Urban Security and Social Justice in the Americas

Catalog description

This course explores how urban insecurity and security policies intersect to shape urban life across the Americas. Using a justice-centered lens, students will examine the spatial politics of policing and surveillance in select cities, investigating how marginalized communities have been positioned as both threats to public order and therefore need to be policed and surveilled in order to meet boarder development goals. Through an examination of ethnographies, policy documents, and key texts, we will trace how urban governance regimes in the Americas rely on spatial control of the most marginalized, racial capitalism, and colonial legacies to inform contemporary urban security practices.