Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An exploration of theories and geographies of conquest and liberation to analyze present-day struggles for abolition and decolonization. We will weave epistemologies from across the Americas to understand how different struggles for liberation are spatially connected amid colonialism, racial capitalism and empire.

COURSE DETAILS:

In the past decade, global struggles for abolition, decolonization and liberation have gained significant momentum. We are also seeing climate justice movements emerge globally as the climate crisis has become the new normal, calling attention to how while climate change impacts all life on earth, some communities disproportionately feel its effects due to existing injustices. How are these movements for climate justice and liberation related, and how might we organize to address their intersecting origins?

In this course, we will turn to foundational texts of conquest and liberation to make sense of our global interrelations under empire and how these conditions shape the terrain for present social and environmental struggles. This class explicitly thinks transnationally and hemispherically to understand how people, geographies and social movements exist in relation to one another.

We will engage Black, Indigenous and Latin American theorists in particular, considering how empire and conquest have fomented spatial relations across the globe and produced the conditions for mass economic and racialized dispossession. It is from within these theorizations of conquest that we will ultimately consider the moment of crisis we are collectively living, and the emergent possibilities of abolitionist, decolonial and climate justice movements.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

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