. We will additionally focus on case studies throughout northern, central, and southern California that reveal how different carceral projects affect people based on race, class, gender, indigeneity, ethnicity, and citizenship status. This includes but is not limited to imprisonment, showing how anticarceral struggles extends beyond the prison and exists in everyday interactions with social systems of power that socially construct identities and structure social inequalities. Importantly, we will also analyze the theoretical and practical explorations of anticarceral struggle and resistance ranging from restorative and transformative justice to reform and abolition and artistic expression. At the end of this course, students will be able to trace how California developed as a carceral state that disproportionately polices, detains, incarcerates, exiles, and deports Black and Brown, poor and working-class, non-citizen, and queer communities. We will reflect on how we imagine a less carceral life for all and what that means for us on personal, academic, and communal levels.

Prerequisites & Notes
None

Credits: 3