FYS 24 Imagining Freedom
Mariame Kaba, an anti-violence activist and advocate of abolishing prisons and policing, has said, “As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.” This course revolves around Kaba’s insight. To imagine a freer and more just world, we begin by discussing concepts of freedom. Then we use these concepts to discuss the many ways that those in the prison system are denied freedom, as well as the ways that people are manipulated toward complicity in an unjust status quo, even sometimes in our own oppression. Then we will examine how certain social movements have developed practices to resist social and political coercion, with special focus on how their work enables us to discuss and imagine more freely. At the end of the course, students will engage in a social justice project that will give them the opportunity to envision and work towards a more just world. This course is part of the Humanities for Just Communities curriculum. Open only to first-year frosh.